I won a Scrabble tournament HOW?? 

Thanks Will! Looking forward to seeing you in July!

crazy man

The crazy thing about SUCCUBUS is that it's one of the rarest 8-letter words -- by probability, it is the 14th rarest out of 31523 words in NWL (#31510), and the 21st rarest out of 42089 in CSW (#42069).

@@justin_tang Wow, really? I know it couldn't be a common word due to the 2 Cs and 3 Us, but it's still playable without blanks. But yeah, that was a crazy game for sure! I swapped 3 Is and some other junk and got 3 Us. My opponent played the only letter I could use at just the right place (I don't think BCSSUUU can make any other word with any other letter). What are the odds? I might still have a photo of the final board somewhere. I'll post a link if I find it.

@@justin_tang42069th, gg

Where can I find the rarity list of 8 letter words in scrabble ? Or 7 or 9s? Is there a website?

Thanks Humberto, and thanks for your suggestions on the other video!

Hey Brett! Great question -- dropping the Q for 21 is absolutely not a bad play, and I actually probably should've considered it for longer than I did. In the game I saw it and quickly discarded it after seeing SQUEG given the latter scores 9 more and gets rid of more tiles, especially the clunky G. I think if I were leading by even more than I was (say, 150 instead of 80) I would've more seriously considered it and maybe even played it. The thing is it's of course nice to keep the extra vowel, but the remaining rack is really clunky and awkward -- DGKU in particular are pretty tough to work with together. Generally speaking, if you're going to keep a clunky leave it's better for it to have fewer tiles, since that at least gives you a chance of drawing some better stuff to clean up your rack. Of course the flip side is that, especially in a consonant-heavy situation like this, a leave like DKT gives you more chance for a bad consonant draw like I got in-game in addition to a good draw that would clean up the rack. If I'm up 150+ in that position, I think QI makes a ton of sense, since Max will need at least 2 big bingos to come back, and keeping the vowels (despite the clunkiness) at least ensures I'll be able to respond somewhat to anything he opens, even though I'll never be getting anything great. But as we saw in game, the board is open enough that my 80 point lead evaporated quite quickly, so it didn't seem worth it to keep a rack that's guaranteed to be mediocre at best when I could score more points and give myself a shot at getting a better rack. For what it's worth, I just simmed both plays for a while on Quackle, and SQUEG is holding steady at around 89% to win and QI is just over 86%, so not a huge difference but a substantial one. But when I artificially add 70 points to my score so I'm up 150 pre-turn instead of 80, they sim neck-and-neck around 98.5%! So this is a really cool example of how the score really matters when considering what play to make. Hope that helps, and thanks for bringing this up!

@@mackmeller That was a better explanation than I could have happened, I appreciate the advice. I'm sure I would have seen SQUEG but my logic was while it does clear up more clunky tiles and scores 9 more points, it floats an E, a G in a triple triple lane, and could draw into a potential 7 consonant rack. QI keeps two more vowels and while one of them is a U, it's still probably better in a worst case scenario situation. As it turned out, after MORuLAR had you played QI you would have had U(R)GED for 21 at the minimum rather than being forced to exchange, and then he obviously doesn't get the triple triple down while you're still up like 70 or so points. I get what you're saying tho, QI is less volatile and is more defensive which makes it better when you have an extreme lead, and going up 100 isn't quite good enough. My mistake was thinking it was good enough. Thanks again for the insight!

Also ZADDIK/ZADDIKIM. Worth noting that the ones ending in a Q are only valid in the international/Collins lexicon, not the North American.

@TheScrabGuy All good! Just making sure other viewers don't get confused :)

TSADDIK TSADDIQ# TSADIK# TZADDIK TZADDIQ# TZADIK# ZADDICK ZADDIK # means in CSW (international) and not NWL note also the unrelated SADE/SADHE/SADI/TSADE/TSADI/TZADDI#, a Hebrew letter