Couple notes on this one: - Preemptive apologies for all my poor Spanish pronunciations. I tried, but I'm sure I got many words and names wrong. (Edit: I misidentified Carlos Garcia as Carlos Gonzalez in the Duplicate portion - sorry for the error!) - Huge thanks to Cesar Del Solar of Macondo/Woogles.io for a great deal of help with various stats & analyses. - Alex Dings' excellent longer-form recap of Nigel's Spanish win is out! Watch it here: ruclips.net/video/fiRr0MISI5c/видео.htmlsi=At-f-awvOjpT7EUE
Kudos to you @Wanderer15 for the wonderful coverage and breakdown of how crazy a feat this is. We have to give you lots of props for the wonderful commentary
While I agree with the sentiment in some ways, I actually think this more highlights how humans can and should think about scrabble and why human-style of play can be superior to computer-style of play in some positions. The meta-strategy there (as Will explained it) is it is paramount to block the bingo, and among plays that do that, the best one is the one that maximizes the score across the remainder of the game (there are no more tiles left in the bag prior to the play, so all stochastic elements of random tiles we see earlier in the game is completely eliminated, making this optimization problem entirely deterministic). The lesson one can apply here to future games is among meta-strategies for this endgame, one strategy to consider is plays that block with the minimal number of tiles on this turn, since a block will necessarily score fewer points than other plays on other parts of the board (so you can get the best of both worlds by both blocking your opponent's best plays and preserving your own). The computer doesn't have the same ability to learn meta-strategy lessons to apply to the future and instead searches a large tree of all possible endgames here. While the latter approach is more precise, the shortcuts humans can take by considering among a set of meta-strategies can often lead to optimal play with a fraction of the computational time. The important part is to have a holistic set of meta-strategies.
@@morrisgreenberg5223I'd like to add that there are, in fact, computers with the ability to learn meta-strategy lessons to apply to the future. This is essentially the entire draw of neural networks - they are structured like a brain and find patterns like this when exposed to enough data. I believe at present, the most powerful Chess and Go engines involve neural networks.
It is also a handy way of avoiding any possible claim that he is cheating with some sort of communications device like has happened in chess. The best computer engines in the world aren't good enough to play that well in the time available.
Crazy man. In his first ever competition, he gets the two first ever perfect scores, and finishes second only because of marking the wrong square. Just how?
forever grateful that Nigel is the GOAT of scrabble. He's not arrogant or controversial, but rather mysterious and down to earth. His techniques are unconvensional and yet he blows everyone out the window. It's almost like he's a character in a novel lmao
There's a quote in Fredrik Knudsen's video on Deep Blue wherein Kasparov brings up how you commonly talk about the game with your opponent afterwards, and the awkward interaction he had with the programmer making the moves for Deep Blue after his first loss to it when out of habit he asked him where he went wrong. I'm sure a lot of the spanish players speak english, but it's still funny to me to imagine a similar thing happening where you get crushed by Nigel in your native tongue, then can't even converse with him about the game in it afterwards.
It's funny because even in English he's usually content to square up the tiles and move on to the next game without discussion. Oddly, a lot of his most brilliant moves have pretty simple logic behind them, but generating the move or move sequence is just nearly impossible for a (normal) human.
Memorizing 11 letter words in a language you don't speak is utterly preposterous. Of course his superhuman memory is well-established but finding out he studied and can recall 11 letter words OTB still blows my mind.
It's absolutely insane how good Nigel is at Scrabble. He can travel to YOUR country, play Scrabble in YOUR mother tongue, play the game perfectly and even call you out on phony words in a language that he doesn't even speak, not to mention doing all of this without a computer to utilize the powerful tools that people can use to improve their gameplay.
and also study YOUR country's scrabble dictionary in a small fraction of the time YOU take to study HIS mother tongue's scrabble dictionary. also when YOU have a language with more scrabble words and more difficult words.
