What Happens When Nigel Misspells a Word?
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- Опубликовано: 25 май 2024
- Welcome to Episode 27 of Scrabble History, a series where I break down some of the most incredible plays, epic rivalries, and amazing moments in Scrabble's rich competitive history.
In 2010, Nigel Richards won his second North American Scrabble Championship, his first of what would be a staggering 4 in a row and 5 in 6 years. There's no question that in addition to his many brilliancies, he makes fewer mistakes than anyone else. But sometimes, even his mistakes go unnoticed until it's too late...
Sometime soon, I plan to resume streaming on my Twitch channel:
/ wanderer15
I also have a weekly show on the official Scrabble Twitch channel (Tuesdays 3-5 PM ET):
/ scrabble
Play Scrabble at playscrabble.com! 
Игры
His mistake being even more optimal than any legal word makes it so much funnier
it's like an artificial intelligence violating ethics protocols to better optimize a task.
@@Gumper30 oh God, let's hope nobody ever asks Nigel to assemble paperclips
This convinces me that it wasn't a mistake and Nigel knew for certain that Mike will too hastily pull a tile
@@prysrek8858 The cost-benefit analysis indicates the risk would not be worth it.
even when Nigel phonies, he does it optimally.
"The board after vibrator is significantly more difficult to score on" was not a phrase I thought I would hear today.
Well when you put it like that…
Makes it hard to focus...
@@Herra_KI've heard you can use them to cheat
@@TheGuyCalledX only works for chess and you have to be well prepared.
@@wanderer15no that’s how you put it 😂
I love when Nigel makes an end game move and the computer says it's not the best, announcers just assume the computer is wrong...
...and it usually is!
(You might have this notion from my video on Nigel) - since about a year or so, there actually is an open-source flawless endgame solver! Commentators will typically still use the imperfect engine Quackle (because the perfect solver, Macondo, doesn't have a GUI yet), but computers _can_ now play as well as Nigel in the endgame 😀
@@AlexDings I'd love to see it! Hard to imagine...lol!
I don't even play competitively. I enjoy playing against my mom, sister and brother (1 PhD, 5 or 6 master's degrees) mostly because as a college dropout (journalist) I can usually beat them...
Likely ruined now as I'd have to actually learn all the 2 and 3 letter words...
My dad is the one who should have played competitively (RIP). He spent 18 months in the VA hospital reading whatever he could. Knew very obscure word origins because he read the dictionary. Did Jumbles in his head, just writing down the combined solution. Bet Jumble is popular among Scrabble players (do they still put out Jumbles?) A Saturday (Sunday?) NYT crossword guy.
@@whitelfner4582Lol, that’s a great story. It’s awesome how he learned in the state he was in.
@@AlexDings Is the endgame solver able to solve endgames quickly enough on modest hardware that it could be used live by commentators? Cause if so, I definitely hope they start incorporating it soonish.
@@EebstertheGreat On a regular laptop or something, it still takes more than a few minutes for complex endgames (and those are of course the interesting ones). So in that way, I guess computers STILL aren't up to par with Nigel, come to think about it 😅 But if I was in the position of broadcasting games, I'd definitely at least try to use it
If I would ever play Nigel, and he would misspell a word, I would just assume I've spelled it wrong all my life.
love him or hate him, not a single computer on earth could have spotted the brilliant move HIARNETS
I bet it happened because the IA are adjacent in that order in Therians, he may have just scooted them over together on the board without realizing.
H I A R N E T S
Would be fun to write this on a blackboard at Uni or something to find who the scrabble nerds are
Once, Mike played HA?RIEST, hit the clock and said "ninety, R", playing 'most resembling Harry'. But...I didn't see it on time, plus he won the game.
@@paulepstein7421 potteriest
We really take it for granted how these tournaments archive all their games, such that even almost 15 years later you're able to recreate these games and perform extensive analysis on them, like at 5:28. I'm sure there are even more fantastic games that were just never preserved and are now forever lost. Great video, Will. One could say you are the Landorus-Therian of textbook editors
The thing is, they typically don't! The vast majority of tournament games is lost, and we have records of less than half of Nigel's games. I unsuccessfully tried to unearth this game when researching Nigel. The game is not on the main archive site for tournament games. Will might just have gotten it from Mike.
