Some little twerp playing tournament Scrabble had been winning big this year until competitors realized he was stealing blanks, hiding them on his person, and then hauling them out when he needed them.
This story allows UD to share the fact that she has joined an online Scrabble site (it’s mainly Brits) and she’s learning a lot. All she’s done in her life, Scrabblewise, is play a sort of slow game on a board. Her opponents have been a motley crew, and whenever she’s suggested to any of them an hourglass sand timer (three minutes) or other such constraint, she’s been shouted down.
Well! Turns out there’s
Normal (5 minutes per move)
Quick (3 minutes)
Stress (2)
and
Rush (1).
Strongly attracted to the word Normal, and not wanting to make herself a nervous wreck, UD has been sticking to the five-minute thing; but her excellent scores and rating, which are public on the site, have attracted the fast-lane people. They shoot her messages when she logs on:
MARGARET: PLAY A GAME?
Naively, she accepted the first of these invitations. She assumed the player was Normal. The player was Rush. UD stayed in the game because it seemed the decent thing to do, and she even made a good score (though she lost), but she didn’t have any fun, and she didn’t make any interesting words or letter connections. Rushed games turn into Three-Letter Smackdown.
Her Rushed opponent told her (you can chat while playing) that rushed games are in part about keeping people from cheating, and I guess it’s true that if you have five minutes to fart around on your computer while playing, you can check whether something’s a two-letter word, etc. But in most of my Normal games, both of us play quite fast anyway. It’s rare that anyone uses more than three minutes, and typical for people to use around two.
August 16th, 2012 at 11:19AM
It’s a step up from cheating at solitaire, I suppose…
What site do you play at, UD? I have done the occasional Words With Friends, but it’s not (quite) Scrabble, and the idea of matching myself up with strangers is interesting.
August 16th, 2012 at 12:01PM
Quadplex.
August 16th, 2012 at 12:19PM
I like ISC (http://www.isc.ro/) and you can also play Scrabble on Facebook. The more serious Scrabble players use chess clocks to keep track of the time — you have 25 minutes in total for all your turns and you can allocate that time however you want. Using anagrammers while playing online is generally considered bad form. Whether it’s permissible to check word validity varies depending how the game is set up.
August 16th, 2012 at 1:08PM
BTW, the article wasn’t quite right about the cheating attempt — it made it sound like he dumped two extra blank tiles into the bag. Scrabble players sometimes “square up” after games by placing the tiles in 4 quads that are 5×5 on the board. It makes it easy to see that you have all 100 tiles. So the guy placed the two blanks together in a quad next to him and then palmed them instead of placing them back into the bag. His opponent got suspicious and the director counted the tiles in the bag and noticed that there were only 98.
The kid that got caught was about 13 or 14 and seemed to be of South Asian heritage. Not sure if there might have been some excessive parental pressure or whether he just had problems with right vs wrong. Reminds me a little of the Kaavya Viswanathan thing years ago.
August 16th, 2012 at 1:16PM
Well, there you are, wayward. I didn’t even know about anagrammers.
August 16th, 2012 at 1:17PM
Thanks, wayward. I see now what he did. Before, I wasn’t sure.
August 16th, 2012 at 4:56PM
Yeah, anagramming software takes a sequence of letters and tells you what valid words you can make. Almost always considered cheating in online play. Software that only tells you whether a particular word is valid is sometimes permissible during online play (though possibly frowned upon in some circumstances). In regular face-to-face play, you can’t use any aids in coming up with words or deciding whether to challenge. The only time a computer is used is when one player challenges a word an opponent has played.
BTW, the kid won his division last year and there was some speculation back then that he was cheating. He was scoring a lot better in the national tournament than one would have expected from his performance earlier that year. (It’s possible that he’d also been “sandbagging” a little to avoid getting moved up to Division II, where it would have been a lot harder to place.)