The French Scrabble Champion who doesn't speak French
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 มิ.ย. 2024
- The incredible story of the Scrabble savant from Christchurch.
More on Nigel:
fivethirtyeight.com/features/...
scrabblestudylog.blogspot.com/...
Quackle: people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/q...
Elise (another software - not been upated in a while, so the word lists used in the program are outdated): codehappy.net/elise/
Macondo (open source engine which is under ongoing development): github.com/domino14/macondo
Scrabble discord group: / discord
0:00 Introduction
2:05 Greatest of all time
4:13 The words
16:23 The game
27:53 The strategy
44:56 The personality - กีฬา
PLEASE NOTE: my regular content is in German, so subscribing only makes sense if you speak the language 🙂
If you'd like to give Scrabble a try after watching this, I highly recommend you try playing on woogles.io/ (start by going to "Play a computer" and selecting BeginnerBot) and join our Discord server, where we are happy to welcome beginners and help them out: discord.com/invite/GqkUqA7ENm
To learn about strategy, take a look at this free handbook compiled by expert players: www.scrabbleplayershandbook.com/
I forgot to explain in the video what a 'bingo' is - hopefully it is clear from the context that this means playing all of your letters at once, and that this nets you a bonus of 50 points!
Also, the stat at 3:53 has become obsolete since David Eldar clinched his second World Championship title - just weeks after I uploaded this video.
Check out these Scrabble content creators:
www.youtube.com/@wanderer15 (Will Anderson, who has some great short videos on Nigel)
www.youtube.com/@mackmeller (matches against an engine + some content geared towards beginners)
www.youtube.com/@axcertypo (Josh Sokol, more of a Scrabble streamer)
Some further resources to learn more about Scrabble:
Quackle (the engine shown in the video): people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/
Word study: aerolith.org
And last but not least, a great way to learn is to watch tournament games with expert commentary. Here's my favourite such game (a small clip of which we saw in the video): th-cam.com/video/jUV5TUb_CwA/w-d-xo.html
time to learn german dictionary
You are German? Really i would have never guessed it ...
@@majormononoke8958 I know lol. But people might assume my other content is in badly pronounced English rather than German, too ;-)
Well, I'm subscribing anyway because this was an excellent video
@@AlexDingsich lerne Deutsch
I admire this mans dedication to not learning French
This comment really opened my eyes to the silliness of that. 😂
Honestly, knowing the spelling of words does nothing in terms of teaching you what the words mean, how they can be combined in sentences, let alone being able to pronounce or understand what you are hearing.
I had a really bad french teacher once, who due to reasons only gave me a packet which was a word list for me to memorize, and by the end of the year, I knew most of the words, but couldn't speak or understand a single sentence, and I failed the subject.
@@HenrikMyrhaug I think that's the point of the comment.
Learning each and every single word in the language's lexicon without learning the language itself is probably the very most effort one can spend in learning French without actually learning the language.
Although this probably doesn't apply to Nigel given how his memory seems to work.
Literally the worst language. Worst people
@@johnkingsize Yes, and my point was the comment is partially wrong. Nigel isn't "dedicated to not learning French", he simply isn't doing anything which requires/ benefits from learning it.
Knowing a language doesn't make you any better at scrabble, as scrabble requires extensive memorisation of word lists without necessarily knowing what every word means, something which Nigel is extremely good at. As such, it is much easier for Nigel to only memorize the word list, instead of also learning the grammar, pronounciation, sentence structure, etc. of the language, when that does nothing to help with scrabble.
What’s funny is that outside of scrabble, he memorized a completely useless set of words. He could have (presumably) spent another 9weeks memorizing the English translations and know French. But instead he only knows they are French words, so he can look at any set of letters and tell you “yup that’s French” or “nah not French” and that’s it. Which is very funny to me for some reason.
Knowing the English translations only gives you vocabulary, not grammar. After learning grammar, he could then type in the language and read the language, but not speak the language. He'd then have to learn how to pronounce the words, and learn to listen to them as well.
@@gamemeister27 and all of that would be useless if the goal is only to play and win the game. So he didn't bother. just memorised what he could use for play.
he's not going to do any interviews anyways
@@DBZVelena yup
I love that, its just the right amount of effort.
"Using an engine would make him worse" is such a banger compliment
No it’s not. All it says is the engine was badly designed
@@MikhailFederov it clearly isn't badly designed if it beats almost every top player (as shown on the table in the video), Nigel is just on another level.
When I heard that in the video, I started laughing out loud in a way that, in the past, happened when I was faced with an idea profoundly sublime or unknowable (e.g. the scale of the Universe) and all my brain could do to cope with processing the realization was to laugh. That's how insane Nigel's brain is for my brain to understand.
@@a.lollipop if scrable was as popular as chess or go the ai would be far better. But it's not and so the ai is sub par as interest for developing superhuman scrabble ai is just not there.
So in that sense if we compare the scrabble ai against top chess engines, it's "bad" in comparison.
@@MCoTEDDY you're right it could be better if there more people developing scrabble AIs, -but does it really matter if- -it's already better than everyone but a- -single person? Just because it's not the- -best it could be doesn't mean it's badly- -designed.- It is also much harder to design good scrabble AI in general, I'm pretty sure the video talks about this. It's a complex game. That's why the chess AI is relatively better
edit: sorry, I thought you were the same person as before, thats why I thought the badly designed thing again.
The fact that we know Nigel isn’t cheating because he literally outperforms all existing scrabble AI is so funny to me. He’s so good that cheating would actually be a handicap.