Amazing video Will - it is hard to clearly explain how mind-blowingly superhuman Nigel's accomplishments are, but you did it masterfully. Thank you also for touching on Nigel's (only) two errors in the duplicate event. One, as you point out, was an error in notation after he had found the correct word. The other error is explained in more detail in the article by Jose Fernandez in scrabble-santandreu. You showed a screenshot of part of this article at 14:20. Here is a quote from the Google translation of the article: "A day and a half after the results of the duplicate were published, I told him that he had come second, thinking that he already knew, but it was the first news he had. During the first duplicate, he was sitting at one end and someone standing prevented him from seeing the tilde of the Ñ. He raised his hand, but he did not dare to make an oral appeal and this circumstance was not noticed because he was in a very cornered spot. A few seconds from the end, he was able to see the Ñ, but in extremis he put an invalid word, DAÑIA. He did not give any importance to this fact, he only said “it's ok, it's just a game."" This explanation makes Nigel's accomplishment even more astounding (if that's possible). In the one game of classical Scrabble that Nigel lost - from looking at the score sheet it seems to me he was forced to exchange four times!
I'm beginning to doubt Macondo is a real AI. I personally think it is just Nigel on the other end. The reason it took hours to determine Lo was the right choice was because Nigel was busy memorizing another dictionary in a language he doesn't know.
This is so beyond ridiculous for such a vast number of nuanced reasons, I feel like it takes a lot of Scrabble experience to even be able to understand the depth of how unbelievable Nigel's accomplishments are. Every hobby's community has its members who are known for being the best in the world, but Nigel's level of Scrabble mastery is damn near impossible. It's scary to think of a world where he never happened to stumble upon the game.
It's difficult to make it come across properly, too. Every time I play in a tournament (in my native language, mind you 😅), I feel that very directly because I'm uncertain about missing a move or taking a wrong strategic turn on every other move, and the computer generally confirms afterwards that I get a lot of stuff wrong. Always makes me shake my head about how on earth Nigel just completely avoids getting anything wrong
Yet another banger of a video. Great breakdown. I loved how you explained the different equities in the two languages and provided a report card near the end to help create a baseline!
I probably should have made it clearer in the video that the "report card" results for the non-Nigel players is really closely in line with what I would expect from an English language tournament. The top Spanish players are fantastic, but Nigel is still Nigel.
It's times like these where it really feels like Nigel's genius knows no bounds. That bit at the end about him finding a play that a perfect engine took _hours_ to compute (in a foreign language, to boot) is especially impeccable.
To be fair, that's a kind of endgame that's much easier to solve as a human than as a computer, because a computer goes through millions of possibilities that a human would know to discard. Still extremely impressive though.
@@galoomba5559 nigel goes through all the possibilities too, so your point only makes him more impressive really. He's just doing the same thing, but faster.
@@miaowmiaowchowface A human physically can't do brute force calculation faster than a computer, or even come close. And Nigel isn't perfect, he makes way less errors than everyone else, but not zero.
@@galoomba5559 that's neither here nor there. The only point you made is some endgames are harder for computers to solve, which is true, based on computation time. Meanwhile, based on computation time, all endgames are equally easy or difficult for nigel, except the 1/100 he makes minor mistakes on. To think Nigel is discarding certain game tree paths fails to understand that he is essentially iterating, like a computer does - he is not using shortcuts. His 99/100 would be impossible if it weren't true - discardable options are the correct path more than 1/100 times.
ok also just to point out that when commentators are discussing a nigel game, if nigel does something the computer doesn't recommend, particularly in an endgame, they generally assume the computer must be wrong and needs more time with the position. like nigel's known for being better at endgames than a comp when it comes to skill + speed
The word knowledge is somehow like the least impressive thing. The fact that he understands the rack leave values in Spanish and plays flawless endgames in another language, just mind boggling
I can’t even begin to comprehend Nigel. I know everyone will get worked up about Nigel’s mastery of the dictionary particularly at longer words greater than 10 letters, which in English no one even really bothers with and yet Nigel seemingly has complete mastery with in MULTIPLE LEXICONS. His ability for retention of words when every single other expert has to study constantly in order to not have retention loss in one lexicon. And yet this would seem to suggest he has complete mastery in Spanish, French, Collins, and NWL (American English). And don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to diminish how completely unfathomable that is, but in my opinion the words aren’t what’s most impressive. It’s how he can seamlessly switch strategy wise, play finding wise, and evaluate leaves correctly in other lexicons WITHOUT AN ENGINE. Only with his own intuition. And he still only spends about a minute or 2 on each turn, which would seem to suggest that he sees all the options (even if it’s a disconnected 10 or 11 letter word that no one else on earth would find) very quickly and is just choosing between them. That kind of play finding, and the ability to adjust extremely complex strategy like endgames or pre-endgames that engines need hours to compute, is why Nigel is truly an Alien.