Lmao the lando t of scrabble
LMAO did not expect a smogon reference in the comments of a competitive scrabble video
I did some kind of deep dive into the archived 2010 championship site - the links were all dead, but by changing them to mirror other years where the links were still alive, I surprisingly was able to access the annotated games from that year.
lando therian lol
Adding the orange for possible plays and green for optimal makes the videos so much more readable thank you!
What would be even more insane is if he had done it on purpose, knowing that his opponent would just assume that he doesn’t make mistakes.
“Dark Nigel” would be truly a sight to behold
@@wanderer15 we need someone to convince him to let the demons out for a tournament, just to see how horrifying it would be to witness
@@swedneck We probably already have and there were no surviving witnesses
And here I thought we might see the infamous B(Y)AGEE phoney. Maybe you should use that in your next video. That one was even funnier because not only did it stay on the board, his opponent later hooked it with an S, leading to Nigel challenging of course.
Oh that’s a bit of a dick move to get away with a word, then to call out your opponent for hooking it
@@Jaxck77 not really, the first time it was because nigel was trying to play B(H)AGEE and put them in the wrong column, if BYAGEES* isn't a word then why not challenge
@@Jaxck77 It's completely legal and acceptable
@@Jaxck77 Not even remotely. That's how the game is played. If it goes unchallenged, that's on the opponent.
It's also on the opponent to know that trying to play off of it will likely be challenged, if the person that played the invalid word is even aware it was invalid. Playing fakes is just part of the game.
Even if it was a word the opponent played that not knowing if it was a noun
WHY AM I SO ADDICTED TO NIGEL VIDEOS
I’m addicted to making them!
As someone who has never played Scrabble, I have no idea how you made it so hype and intense...
nigel trying to prove he's not a robot:
The fact that nigel doesn't play phonies honestly is amazing. Even in losing endgames he doesn't attempt to trick people to save the game or reduce point spread, he just plays the most optimal "fair" way.
Actually, that isn't quite true. In one of my games against Nigel at the Capgemini tournament in Bangalore, he tried phoneying with LENNE (instead of the valid RENNE) to steal a lost endgame, but I did challenge it off and won 414-400.
@@anandbharadwaj4250 Wait this man ain't lying he has a positive winrate over Nigel, too!
You that dense? This entire video is about Nigel playing a phony.
i have heard of a few cases where Nigel played a phony intentionally, I wouldn't say it's unfair though, just a risk that Nigel often decides not to take.
Nigel is a huge phony player
Crazy. And what's even more amazing is that Nigel *still* should have lost even after his play went unchallenged.
I think this type of thing happens in chess to, where the best players in the game will hang a piece, and even with plenty of time to think about each move, the opponent, who is also an expert, will miss it. Generally what happens after the game is the opponent that missed he could just win a piece says "I didn't expect my opponent (well-renowned Grandmaster X) would simply just hang a piece"
Fantastic as always, I'd like to shout out the quality of the graphics in these videos. High quality and beautifully legible, no unnecessary fluff or guff.
Really appreciate that, thank you
i love watching in-depth commentary for things which are way beyond my understanding
plays "celesia" which is not a word
"right yeah"
then Nigel makes a very sharp play and does phooey for 25
"I guess that counts as a word" *looks at video to see board to see PFUI*
"how can these people be serious.."
Impossible. Nigel is human? He's imperfect?
I don’t even play scrabble, these videos are just amazing
Thank you!
I wonder how much “BAERDNETS” would score in that position
But that would leave the A hook open, which was the biggest advantage of HIARNETS over HAIRNETS
If people start using "Hiarnets" as a joke term to mean "an accidental mistake that leads to good fortune" and it starts to spread and get popular enough in the language, could it one day actually be a legal word spawned from this exact scenario, I wonder?
When Nigel misspells a word, the dictionary is changed.
this sounds like a chuck norris joke
Wake up babe, new Nigel video!
I wouldn't even challenge "tnetennba" if the goat played it
Can you make a video on how Scrabble Novices (like me) who got interested in playing but don’t really know where to start or how to prepare for a first event, I.e. what words you must know by that point (like that cheat sheet of words I didn’t know existed until now). You have pulled so many people into having an interest in Scrabble, and you have the knowledge to get us all into playing the right way. We just need the right guide to get us there
Yes, this is something I'd like to do for sure. (And I'm so glad to hear that you're inspired to get started with OTB play!)
i loved this video and tensed up till the end
i dont even know how to play scrabble
When he misspells, a new word is created.