Or he wrote his own
@@Max24871that would be even more impressive considering he has no idea how to
@@Max24871and it would have had to be 20 years ago
scrabble noob: just learn the words
expert youtuber: actually there is a lot more to that, ....
nigel: just learn the words
Bell curve meme
Nigel has some kind of "I don't know, I just got here" vibes. What an amazing guy, his skills are absolutely ridiculous and the fact that he doesn't even really know how he got so good is hilarious
What’s funny about this comment is that this is a rare case where “talent” would be more appropriate to describe a person’s, in this case Nigel’s ability, than “skill”.
It reminds me of that scene in One Punch Man where some opponent asks for Saitama's secret (how he got so basically infinitely strong) and he finally tells his secret and it's just "I run 10 miles every day and do 100 pushups".
"How did you learn to play French Scrabble perfectly in such a short time?"
"I read a list of all the allowed words"
@@FPRobber seems about right. Then Nigel, like Saitame, goes around and absolutely annihilates every opponent, even the ones that are programmed (Bots/Boros) to never lose.
@@0x13horizon4 ability and skill are pretty synonymous in your usage of the words. as far as i can tell, talent would be best described as a sort of extraordinary innate intuition for some sort of process or activity. but, as far as i can tell, the development of all intuition relies on practice, therefore i would disagree with your statement. he may be talented, but it was the consistent practice of his field of talent which made him the best at it. i would even go so far as to claim that a perceivable notion of talent is something which can universally be acquired through rigorous practice: talent can be gained, at which point it becomes completely synonymous with skill again, as the two eventually become indistinguishable.
@@Concentrum I disagree but don’t feel the need to expand on why, so have it your way
I'm dead. This man broke scrabble minds so hard that people now WANT him to memorize their entire language. Iceland tried it
Icelandic is kind of the standard for proving your a savant with an insane memory. I remember watching a documentary where a dude became basically fluent in Icelandic in a couple of weeks and the news crew interviewing him was flabbergasted. Apparently it's one of the most difficult languages
@@cbot9302 I believe it was in 4 days
@@cbot9302 The Foreign Service Institute suggests 1,100 class hours for English speakers to learn Icelandic, which is half the time needed for Japanese, Chinese, or Arabic, and nearly double the time required for Spanish.
However, in reality, it's closer to 2,200 hours to achieve fluency in Icelandic since the FSI estimate doesn't account for self-study and immersion, where a lot of the learning takes place.
And just to be clear, fluency does not equate to native-level proficiency, which would require a much longer commitment.
The challenge with Icelandic Scrabble would be the variety of forms a word can take, called 'bending.'
Take the word horse, which in English has two forms/spellings (horse, horses). In Icelandic it has 16 forms (hestur, hest, hesti, hests, hestar, hesta, hestum, hesta, hesturinn, hestinn, hestinum, hestsins, hestarnir, hestana, hestunum, hestanna.) And those are just nouns, there are different forms for verbs as well. As a matter of fact, horse is arguably one of the easiest and is used to make the concept easier to understand for native speakers in school.
Thing is once you learn Icelandic grammar these become easy or intuitive to predict but would be a challenge for someone relying on raw memory.
@@connoisseurofcookies2047 you mentioned hesta twice, so is it only 15 ?
The other proof of Nigel’s absurd skill is how there’s like 2 hours of yt videos from top players explaining intricate scrabble details just so we can even begin to comprehend how good he is. Like, he’s so good you need significant insight into the game to even grasp his skill. It’s also just really nice to see top competitors so respectful of each other to just be this positive and admiring of their game’s top player. This was also honestly helpful cause at times Will would say things about how good Nigel’s play was that I wouldn’t even fully grasp with this context and makes them that much more astonishing.
That partly comes from Nigel being so humble and unassuming. If he was an arrogant jerk, I'm not sure how we would be talking about him
@@AlexDings there really is something endlessly satisfying about somebody who truly loves what they do perform at the highest level and share that passion with us.
@@AlexDings Could you be arrogant at being more skilled than everyone at everyday tasks, like ordering mcdonalds, putting grocery away in kitchen cabinets, filling out work timecard? Also, you might think twice about accepting an interview from a media outlet that tells you 'Wow, amazing you can order a Big Mac every time you want it! How is it possible? Would you like to be interviewed?' It'd be weird, right?
@@emctwoo The craziest part is Scrabble is just a hobby to him. His real passion is cycling.
Reminds me of the scene from Good Will Hunting where the Professor is distraught over the fact that he's one of the few people that can discern the difference between himself and Will. Fortunately Nigel wants to play Scrabble.
Not sure if this is a "glitch", or rather a clue about how Nigel's memory works, or just a friendly attempt to troll me. I have played Nigel Richards 5 times over the board, and in two of those games, Nigel has "held" one of my valid moves, indicating an uncertainty about the validity of my play. Both times, I had played a word that most top experts wouldn't have hesitated to accept as valid. He didn't end up challenging either of them. The first time he held one of my words, it was a 3 letter word. My entire life flashed before my eyes when I heard his cue. We all know that "Nigel knows better", so even if he questions even a 3 letter word, it is very difficult to trust oneself over him.
What's the distinction between a hold and a challenge? Can you hold the clock if you're considering challenging?
@@abee127 you hold when you are considering challenging, but your clock runs until you decide whether or not to challenge. The hold indicates to your opponent that there might be a challenge, and they are not allowed to mix the tiles they left over with new ones unless the hold is released. You can only hold if you are unsure of a word that has just been played.
It's probably that he has to stop and review his memory. After all, he talks about reviewing the pages in his mind, so it is not that he has necessarily memorized every word, but that he has memorized the *appearance* of them in the dictionary. Meaning he has to review the dictionary pages to check if a word is valid.