Thanks for this excellent commentary! Minor nitpick: while we Scrabble players understand what Macondo is, I somewhat wish Cesar's name could have been mentioned, as he just added Spanish support this year (and I see your pinned comment about this, so I won't belabor the point).
You've done it again Will! Thank you for what must have been ALOT of work on this. I just found myself laughing through the whole thing as each achievement of Nigel just gets more and more wild.
I laugh my ass off frequently doing videos about him myself. That feeling when I have no clue why he's done something and then piece together the reasoning is *chef's kiss*
@@wanderer15 incredible. And its that situation as you so well described of it not just being about having an amazing ability to remember the words, but to be able to PLAY in the best way for the language just takes everything to that next level.
3:59 lmao Amazing recap! The only thing I could even hope to improve on here might be your Spanish pronounciation, although I really enjoyed SABURRRRROSA at 8:04 🤣
Yeah, it's insane that he could adjust to tile combination values without studying with an engine. I don't think a Spanish Scrabble strategy book would help him either since he can't read it.
This video is so masterfully done. The story telling, the editing, the pacing, everything lol wow. Literally the only thing that could've made it better is some quote directly from nigel that you requested via an interview.
Damn this feels like the culmination of all your Nigel videos. You feature his old games so many times i wonder how his current skills fare. And now out of nowhere he descends from the mountain and destroys the Spanish Armada lmao. Truly a great moment in Scrabble History.
I’ve been spanish since I was born and this guy knows words I have never heard of in my language. Deyeccion 💩 Kudos to the goat of scrabble for this video and to Nigel Richards for his magic.
When I saw it in the news that Nigel Won the Spanish language scrabble, I knew a video would follow soon. Thank you for showing what he did. I didn't even know he won with such a margine. Crazy to see what this man can do in scrabble.
Excellent breakdown as usual, to show how crazy Nigel's plays are for non-Spanish players! I was expecting to see another play featured actually: in one of his perfect endgames, Nigel managed to L-stick his opponent. Sticking a tile in English (especially non-Q/V/C) is already hard enough; to be able to stick your opponent in your tertiary language with a less conventional tile in your first tournament, was mind-blowing to me. Shame you didn't have time to include it in your video. But I blame Nigel for this, for having too many other plays worth featuring 😐
I'm scouring the comments here to see what else people might like to see, so I'll include that 😊 Edit: We had compiled 14 annotated games of Nigel, but he played 15 on stream. The game you're referring to was the one missing. Maybe Will just never saw it for that reason, because after checking out that game now, I'm sure he would have featured that... it's ludicrous
I don't even play Scrabble but I am just so fascinated by Nigel videos. It doesn't just seem like he is far better at Scrabble than anyone else is, it seems like he is better at Scrabble than anyone else is at anything! Seeing some of these Nigel plays is similar to watching top Chess Engine moves where the only reaction you can have is "well that's simply not possible for a human to find".
The Scrabble dictionary seems to be much, much bigger than a normal person's working vocabulary in every language. This is definitely a feeling English speakers have looking at English games too.
Every time you post a video about Nigel I am more impressed. What are his limits? What can he do if he steps out of scrabble? Nigel Richards is truly no ordinary man
6:13 Something I noticed about the tile values here is that there are 5 tiles in Spanish Scrabble that are worse than the Q in English Scrabble. This makes Nigel's 23-1 run even more astonishing, as it seems like you could get saddled with bad tiles much easier in the Spanish game, so the fact he was this consistently excellent is insane.
Consider though that most of the poorest tiles have only one instance in the tile set, whereas the very useful vowels are everywhere - the 6.5-equity A has 12 copies in Spanish, for example. I think the sample size was small to make firm conclusions but my gut tells me that scores are not only higher in Spanish, but their standard deviation is lower.
It's incredible to witness, in real time, the achievements of the worlds greatest scrabble player of all time. No one will come close to this. Praise Nigel Richards!
While all of this is very impressive, the thing that is truly incomprehensible to me are his flawless endgames. The game turning into a perfect information game in the last couple moves essentially forces you to brute-force all the possibilities, because estimated scores don't matter anymore when you can calculate exact ones. For him to never miss even the most obscure endgame sequences is insane. This is the only sport I know where people (rightly!) trust a players evaluation of a full information position more than that of the best engine.