I clicked on this video because I had no idea who on earth Nigel was and the fact that he was referred to by just his first name was quite funny. Definitely glad I clicked.
That's pretty funny. Have you learned more of Nigel since?
@@ambiguousduck2333 Indeed, although it was just through watching more videos on this channel. I thought this video was great so I watched some others!
Thank you for giving my videos a try!
At 1:16 you said 16 points for Mike Baron's second move when it was worth 26.
On the screen it says +26 and his score goes up by the same so don't worry about the point totals
Oops, not sure how I didn’t catch this, thanks. At least the numbers were correct on screen!
Wtf bro? Suddenly I'm interested in scrable and idk why! Really enjoying your videos...
Thanks for giving my content a try!
Every community needs a Will Anderson, aGameScout, Pannenkoek2012, etc.
These are my favorite channels.
This is really high praise, thanks. Love aGameScout - will have to check out Pannenkoek!
@@wanderer15 you should start with "watch for rolling rocks .5 a presses"
Your mind will be blown
@@wanderer15 not gonna check out will anderson
"a V in a very defensive spot" I'm 2 minutes in and learning things I didn't know were things
Even his mistakes are amazing!
I think _jus_ (when it means meat juices) is often anglicized "zhoo" (rhyme moo). That's how I typically hear it on U.S. cooking videos mentioning _au jus_ and the primary pronunciation in dictionaries I use (Merriam Webster, Collins). The pronunciation when it means law/justice (e.g. _jus soli_) is different.
Also if it helps: AY-luh (*ala*) and KEE-luh (*chela*).
Great content as always 👍
Thanks, noted!
Is this a competition on how to pronounce foreign words more wrongly? Kinda ridiculous to be so prescriptive about words that native speakers pronounce wrong anyway
@@louisraphael1727 French words often acquire an "Anglicized" pronunciation when they're adopted into English, because English has a different sound inventory (e.g. English lacks the French _u_ and _r_ sounds). Sometimes you'll hear the French pronunciation instead and that's fine - dictionaries typically note both.
I hadn't meant to tell him he _has_ to use the Anglicized pronunciation, but just letting him know what it is and that it's not uncommon, in case he chooses to.
.... I didn't realize that Scrabble got this strategic.
Thanks for the video
Purposefully misspelling is something crazy
Calculating optimal play...
Playing: THERIANS
Observing opponent...
Opponent distracted successfully.
Playing: HIARNETS
Ending turn.
Playing against Nigel Richards must be stressful enough to make anyone tear their hiar out.
I’ve played him 8 times (I’ll do a video about the games sometime) and it definitely takes practice to relax and play your best.
I can't believe he let Nigel off the hook!
Since Nigel is not human he probably did it on purpose
I dont know why youtube decided im interested in scrabble but im glad it did
that's halirious
challenge. halirious is not a word.
this game in particular reminds me of barry bonds, his reputation alone is a tool almost as powerful as his word knowledge and strategical skills.
how many times has an opponent challenged one of nigel's plays? it has to be way less than any other top player, right? makes me wonder if he'd win even more games if he phonied more
Yes, he is seemingly totally uninterested in exploiting his incredible word knowledge advantage. When he says he doesn’t care whether he wins or loses, he truly means it - his sole goal seems to be playing well.
Nigel should play more phonies. People would have a very hard time challenging him on long words and it would get people to start challenging his legit words.
often times its just not worth the risk, but he has done it a few times before
There is no question he would win even more games doing this. However, he has stated before that he doesn’t care whether he wins or loses - and I actually believe him. His total lack of interest in any type of exploitative play (intentional phony words, suboptimal endgame sequences that force opponents into a much more difficult line than the mathematically optimal sequence) backs up his claim - as does as his complete lack of nerves in high-pressure situations or negativity when getting unlucky.
@@wanderer15 Sounds like a good topic for a video
I haven't played the game since i was a kid and now I just happen to stumble on this video. I know the conclusion is that all of them are just human beings but the way this is played i blowing my mind xD incredible skill.