@@psymar yes, this is likely the reason why, though that doesn't explain his lightning-fast ability to find valid words and align them on his rack. He potentially looks for the word on its page once his intuition finds it over the board, but there is some other form of memory at play as well. Nobody that I've talked to has ever had Nigel hold them on a single play and not challenge.
He could also just be doing it for mindgames, giving himself more time, etc.
The answer is simple!
Nigel just developed he's own Scrabble AI two decades ago on device no bigger than a phone which gives him answers through vibrotactile morse code. He also made an ocular prosthesis with a built in camera that is connected to his handheld supercomputer through his blood vessels. You might be wondering how these gadgets are charged? Well, with the perplexed faces of his opponents, of course.
hahaha
beads?
A certain American GM might have helped him?
@@wronghorsebatterystaplea certain GM who just got smoked by a 13 year old IM? 😂
@@tdillpickleh4684I guess he only uses it against Magnus 😂
The constantly changing memes of Nigel's face really kept my attention through the entire video. Great speaking as well. Thank you for your hard work.
Nigel Richards is like One Punch Man. He trained so hard that he grew a beard, and nobody believes him when he says it's just hard work.
It really isn’t at this point. No ammount of hard work would produce such a dominant performance, it’s a combination of genes+dedication, and frankly you belittle other participants by saying that it’s “just hard work” implying that they didn’t work hard enough to win.
We are all different, and his brain has unique memory and analytical skills, that allow him to dominate the field.
I think this is an accurate comparison but for a different reason: both Saitama and Nigel give a very basic answer of "I did some reasonable amount of hard work for a reasonable sounding time" to explain a completely unreasonable end result of being an invincible super hero in their chosen field.
@@max7971 Working smart and working hard don't work exclusively. He likely has a method to his learning that nobody else knows and he's working really hard using that method. Genetics I'm sure has plenty to do with it, but for someone to dominate so heavily (even beyond that of someone like Magnus Carlsen to his respective field), there must be a difference in strategy to how he remembers words in certain positions that has floated under the radar.
Also compare this to video game speedrunning, if I may. You don't see major new time saves unless a new strategy is found. The paradigm of speedrunning, much like Chess, and much like Scrabble, is built upon the shoulders of the giants of the past. One strategy works for a really long time, gets optimized to a point of no more improvement, and then a new strategy is found.
@@max7971that what he was trying to say though, saitama from one punch man famously did less training then most olympic athletes yet inexplicabley, even to him, became strong enough to punch a hole through a planet. People are constantly trying to ffgure out how he got so strong but the only answer he has is to train hard, because that's all he did. same with nigel, he did something incomprehensably hard and he doesn't even really know why he can do it and others can't.
My favourite part of this is the fact that in tournaments, commentators will default to Nigel over the computer analysis. Imagine if that was the case in Chess with Magnus Carlsen or any other strategic board game and their respective 'Greatest ever' player
In part this is because Scrabble engines still have a long way to go before being Stockfish-like. The difference in work that has been put into them compared to chess is, unsurprisingly, not even remotely in the same ballpark. Here's a nice piece on that medium.com/@14domino/scrabble-is-nowhere-close-to-a-solved-game-6628ec9f5ab0
To some extent this does happen in chess, but mostly in shorter time formats. Sometimes, the BEST move isn't the top engine move but rather the move that makes the position more complicated for your opponent (meaning they might have to spend more time calculating). This occurs in rapid chess (~15min per player per game), but becomes very obvious in bullet format (~1min per player per game) with stalemate traps and the like.
There are still occasions where stockfish needs a few solid minutes to comprehend Magnus moves before it realises how strong it is.
@@DrZaius3141 stockfish actually added that recently lol (favors more complex positions)
@@DrZaius3141well no, the engine move would lead to better positions, but that's because the engine assumes its opponent is competent. humans playing blitz are playing psychology mixed with chess, and in that respect, such moves are okay. but if humans tried such moves against engines, they'd be crushed.
Well, I didn't know absolutely nothing about Nigel or competitive Scrabble, yet I ended up watching the whole 48 mins.
I very much appreciated the amount of effort that went into that video. A great storyline accompanied by a very clean analysis supported with lots of facts.
Kudos to you, man.
same and i only paused to marvel in how absurd this man is idk if that says a lot about how well the story telling was or how interesting of a man he is
Nigel's power of suggestion is so great that at 19:56 when explaining how he played "byagee" instead of "bhagee", you write that "he used the Y instead of the.... Y"
At Cambridge Uni in the '70s I knew a postgrad student from the Frei Universitat in Berlin who claimed he had memorised dozens of volumes of the collected works of Marx. To test him we took the 900 page volume of the Grundrisse and read him a random sentence. He immediately provided not only the page number but the line on the page...
Of all the things to waste time memorizing...
@@ShortArmOfGod Well, if you're a professional Marxist scholar as he was, I would suggest that this makes perfect sense. Certainly more sense than learning a foreign dictionary by rote without knowing the meaning of the words...
Is he still around?
@@tullochgorum6323a Marxist scholar. Even more of a waste.
Could be advanced mnemonics.
The fact the engine makes him worse is hysterical.
Edit: just noticed your subs. It's crazy you made such a long vid with incridble quality. Way to go man
I don't even play. But your explanation of how superhuman Nigel is in all respects, interwoven with some intricacies of the game, was amazing. Thank you.
A perfect example of why a statistical outlier isn't always a result of poorly collecting your data. This was crazy interesting, and I don't even play scrabble other than with family sometimes. Nice upload.