The same thing happens in other strategy board games like chess it’s just even rarer (in chess the engines are more developed). Generally it’s because the human sees a heuristical reason for something (in this case he needs to block the bingo) and focuses on that in a way engine fails to do so
"...in fact, after hours of processing time Macondo does eventually concur that 'LO' is the best endgame move. Just to be clear here, Nigel came up with moves that the World's strongest Scrabble engine takes hours to verify in his first ever tournament in a language he doesn't speak." -Will Anderson Probably the most concise sentence ever written that demonstrate the meaning of GOAT in this context. A future, Scrabble playing general AI will have fond memories of Nigel as it's early teacher and didactic father.
I assume he used a scrabble dictionary, not a regular dictionary, to study. Which would include the conjugated forms. What I wonder is whether he just bruteforce learned all the conjugated versions of verbs, or he learned the rules of conjugation. The latter would make sense for most people, but I think Nigel is capable of just learning all the conjugations as their own separate words
As you say, there's much more to this than just learning the words. For me, the most amazing thing is being able to consider your opponent's options: work out what tiles they're likely to have (or in the endgame, know exactly what they have), what their best potential plays are and how you can block them. Casual players can't even do that in their own language (although of course the pros can); Nigel is doing it in a language he doesn't speak.
Conclusion: Nigel Richards is a time traveller. He has seen his own wins in his personal past and merely memorizes the words he played. Still an impressive feat.
11:23 - "Just to be clear here, Nigel came up with moves that the world's strongest Scrabble engine takes hours to verify in his first ever tournament in a language he doesn't speak". Absolutely brilliant video
This is one of the craziest things I have ever heard of in sports. This is like Steph Curry quitting the NBA, becoming a gymnast, and winning gold in the next olympics
Nice! I was struggling to come up with a good analogy. I thought maybe it would be like a top boxer quitting and dominating MMA, then dominating jiu jitsu or something like that.
A comparison to the other Scrabble languages to English would be a really cool video. I had no idea they straight up added new tiles to the game, are there any other languages that do do stuff like that?
@@galoomba5559They were considered letters until the late 2010, to be precise in 2010 it was made clear they never were. Guess Scrabble decided it was better to leave it as it is now.
Developer of Macondo here, that’s on purpose. I’m Latino (born in Venezuela 🇻🇪) and have always wanted to get support for my native language. I hauled ass the week before the world championship to get Macondo/woogles to support Spanish and thank goodness, we were able to get 15 Nigel annotations shortly after 😅
He’s like a reincarnation of Bobby Fischer, doing moves so great the computers at the time had no chance against him. Truly amazing to be alive at the same time as this legend. He is special.
What does it say about elite scrabble that even though I’m a fluent English speaker and don’t know any Spanish, watching these games felt exactly the same as watching English world championship games
I don't have Scrabble memorization experience, but I'm a Portuguese speaker. I assume long words are way easier to memorize in Spanish than English because of the verbal conjugation system. Most long words will follow the same pattern of shorter ones, you just need to know the root of the verb and then attach the same
Yeah, the verb inflections inflate the size of the dictionary a lot. For example, in Polish the dictionary has about 3 million words, most of them obscure inflections, while the number of base words is comparable to that of other languages (100-200k).
@@galoomba5559 Oh hey there, fellow Marioer. Heavily synthetic languages sound like a nightmare for dictionary makers more than for people trying to memorize them. :P I do wonder how much more/less advantageous these are in comparison to English, cause the chances of stringing them together must be also different.
@@Marcotonio A major difference i've noticed in Slovene is there's a lot of hooks. For example, in English a lot of words take S hooks (plurals of nouns, 3rd person singular for verbs), but that's the only common hook. In Slovene on the other hand, word forms take a variety of back hooks, some as many as 6 (root forms of most verbs take all of JLMTŠ and some also N). Front hooks, though not grammatically as regular, are also way more common. It's not rare to get a 10 or 11 letter word on the board through consecutive hooks. As for dictionary making, I'm actually compiling a Slovene lexicon with all the inflections that the official dictionary doesn't explicitly list. It's painful, but I've managed to automate most of it.
What an absolute monster. One logistics question, how does he get through these events without speaking the language? I'd have to assume he's got a translator or staff to help him out.