Thanks for giving my video a watch!
even when phonying he can't lose. this is insane LOL
What if Nigel did that on purpose to convince us that he is a mere human instead of a scrabble god?
6:27 start of misspelled word
6:40 misspelled word
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a deliberate play and Nigel casually acting normal so it goes through
Incerdible! I'm surpirsed it wasn't noticed. It changed the dircetion of the endgame.
He was just playing on hard mode where you have to win by psychological domination.
The dictionary corrects itself, of course.
ngiel the GOAT 💪💪
It shouldn't be "comforting" to see someone make a mistake.
bro this guy nigel is chosen by god
bravo
it was definitely intentional and actually a really smart play! (im joking, its definitely not worth it)
He's got so bored of the regular ole dictionary that he's inventing his own words. IT'S FINEEEEE...
Nigel doesn't misspell a word. He stares it down until it becomes the new spelling.
hes doing tricks on it 😭
This is like the Magnus effect, where Magnus Carlsen blunders a piece and the other players assume he knows what he’s doing and don’t take it.
Plot twist: Nigel indeed did it on purpose, winning the metagame too!
Im semi pro in european junior league, I wish I was that good as them, really impressive
While watching I was kinda hoping this was in fact an intentional blunder for some crazy endgame.
he has intentionally played phonies before.
the only explanation is that he's lived that day over and over a million times and that was the only way he could win
Hadn't considered the Groundhog Day scenario here...nice one
so this is how it feels to watch a chess video as a normal person
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Imagine if he changed the word to make Mike assume it would be correct anyways and put IA isntead of AI on purpose to get a better shot at winning
Please add to Scrabble History Playlist - I only see 25 episodes there - so is this Episode 26 or 27? If the latter, which one is 26?
Fixed, I think!
@@wanderer15 Thanks - and I realized I had missed #26!
5:29 Richards wanted the za
When he misspells a word, it is added to the Oxford Dictionary
Actually it was a calculated mistake on Nigel's part because he's an almost perfectly polite player who focuses on playing the game rather than playing the player, but there's a mischievous gremlin in all of us and occasionally he sees if he can get away with something.
Nigel harnessing his mischievous gremlin would be amazing to watch (and a nightmare for anyone facing him)
What happens when both players turn in their scoresheets, showing hairnets on one and hiarnets on the other, and there's a question later about the score?
You don't turn in your scoresheets, and you aren't required to write the words down, just the scores
One of the words in this sentence is misspelled.
Second comment: *his misspelling was intentional.* Nigel knew he was blocking bingos with the misspelling. Nigel knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that Mike would look away to tile track and allow Nigel to place a different bingo down without Mike checking because no one would check his spelling. I capitalize on Magic the Gathering games by knowing the *way* my opponent plays just as much as I understand *how* they can play and take full advantage where the rules allow. Nigel knew he was taking an insane risk of losing the whole game to guarantee he would not lose, and did it all without cheating (even if that is quite a sneaky strategy to actually follow throw with.) But he also knew that, because he was playing a Scrabble Book Author, he would NEED a strategy that even Mike would never see coming. Mike likely had the finish he had to that tournament because he knew that whole day that Nigel had thoroughly outplayed him in a way that he never dreamed existed. I’d be second-guessing every play, over-tracking every tile arrangement, and throwing off my normal rhythm to account for that gameplay anomaly. Not only did Nigel do it on purpose, Mike knew he did, too. And they respected each other as the ruthless competitors they are.
I know this is a small thing but if you have the time to add a graphic correcting something you say in the voiceover, you have the time to re-record that line of the voiceover. (this is about the "*6-way tie" at 0:37)
I've done this many times in the past, but because I don't have a professional audio setup at my home, the audio quality is often noticeably different from one recording session to the other, and the resulting spliced audio sounds jarring and obviously off to my ear.
Hiarnets hit harder than a rock 💀💀💀
What did I stumble across!?
I feel like if you ever play Nigel, you're gonna be too star-struck to think straight 😂
In world ranking games, Will legitimately has a 4-1 record against Nigel!
@@AlexDings Really? For some reason I thought they had never played.
@@ADeadlierSnake The reason being that Will is too modest to brag about it 🙂
Yes, I’ve played him a total of 8 times now across different organizations and I definitely plan to chronicle those games at some point!