"Do you have any particular method for learning the words?"
"No :))"
I thought I was so clever on the chlorodyne question for finding chandler instead of children, only to be immediately humbled
Such a great video. Simply structured, interesting story, never boring, not over-edited, no unnecessary dramatic music, sponsor breaks, etc. It's like I traveled in a time machine back to before TH-cam became overly formulaic and commercialized. Hope you'll make some more English content in the future
My channel wasn't even monetized yet when I uploaded this so that might explain why it doesn't feel commercialized 😀 A few other English-language videos are in the works.
This is exactly what the French need, someone who doesn't speak French to humble them in their own field
Mes couilles sur ton front
As a French I find this fascinating and admirable.
And again, he just played what the engine later conformed to be the best move. He outfrenched the French!
This is an incredibly underrated video. I didn't expect to spend more than 5 minutes on it but I'm so glad I finished it because I felt like my mind was constantly blown at how crazy good this fellow kiwi is at what he does. I've seldom had such engaged enjoyment watching such a video and I wish I could forget what I'd watched to rewatch it with the same sheer disbelief at each new piece of information that is then compared to other top players.
Will Anderson sent me here. What a great video, really really puts his skill in perspective. Liked the memes too.
So I'm a Kiwi, and I had no idea that we had the world's Scrabble Grandmaster!
Random side note, I used to know the world-champion jouster.
Kiwi exceptionalism is real, but extremely niche! Lol.
Equally stunning was a German comparing someone to Don Bradman.
The first tournament he went to, he left work at 5, then biked for 14 hours from Christchurch to Dunedin in the rain overnight. Someone at the tournament offered him a ride home, and he said nah I'm good and biked back. If you've ever driven into Dunedin from the north you know that's especially awful, the last hour or so has about 400m of hill climbing.
@@L1ama If this video is anything to go by, he can probably ride a bike in a way that consumes fewer calories than It would take to press on the gas.
I'm quite proud to have found 'tearjerker' in your puzzle, despite not playing Scrabble. But there's an enormous difference between finding it on a board where it's implied there's something huge available, and spotting it in a real game.
Yeah, puzzles do have that effect, but that's still quite the find from you! Maybe you should give playing a try ;-)
I suppose on some level you have to approach every gamestate you get this way.
True, and I try to emulate this in my own game - whenever possible I try to tell myself "what if someone gave you this situation as a puzzle?" and deliberately try to search for wild, outside-the-box moves. That has helped me sometimes, but it's really difficult to do this consistently because you're doing so many things at the same time in a tournament game. In a German tournament game I missed the wonderful bingo of SNOBIETY (that word really is in the German word list). After the game, someone who had watched the live broadcast told me "you missed a nice bingo with the Y", and without even having to see the board or the letters again I *immediately* realized I could have played SNOBIETY. That's how weird this "puzzle effect" is.
@@AlexDings Snobiety ist im deutschen Katalog?
Gütiger, und was soll das heißen?
Sieht wie'n Anglizismus aus, aber ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob das im Englischen als Wort durchgeht.
I found jerk and wasn't that proud
This showed up in my recommendations. I never expected long form Scrabble content to grip me, but this absolutely did. Way to go and congratulations in the amazing video.
I watch a lot of in depth analysis videos on random topics- I’m definitely glad yours popped up I’ve really never considered strategic scrabble on a competitive scale! Also the fact that all your videos are German and specifically on scrabble makes it even more fun and unusual that you came on my feed lol
In-depth videos on random stuff are my favourite genre, too 🙂 Thanks for watching.
"...can be played in any language" I'd like to see a game of Chinese Scrabble.
Good point!
Lol Chinese is technically pictograms. I would like to see what that game would look like 😂
It’s not possible in Chinese I don’t think but Japanese has a version that uses hiragana/katakana. Arabic would probably also be impossible due to letters changing in shape depending on what’s next to them
There's a Pinyin version
Actually I forgot that Chinese has an “alphabet” of sorts. Each basic sound is represented with a kanji that starts with it, kind of like “a for apple” “b for boy” etc. So theoretically you could make a Chinese scrabble with that.
27:12 amazing, i cant even express how good this felt as a viewer! Amazing story telling not just through words, but through images and little suprises like this!
Don't know why youtube suggested this to me and not sure why I watched through the whole thing as I've never played scrabble in my life. But one of the most fascinating videos I've watched on this platform. I'll probably never play scrabble even now but learnt some incredible stuff and the unexplainable genius of some humans.
Beside the incredible achievements of this guy, the reason he chose French is mainly due to the very high level of cognates between French and English (about 66%). There is a huge overlap in terms of vocabulary and spelling rules between the two languages. If you take any texts in English be it literature or news-papers, the number of common words is usually around 40%. In English dictionaries, the number of common words drops to 29%, simply because the lexicon is then much larger and includes a lot of a very rare words.
So by focussing on verb conjugations and some regularity in spelling differences, you can acquire a pretty large lexicon of French in a few months, especially if you already have a huge knowledge of English beforehand.
Again, his capacity to select the right spelling is incredible, but the guy seems to have an out of this world talent for pattern matching and I would not be surprise if he did not use this talent to learn French as a subset of the very large lexicon of English he already knows.
Learning English by reading lots of it over a French language background resulted in surprise at how English language readers would tend to apprehend as a snub's affectation my innocent enough use of words rare to them. I hadn't realized my reflex habit to promote to my English lexicon any familiar French word as soon as I'd spot it used in an English language context. The rarer the word in English, the less likely the divergence in meaning from French, and this works against attention to relative frequencies when augmenting one's English vocabulary in this manner.