Why would he? Most places you can communicate in English at nowadays pretty well. And heck, I spent 3 weeks in Brazil incl. rural areas with almost nobody speaking English, and I knew about 10 Portuguese words only.
I hope he write a book someday on his techniques. It will be very valuable not only for scrabble but maybe in other branch of sciences. His brain/mind operates in a whole other way.
I don't think it will be, specifically for the reason his brain doesn't function within the standard deviation of human memory storage and recall. He's stated he doesn't really do anything more than read the scrabble dictionaries once over and it's likely that his brain fills in gaps such that he "sees" words on the board with minimal concious effort. There's not really much to be gleaned from what he can put into words. Brain activity mapping while he plays scrabble or memorises a scrabble dictionary could be rather worth looking into tho.
13:27 now this more feels like Nigel's opponent's arent master enough to block Nigel's setups. Then again this is literally their first time fighting him
that Duplicate round looks like it would be a lot of fun, even for someone who is purely casual at Scrabble like myself. and honestly, that could be a sort of side event if large Scrabble tournaments (i'm talking hundreds of players) were more common
Honestly, as a non-native English speaker who regularly watches English Scrabble content it remains funny to see top Scrabble players mispronounce words they are playing. Even some words I know they must have heard before. It’s just that English pronunciation can be so confusing that you might not make the connection between the pronounced word and the written word, when studying word lists.
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Couple notes on this one:
- Preemptive apologies for all my poor Spanish pronunciations. I tried, but I'm sure I got many words and names wrong.
(Edit: I misidentified Carlos Garcia as Carlos Gonzalez in the Duplicate portion - sorry for the error!)
- Huge thanks to Cesar Del Solar of Macondo/Woogles.io for a great deal of help with various stats & analyses.
- Alex Dings' excellent longer-form recap of Nigel's Spanish win is out! Watch it here: ruclips.net/video/fiRr0MISI5c/видео.htmlsi=At-f-awvOjpT7EUE
Nigel is actually crazy for this tho😭
Amazing to see such a unique and astounding mind at work!
Kudos to you @Wanderer15 for the wonderful coverage and breakdown of how crazy a feat this is. We have to give you lots of props for the wonderful commentary
Perhaps it's easy for me to say as a non-speaker of Spanish, but I think you did a spectacular job on this, especially so soon after the event.
He should learn Turkish words for Scrabble.
I love the statistic about his 4 challenges. "That's not a word ... in YOUR language, which I don't speak."
I wonder if any of the players deliberately played fake words when they had no good plays to try to get them past him.
@@Think_Deep They did this in the French one!
Yea it was something like FANATIZA (the real word was FANATIDA) iirc
Fanatizar (and correspondingly fanatiza as the 3rd person singular) is a word, so is fanaticada but not fanatida
Did nigel challenge all 4 of those words? Where can I see the games?
Nigel finding a move that takes an engine hours to find in a language he doesn't speak is beyond absurd
it really is!
While I agree with the sentiment in some ways, I actually think this more highlights how humans can and should think about scrabble and why human-style of play can be superior to computer-style of play in some positions. The meta-strategy there (as Will explained it) is it is paramount to block the bingo, and among plays that do that, the best one is the one that maximizes the score across the remainder of the game (there are no more tiles left in the bag prior to the play, so all stochastic elements of random tiles we see earlier in the game is completely eliminated, making this optimization problem entirely deterministic). The lesson one can apply here to future games is among meta-strategies for this endgame, one strategy to consider is plays that block with the minimal number of tiles on this turn, since a block will necessarily score fewer points than other plays on other parts of the board (so you can get the best of both worlds by both blocking your opponent's best plays and preserving your own). The computer doesn't have the same ability to learn meta-strategy lessons to apply to the future and instead searches a large tree of all possible endgames here. While the latter approach is more precise, the shortcuts humans can take by considering among a set of meta-strategies can often lead to optimal play with a fraction of the computational time. The important part is to have a holistic set of meta-strategies.
@@morrisgreenberg5223I'd like to add that there are, in fact, computers with the ability to learn meta-strategy lessons to apply to the future. This is essentially the entire draw of neural networks - they are structured like a brain and find patterns like this when exposed to enough data. I believe at present, the most powerful Chess and Go engines involve neural networks.
The computer consulted with Nigel after the tournament.
