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What Makes Nigel Richards The Best Scrabble Player On Earth
LeBron. Peyton. Tiger. Serena. Nigel. Nigel? When the 2014 National Scrabble Championship begins Saturday in Buffalo, New York, the odds-on favorite will be a 47-year-old New Zealander who resides in...
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The Scrabble King Is Dead, Long Live The Scrabble King
Behold, the FiveThirtyEight curse! It was Brazil’s World Cup to lose, and lose it did. Lionel Messi is impossible, but was anemic in the tournament’s final match, and his Argentina side took home...
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‘Da Gi Po Te’ Isn’t Baby Talk; It’s A Key To Scrabble Success
One of my favorite political scientists is Stephen Ansolabehere at Harvard. I greatly admire his scholarship on elections, politics and the media, and political economy. But there is another remarkable...
View ArticleNew Scrabble Dictionary Disrepects The Game
The Scrabble dictionary is getting an update. But it’s not going so well, and the world’s best players aren’t happy. Much of the press coverage of the update has focused on added millennial argot....
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I Played The New Words With Friends Bot And C‑R‑U‑S‑H‑E‑D It
In 1997, World Champion Garry Kasparov lost a chess match, and humanity’s intellectual mantle along with it, to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. (My colleagues recently made a film about the match — it...
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Dear Nigel Richards, Please Try Romanian Scrabble
The legend of the world’s best Scrabble player continues to grow. On Tuesday, Nigel Richards — who can already claim eight English-language U.S. and world championship trophies, the most famous beard...
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How ‘Qi’ And ‘Za’ Changed Scrabble
I had a grand plan, dear reader. I planned to shed quantitative light on the problem of income inequality. And I planned to do it with a million games of web-scraped Scrabble tournament data. But,...
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