Thank you for putting the time and effort into making a video that explains this so clearly! Your narration was really gripping and the visual aids/annotations were hilarious; I also really appreciate hearing someone with knowledge and passion about their field discuss it in a way that's accessible to laymen like me :)
the bike ride thing is like something i learnt called a 'mind palace,' where you place the information around a place you know well. when i read about it, about 20 years ago in my first year of uni i memorized the order of a shuffled deck of cards and i can still easily recall the list now. i also made the cards into 'objects' which represented 5 cards. for example a hand of '2 of clubs, jack of diamonds, 3 of spades, 9 of spades, 3 of clubs' is the first hand, so it's only really remembering like 11 things, which isn't so hard. i have a bad memory too. so i can imagine someone with a gift and a few other mnemonic tricks up their sleeve could easily remember quite a lot of data without much issue, tho 500 pages of foreign words is something else.
great video btw.
While this is true, the memory palace technique is used by no Scrabble player that I know of - it's not quite the right purpose, partly because tens of thousands of items are a bit too much, but mostly because it doesn't help the task in the game. Nigel also says he doesn't use any specific techniques, so it's something else in his case. But I guess it's probably a similar process. For me and surely most other players, the similarities between words automatically group them into certain categories so that when I see some combination of letters, it's like stepping into a mental room where a bunch of similar words are all on display.
I'm German, my betrothed is Thai, we play scrabble (and communicate in general) in English and they ALWAYS KICK MY ASS SO HARD. this is the beginning of my training arc. Teach me your ways alex o_o
Hab ein paar Strategie-Videos auf meinem Kanal, guck da mal rein ;-)
Oh, a they-them. 😂
@@reginaldforthright805Is English even your first language?
@@reginaldforthright805Uhhh… So I can’t tell if you are a vile person, or if you just have no reading comprehension skills 😂Using the term “they” like the OP refers to male, female and/or any other gender. The OP is using completely normal correct English, and the OP does not suggest anything about gender identity by what they wrote here.
You clearly are not very intelligent…
@@reginaldforthright805 what?
Alex, this was a fantastic video. Seriously great work. I knew nothing about Scabble going into it but your explanations made the beauty of his game really understandable. Thanks for sharing.
Wow, this was an incredible video!!! The way you presented everything was so engaging! I loved it!
I really believe that he makes simple mistakes, because he is focused on bigger things. While this sounds weird, think about this: Most people who are super deep into mathematics, physics, etc. use a calculator for simple things like addition or substracting basic numbers. Without this tool, they can get distracted very much.
Although this is by no means THE explanation, for me it is ONE simple explanation for his simple mistakes.
Brilliant, engaging video. Thank you for a great 48! minutes (I had to double-take at that length because it flew by
Absolutely brilliant video, thank you for this!
I love this video. I keep coming back to it.
You have a great voice for storytelling. Your narration really makes this video.
Second time watching this video all the way through. I haven't played a game of Scrabble for like 10 years, and I don't have intentions of doing so any time soon, but this subject is incredibly interesting to me, and you present it so well! You're a fantastic and captivating speaker.
I won't spoil it, but that is a crazy way to show that someone isn't cheating. Makes me question if calling him a "computer", like many have in the video, is even accurate lol.
The parallels to computer software is eerie - finding every move equally easy, total lack of cognitive biases in gameplay, no concept of bluffing (Nigel doesn't play invalid moves on purpose, which almost everyone else does at the top), the rare mistakes looking like basic software bugs.
It's also telling that cheating is not part of the conversation about Nigel within the (English) Scrabble scene at all. Everyone knows he's legit. The only reason I even touched on this was because I figured viewers from outside Scrabble would be likely to bring up that possibility in the comments.
This is also interesting because there _have_ been cheating scandals in Scrabble. I don't think Will or I will ever make a video about that because it's an ugly topic and not what we want Scrabble to be known for, but there have been a small (like three or four) number of high-profile cases of cheating. (Which in Scrabble amounts to things like hiding the blank tiles in your lap before a game so that you can smuggle them on your rack at some point.)
You did a great job explaining the reasons why Scrabble isn't just about playing the move that scores the most points. The whole thing was fascinating. It felt right that all this was from someone whose native language isn't English. Danke!
Wonderful video, had me enthralled for the entire length!
Thank you SO much for telling me a story about your hobby!
I think Nigel is secretly a time lord. He stops time every move to search through the dictionary to find a good word.
What a fantastic video! I rarely comment on TH-cam videos, but this content necessitated it.
As someone who has no interest in Scrabble and has probably only played a handful of games in his lifetime, I still couldn't help but watch this amazing synopsis and analysis of a unique mind all the way to the end. I almost want to say I'm saddened by the fact that Nigel is not as recognizable to the layperson (at least he was unknown to me an hour ago) as perhaps Magnus Carlsen, but considering his indifferent and unassuming personality, I'm sure Nigel prefers it that way. And honestly, to put him into the same realm as some of the other better-known personalities may very well be a discredit to the dominance he asserts in his craft.
Thank you for introducing me to this Legend. He's not one I'll forget anytime soon.
as many others have mentioned, this was a really really interesting and well done video! i don't play scrabble at all (tho i do watch random videos about random topics) so maybe that's why this video appeared on my homepage, really glad i clicked in! this was really cool!
I don't remember ever playing Scrabble or having really any interest in it, but this was fascinating. What I would give to be currently living in a future where we can truly understand the workings of the brain and what allows these exceptional examples of superhuman achievements.
