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Nitya has a lovely voice and is my favorite Scrabble commentator/analyst. She would be perfect for voice over acting for animated films, doing roles like Pocahontas or a princess. Maybe voice overs for video game characters too.
Wow - great job guys! Excellent commentary; both sharing your thoughts and trying to get into the heads of each player. Matt Canik and team did a great job throughout - very respectful of everyone. Morris provided a wonderful viewpoint. Although Morris should be glad he didn't put money on the line. When game 3 started, he said I'd give Mack a 15-20% chance of winning the tournament! 😂 Yet to keep my attention for 5 hours is quite a feat! And I played at SPC and learned a ton there and from this video.
"AI", "GI", "TA", "RE"... wtf, have I been playing scrabble wrong? If I tried to pull that in a family game I'd be drop-kicked down the driveway. What kind of street rules is this?
These players are all a million times better than me. But I don’t understand why you’d empty the bag giving your opponent and easy opportunity of out in two and the win.
Awesome game and great commentary. Matt and Morris are an incredible team. Hopefully they will continue to work together. Morris is brilliant with extension plays he sees. Matt is always hilarious and insightful.
As a former poker pro, I might read that quick confident play as more likely to be a bluff than a real play. A few things here: 1) One of the most basic “tell” rules is “strong means weak; weak means strong.” Visible displays of strength (such as quick confident actions or staring down your opponent) are typically signs of weakness (in non-pros). Similarly, acting weak (not making eye contact, taking unusually long amounts of time to make a decision, etc) are usually signs of strength. The idea here is most people know poker is a game of deception, but they don’t understand how to be deceptive except on the most surface of levels. This is one of the best known tells in poker, being a subject of several pages in Mike Caro’s book on reading tells (still seen as the most fundamental tell reading book by most poker players, albeit most modern players value tells a lot less and rely on math/game theory a lot more when it comes to this sort of thing, at least against other pros. Against the fish, however, sharks will use whatever gets them the most to eat.) 2) Acting quickly means someone is more likely to be bluffing. This may apply more to poker, but the idea is simple- a quick action is more likely to be a bluff because it happens when you know bluffing is your only chance to win, whereas with most other hands you probably have to think about whether you’re better off betting (and if so, how much to bet, unless you’re playing limit where bet sizes are forced) or checking. To say it more precisely, a quick bet is more likely to be either a complete bluff or an unbeatable hand; it will rarely be anything in between unless your opponent is a sophisticated player (pros, generally) AND you know they know you are similarly sophisticated (pro), where you could be going into a leveling situation. Against most players, this tell is pretty reliable (it then becomes up to the player to figure out if it worth acting on, and what that action is, but it still is a good clue to work with in a lot of cases.) So this particular case is both played quickly (especially by the standard of how quickly he usually plays) and is trying to appear visibly strong and confident, and those two in combination would lead me to think about challenging if I had any doubt about the validity of the word. Something tells me Rafi knows better when he plays poker, and likely figured that, short of being up against another poker-literate scrabble player, it isn’t worth worrying about. Still, I wouldn’t attribute the way he played it to his poker background, as most poker players with a significant background in the game will be aware of at least one of the two above.
One other thought: The biggest way poker likely helps a scrabble player isn’t by making you better at “bluffing”, but rather at reading your opponent’s rack based off their actions and your knowledge of their game. A lot of scrabble players already do this of course, but coming from poker, thinking about what your opponent has and what their intention is are two of the most critical skills in poker, so it is probably a lot easier for those with a poker background to learn how to do this in scrabble, and once they learn it, they will do it faster and more consistently than non-poker players with the same level of scrabble ability.