Hey Wirtual!
I can't believe PFUI is a word
My only claim is that I am mentioned in Mike's book.
Could that have been done on purpose? With the initial different word there~
Is there a rule to how long you have to wait to draw tiles to give the opponent an opportunity to challenge?
www.scrabbleplayers.org/rules/player-rules-20170120.pdf
Yes. By rule, the potential challenger is required to have a period of 5 seconds or more to decide to challenge. If tiles are drawn faster than that, the challenger can request that they still be permitted to challenge a word.
@@wanderer15 That makes sense, thank you! I don't play Scrabble, but I've still been loving the videos.
I believe Nigel had VERBY* challenged off once, though I could be misremembering
Yes I recall a story about this perhaps involving Nathan Benedict? Have to dig deeper
It's 3AM
why am I here
And why have I not discovered this sooner
Thanks for stopping by!
I sure do love pretending to know what any of this means
What happens in a live game when you know a word is valid, but it's not in the official Scrabble dictionary?
I tried my hand at a video game version, and thanks to the placement of GO and an R further down the column, my rack of AEIHMPT almost made me possible to play a word that would likely get me laughed out of any serious tournament, but I know for certain is a valid word:
Had I only had the Z instead of a P, I would have been able to play a word so incredibly absurd, yet I assure you is very real: THAGOMIZER.
What is a THAGOMIZER, you may ask? It is the structure of spikes at the end of a stegosaurus' tail.
The word was coined by Gary Larson, of The Far Side fame. Paleontologists realized they did not have a word for those spikes, so they wound up officially adopting the word!
Alas, I had to play PRIME somewhere else on the board instead.
Official rules are that the Scrabble dictionary is the only source of truth. Think of it less like "is this a word" and more "is this a legal game move."
@@SjefDriscoll Fair. And I don't think they're in any rush to add a 10-letter bingo to the game. We don't want another GEOCACHE situation.
It's just that I was SO close to an incredibly crazy play that I had to make note of it.
It is very annoying when the scrabble dictionary doesn't have a definitely real word. Kenji Matsumoto made a list of thousands of those, although i can't seem to find it right now. Some of them are new-ish and get added in dictionary updates, but some are very old and it's weird that they don't get added. Unfortunately, there has to be a definite list of valid words, and the official scrabble dictionaries are the best we have.
Just the other day in an online game i had PLUSHIE on my rack, which i couldn't play not only because it didn't fit on the board, but also because it's apparently not in CSW. It is in NWL23 though, so probably getting added to the next update of CSW as well.
Hopefully THAGOMIZER is added sometime! As others have said, a case like that would be very disappointing, but it does happen. Example - against the then-13 year old Mack Meller, I once played the normal word MOJITO, which has since been added - but was not valid at the time. Having no frame of reference to know any alcoholic drinks, Mack instantly challenged my word off the board.
on 3:40 he most likely mispronounced Silesia, a region in poland.
with his mistake beeing a better word i wonder how much of it was actually a mistake.
could he have make this double move to slip that mistake in intentionally so that the opponent overlooks it easier because the normal word would make him lose for sure?
The thing about Nigel is, he *never* attempts to bluff like this, even in situations where it makes even more sense to do so. He's stated that he doesn't care about winning or losing in Scrabble, and I think I believe him, because he never tries any sort of exploitative play against anyone!
I don't understand the "Retina" stem in the "Hiarnets/Hairnets" context
nigel's letters were r,e,t,i,n,a,s
@@ImNetheN Ahh I see! Thanks!
Yes, Nigel had on his rack arguably the most common 6-letter combination that combines with other letters in 7-letter bingos. RETINA forms a bingo with all of CDEFGHIKLMNPRSTUW in North America, with BJO joining in overseas. For that reason, these words are among the first a tournament player would learn to improve - and Nigel playing a phony with them is/was inconceivable.
Siht happens. ;)
Ok new rules: Just words allowed people actually use in daily life
0:09 only chess players will know
Im 1400 and got over 50 brilliants
@@Chomta nice! I am also 1400 but probably have less than 30 brilliants.
@@thatbostix2 just play aggressive lmao these 1400 still blunder forks and hanging pieces but less
You fix the dictionary?
Hell freezes over?
I considered putting flying pigs on the thumbnail