Why can't we help talking of the brain in the singular to speak of brains in their multitude and diversity, but don't do so when talking, say, of stars?
@@borisborcicbecause stars aren’t necessarily that different from each other and usually operate the same way
@@corporatecapitalism assuming this true, that would at best be cause to do the exact converse -- to speak of the star and the brainS -- and not as we do, of the starS and the brain.
@@borisborcic when we say "stars" we refer to the physical objects that exist. When we say "brain" we refer not to the organ, but to the state of being -- the unified human experience
@@person8064 and you are adding this to a context prompted by an extraordinary performance of a particular person and brain that no other dreams to emulate. I surmise that "the unified experience" is a myth.
Imagine buying a board game just to dunk on your son on but he ends up being the literal best player to ever live
I have never played Scrabble, but just watched nearly an hour of video on the topic. Great video!
Just wanted to say, I love your voice! And this was such a well made documentary about Nigel!
It’s nearly 5am and I did not expect to be here watching a 48 minute video and becoming highly invested in competitive scrabble
For Nigel, it's just learning words; the rest of how best to play the game may as well be hard-wired into him.
The memes every time you cut back to a picture of Nigel are so good. Fantastic video, thank you for giving me context to what an incredible player Nigel is. The Marion Tinsley comparison is, in my view, more than appropriate.
great video. I did not know I was going to be into this but after starting your video the story was awesome.
I dont play Scrabble (well), and I dont watch boardgames on YT. But the algorithm gods brought me to you, and im so glad they did! What a marvelous video. ❤
People: Nigel is literally a robot.
Experts: Actually he can’t be a robot, there are no robots who are that good.
I only have a mild interest in Scrabble but this video goes to show that when someone is really passionate about a subject that passion is infectious and I really enjoyed watching the whole video and hearing you go into detail explaining the intricacies of Nigel’s game. Well done!
fantastic video, Alex! thank you for making such a high quality script & video in a language that is usually not the norm for your channel. I don't play Scrabble but I've heard various claims of his genius over the years and hearing a good & well-spoken player talk about his feats really illustrates even for someone not that familiar with the game just how rare of a talent Nigel really is. what a wonder that he just happened to start playing this game.
Even the most advanced forms of chess have some relation to recreational chess. However, the most advanced forms of Scrabble have no relation to recreational Scrabble. This is why Hasbro eventually stopped funding Scrabble tournaments in America as there was no ROI.
A non-French speaker winning a French Scrabble tournament may be a tour-de-force at the expert level, but it is the antithesis of the recreational game where word knowledge (and not just letter order knowledge) is valued.
Thank you for making this video about him!! I had never heard or him or competitive Scrabble but this showed up for me because I watched long-form videos about the jigsaw world championship (which I also had no idea was a thing) and it’s so wonderful to see people excelling and finding joy and purpose in such niche things. Very, very cool to learn how different competitive scrabble is from what I’ve played for fun at home and your video was SO good!! So much fun with the pacing and chapters and extra info text bubbles. I also really appreciated the last bit about how he doesn’t want to be “known” by everyone and how it’s not right to try even if it’s possible- but also how you made a point to rule out the assumption that he’s unlikeable.
Conversely, Karen Puzzles has been showing up in my recommendations lately 😀 Haven't watched anything yet but will probably enjoy it 😀
Great job on the video. Having discovered Nigel on YT, I’m inspired to spend the remainder of my life building and manipulating my mind through further study.
At 24:28, "Affichage par négatif croissant" means "Sort by increasing negative", it has nothing to do with croissants ^^
Negative is probably the french translation for the 'fewest points missed' in this case.
I know, I speak French. It was just a joke 🙂
It's hilarious that a "language expert" didn't understand that words are simply pointers to concepts. Knowing the pointers only is pointless. 😂
Even if you know what the words mean i don't think you can craft a sentence necessarily
@@vikggx very true
@@vikggx I was sitting here for so long like bruh this doesn’t make any sense, then I realized that that was point 😂
Its just like looking at a sentence and saying "Yep, thats French." It doesn't mean you understand it.
@@vikggxYou could with French because it is very similar to English. Subject verb etc..
This has been in my recommended at least 20 times in the two weeks. Fine. I’ll watch.
Great Video and well worth the watch. Thank you for that!
18:45 (A)U(B)ER(G)iNES was from Ron Tiekert, not Jim Geary (and as noted, the G was also pre-placed since you need at least three pre-placed letters to make a 10). Geary's WATER(Z)O(O)I also went through disconnected tiles, rather than (ZO) which wouldn't have been valid in that 1995 OSPD game.
D'oh! There's a bunch of typos etc. in the video about which I don't care, but I don't like having gotten these ones wrong. Thanks for the correction.
I've gone down the rabbit hole of Scrabble tournament history over the past week thanks to Will Anderson's youtube channel, which is probably why the algorithm suggested this video, and I find it fascinating how competitive the scene is, but also how niche it is at a tournament level. This is a game that nearly everyone alive has played in some form. We all have an old scrabble set that we break out once in a while at family gatherings, and online versions like "words with friends" have been incredibly popular. In comparison to Chess, the top Scrabble players are nowhere as well known, and fewer people follow it. I mean, people like Bobby Fisher and Magnus Carlsen are household names, and I don't even follow chess. Scrabble is also a game where it's much easier as a viewer to recognize a genius move. To really appreciate a high level chess game, you need to be pretty good at chess yourself or have someone explain it to you. I'm a terrible chess player, so watching it is not that interesting to me. With scrabble though, it's obvious that top players are geniuses to anyone who understands English and has played a few games of scrabble in their life. The low barrier to entry and popularity of playing it would make you think it should much more widely followed.
And yes, obviously the game tree complexity of Scrabble is so much higher than Chess or even Go thanks to the element of randomness and the hundreds of thousands of valid moves (words). If the number of possible Go games is on the order of 10^300, then the number of possible scrabble games is probably roughly the power set of that game space (a number on the order of 2^10^n, where 10^n would be the number of possible games if you knew the order of tiles in advance, though this is just an educated guess. If n > 80, then the number of digits would outnumber the quantity of particles in the universe). Yet it's still fairly easy to follow the course of a game.
Chess is popular because it’s legendary, whereas scrabble is something for old ladies
Great video! Ive heard of him before but its super interesting to learn more about him!
A brilliant video! I'm just a filthy casual and stumbled upon this by accident but it's always really interesting to hear good in-depth pieces on people who are the to of their field.
As someone who plays scrabble with my broken french against native speakers, I feel like this is the documentary for me.
Just wanted to add that you have a really impressive talent in storytelling and structuring your videos (and perhaps something else I can't really put a word to) that made this an extremely engaging watch.
I come from absolutely no interest in scrabble as well as a victim of consuming increasingly shorter videos but this was a thoroughly enjoyable watch (including many pauses to read your green bubble context additions).
Thanks for the great video.
Great video, I love learning about people who have absolutely mastered their niche.
Awesome vid Alex! I can't believ I made it till the end. I didn't think I'd do so when I started, but you just made it impossible to look away. Consider making English content too!
I appreciate the fact that you specifically covered the Duplicate, because of course to us french players (who historically don't really pay attention to the face-to-face format even after it was reintroduced in official competition), that is the part where Nigel truly comes in out of left field.
Also, as a neurodivergent person, let me tell you he rings HUGE vibes for neurodivergence.
Haha neurodivergence is just a made up buzzword, madame.
@@reginaldforthright805 Have I got news to you: *all* words are made up 😏
@@circeus weird works; no need for self-aggrandizing jargon, madame.
my thoughts exactly, man's got that special autism superpowers
hia pattern recognition is crazy
@@user-qk8lm3se7q it's the fact he doesn't even feel the need to try to explain how, also if i'm not mistaken isn't the guy with the photographic memory that draws cities also autistic? isn't photographic memory commonly associated with autism?
Schönes, unterhaltsames Video!
As a hobby linguist, I have to think of one of the basic statements of linguistics: The form of a word (phonology) does not indicate its meaning (semantics). Thus our human brain must have at least two mostly independent systems when working with language. Nigel seems to completely leave out the semantic system for optimal use of the phonological/combinatory system. And successfully so!
Such a great video. Made me excited to play a game of Scrabble.
I knew someone that had real photographic memory, they said it would be like watching a movie; They could rewind the memory, fast forward, but they could not audibly hear anything from the memory, just the visuals as a motion picture.. So of course, they were really good at lip reading. They did have really good audible memory, they could hear a song once and know the lyrics by heart. It really was incredible - one time, we got lost going to our destination, and they were able to get us back to the point before we got lost just by looking at the appearance of the streets and landmarks.
They did "abuse" this gift though, they didn't have to actually study or learn like the rest of us. I told them "Why aren't you studying for that test," and they'd say "I already looked at the study guide once, it's all in my head." I mean, talk about an easy A.
They did mention to me that if they didn't sleep right, or eat enough that day, like certain factors would interfere with the ability. So it wasn't always as sharp, indeed like a muscle. It was inspiring to see how they perceived reality, I even asked them "How could I learn to do this? I would like to have that ability" and they just said it's as natural as breathing, just don't doubt yourself and learn.
I have never played scarble in my life (it's not a very popular board game in Russian), but you essay is just frankly fascinating! The narrative is very easy to follow, it's also quite cohesive, I really appreciate the way you made the video "beginner-friendly", I understood most of the stuff about the game itself from context, clear visual aids and nice pacing
Thank you for your research and hard work :D Learning about great human minds will forever charm me in a unique way
For the puzzle at 17:37, "Chandler" also works and is an equal number of points since the blank is still on the double letter. It is a harder word to see though, and I'm not sure why I found it before the answer shown in the video lol
I also came up with chandler before children lol I think it's the "e" and we automatically look to put the d or the r at the end of it before we consider the n.
@@kb27787 yeah it feels natural to try placing "er" at the end of the word first before thinking of other combinations
Such an interesting video man! Thanks!!
I really love the humor of your cut "Nigel looks so distraught", I mean, you've really nailed this whole video. I've been avoiding video or board gaming as serious hobbies ever since I was a kid and some boy was sexist to me in a chess tournament when I was 8 years old and he won, but you know, I think the gaming world in its forms has come a long way since then. And I've always enjoyed Scrabble and languages and I know how to use memory palaces and I'm amazing at cold memorizing even outside that, I mean maybe why not give it a try and see if it floats my boat now. Love the welcoming outro, thanks!
I loved this video, I watched all 48m59s of it. However, I have just one question. Could we expect Nigel to enter any more tournaments in different foreign languages? As a French speaker I love all the french stuff in this video as well. Wonderful analysis on all of this. Thank you for dumbing it down and explaining it to non-Scrabble players like me.
There's been rumors of him targeting Spanish, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet. The one time I met Nigel myself, I unsuccessfully tried to convince him to learn the German word list so he can play in our tournaments 😀
@@AlexDingsWas be nice when you met him?
@@Asterism_Desmos Yes, very nice. Like I talked about in the last part of the video, no attitude whatsoever.
I have a question regarding the icelandic challenge...if there are so many words... isn't it easier? Like...at what point it becomes harder to find a wrong word than one existing?! More words = more options!
Yeah there are more options in the game, but you still need to learn the words beforehand...
It would make guessing more likely to output a real word.
Also, there may be some statistics thing that says he doesn't need to memorize all the words, only as many (or more) than his opponent. Then just pretend the other words don't exist and play your knowledge bank of words almost perfectly. Of course this would make it hard to challenge words. But it would also make it harder for your opponent to challenge words, assuming they haven't memorized all of them.
I also don't know any scrabble strategy or statistics really.
@@mf_01I don't think you realize how many random combinations there are with all the letters in the alphabet and a various amount of letters per word. Even if a language has a huge vocabulary, it's just so far from all the possible random combinations you could create. I don't think that the difference in vocabulary in Icelandic is significant compared to the amount of random combinations possible. With a three letters word and an alphabet of 26 letters you already have 26*26*26 combinations possible.
That was amazing. I would not have commented, however if not for that brilliant reference in the lats 3 seconds. LOVE it.
Never played scrabble in my life and don't really know the rules, besides that you have to make words from letters. But I still managed to follow along and ended up watching the whole video, well done!
Also the "Don't judge a walking dictionary by it's cover" line was genius! 😂
I need to point out (hoping that noone else has) that the text at 20:08 says "Accidentally used the Y instead of the Y", which is very funny to me, given the context
What a wonderful video essay. Scrabble gives me anxiety and I still watched 48 mins of you talking about it. Maybe you could think about doing more video essays? It seems many people, internationally, enjoyed this project.
Scrabble gives you anxiety?!
I love watching video essays, it's a great format. I'll probably make a handful of long-ish videos about Scrabble.
Awesome video. Thanks for all the context. Some crazy shit
Wow. I saw CHaNDLER at the second quiz and had no idea whether it is actually a word, apparently it is and means candlemaker (edit: small a for the blank)
Yes, I forgot to mention that alternative to CHiLDREN
glad TH-cam sent me here, thank you for the very well constructed video! with the rise of AI, feels like it's only a matter of time until Nigel becomes a mortal, but it's good to see there's still at least 1 human better than machine out there at the moment
Praise to the TH-cam algorithm that led me to this video. I don’t know how I missed the headline Nigel’s French win occurred, but wow this is easily the best TH-cam video I’ve watched in months.
Thoroughly enjoyable video. Will definitely be back if you make any more content in English.
Well, with French, you would certainly do yourself a favor by learning some grammar:
- how to conjugate "normal" verbs
- which type of words have a plural and or feminine form and how to form the plural and feminine using the male singular form
But this of course requires to be able to also recognize what is a verb which is not too complex for most verbs but there are some words with an ending that can make you think that they are verb when they are not and there is no directly related verb like "boulanger" (baker) or "gendre" (son-in-law).
And to know if a word can have a plural or feminine form, you basically need to recognize if it's a noun, adverb, adjective, pronoun etc...
Some endings are almost always adverbs (-ement -emment -amment -ément with of course many exceptions) but for most words, you just have to know.
Learning how adverbs can usually be formed from adjective is also useful but there are so many exceptions and adjectives with no directly related adverb ( like colors or "bancal" though people would understand what the non-existing "bancalement" would mean)
I'm sure Nigel probably noticed many of these patterns, but he also apparently figured that using them to learn the words wouldn't help because there's always exceptions, as you pointed out.
That chart at 3:20 is very interesting, how different would scrabble be if the points were allocated to each piece such that they were all more or less equal on average?
Here's the source for that - you can also look at _combinations_ of letters, which makes it even more interesting: www.cross-tables.com/leaves.php Judging the value of these combinations intuitively and accurately is an important part of every expert player's game.
If we tried to balance the point values such that no letter was over- or underpowered, it would certainly reduce variance and make it more "fair" in that sense, but in my impression most players don't want to change anything partly because these imbalances add nuance to the strategy. If the Z is overpowered, it's an interesting question how to best take advantage of it. Especially because the worth of a tile (or combination) is heavily context-dependent (state of the board, leading or trailing in score etc.). With the not perfectly balanced values, the game has more potential for interesting swings in a game. Hope that makes sense
@@AlexDings that's awesome, thanks for that. I can see how the imbalance is interesting and how people wouldn't want to change it.
I did introduce the legend of Nigel Richards to some friends of mine and we have some more questions
Why did Nigel choose to learn French over other languages?
What caused David Gibson and Nigel Richards to face off only once? From what I know they were top competitors for a number of years, I'd have figured that they'd have played each other a lot.
If I understand one of the later charts properly, Nigel has never played a phony in an endgame? I'd have imagined that some scenarios in an endgame would make going for a phony quite worth it (i.e. playing perfectly will result in being a small amount of points behind), and with Nigel's word knowledge he could probably make anyone second guess themselves.
Apologies for all the questions but I am simply infatuated by this man haha.
Thanks a lot.
@@SirTylerGolf I don't exactly know why he chose French, but I imagine it's because they have the largest tournament scene besides English. He was also already friends with a French player.
Nigel and David Gibson only ever meeting once is a weird coincidence. Nigel has played that many US tournaments though, living on the other side of the world.
Yeah, Nigel doesn't go for deliberate phonies! I don't know why, maybe it feels wrong to him to play a word that he hasn't actually studied, maybe he thinks it's unsportsmanlike? It's highly unusual among the top players not to use this tactic at all.
I'm one of the few players who'd like to change things, eg. swap the values of the Z and the J.
Enjoyed the video very much, thank you! :)