It is also a handy way of avoiding any possible claim that he is cheating with some sort of communications device like has happened in chess. The best computer engines in the world aren't good enough to play that well in the time available.
Nigel Richards is to Spanish Scrabble as Nigel Richards is to English Scrabble.
Also as Nigel Richards is to French scrabble
He seems better to the Spanish Scrabble than the English Scrabble
@@J.J.J.J.J.J.J completely agree. more high point tiles = much better opportunity for setting up
@@mesavor Yup, and more long words
Crazy man. In his first ever competition, he gets the two first ever perfect scores, and finishes second only because of marking the wrong square. Just how?
Man that max guy was playing really well
Came down here to say the same thing. I was about 4 minutes in before I realized Max wasn't a reclusive Spanish Scrabble Savant.
Lol 😂 Max was the German contestant who also doesn’t speak Spanish, which is quite impressive to consider.
Took me way too long until I realized max was just the max scores and not some guy named max
@@thesaltyspoon7483 yeah i made this comment when i realized my mistake
I do hope Will makes a video about max. I wonder why he didn't mention him at all in the video.
Casuals: There's no way he can win a championship in yet another language.
Nigel: Sostenga mi cerveza.
I don't know what that means, but I understand.
@@DoongXiouHua I don't speak spanish either but sounds like 'Hold my beer'
The funny thing is Nigel wouldn't even know how to say that😂
In Spanish we rather say "sujétame el cubata", which is a cubalibre or rum with coke
@@carlosglezdr2655 so do you guys say "Sostega mi sujétame el cubata"?
forever grateful that Nigel is the GOAT of scrabble. He's not arrogant or controversial, but rather mysterious and down to earth. His techniques are unconvensional and yet he blows everyone out the window. It's almost like he's a character in a novel lmao
Firat three rounds: Wow, Nigel is practically a Scrabble-playing computer.
11:15 : Huh, guess he's not.
True
lmfao, not quite what I expected. What a legend.
SkyNet hasn't got a chance against us humans as long as Nigel is around.
There's a quote in Fredrik Knudsen's video on Deep Blue wherein Kasparov brings up how you commonly talk about the game with your opponent afterwards, and the awkward interaction he had with the programmer making the moves for Deep Blue after his first loss to it when out of habit he asked him where he went wrong. I'm sure a lot of the spanish players speak english, but it's still funny to me to imagine a similar thing happening where you get crushed by Nigel in your native tongue, then can't even converse with him about the game in it afterwards.
It's funny because even in English he's usually content to square up the tiles and move on to the next game without discussion. Oddly, a lot of his most brilliant moves have pretty simple logic behind them, but generating the move or move sequence is just nearly impossible for a (normal) human.
Memorizing 11 letter words in a language you don't speak is utterly preposterous. Of course his superhuman memory is well-established but finding out he studied and can recall 11 letter words OTB still blows my mind.
I think that was more intuition than memorising the 11 letter words
I csnt even remember my words in duolingo😭
@@jibizz76 but it literally says in the video that he learnt 2 to 9 letter words and assumed the 11 would be valid
@jibizz76 14:15????? It says it in the article lol
@@jibizz76 Fair assumption to make if Nigel himself specified that he learnt the list of 2 to 9 letter words
It's absolutely insane how good Nigel is at Scrabble. He can travel to YOUR country, play Scrabble in YOUR mother tongue, play the game perfectly and even call you out on phony words in a language that he doesn't even speak, not to mention doing all of this without a computer to utilize the powerful tools that people can use to improve their gameplay.
Not just without a computer, in some cases even better than a computer....
and also study YOUR country's scrabble dictionary in a small fraction of the time YOU take to study HIS mother tongue's scrabble dictionary.
also when YOU have a language with more scrabble words and more difficult words.
You know it’s crazy when Will says “a shitload of points” 😂
Because the word he played meant “defecation”
I was caught off guard but the definition of the 9 point word was defecation 💩💀
Amazing video Will - it is hard to clearly explain how mind-blowingly superhuman Nigel's accomplishments are, but you did it masterfully. Thank you also for touching on Nigel's (only) two errors in the duplicate event. One, as you point out, was an error in notation after he had found the correct word. The other error is explained in more detail in the article by Jose Fernandez in scrabble-santandreu. You showed a screenshot of part of this article at 14:20. Here is a quote from the Google translation of the article: "A day and a half after the results of the duplicate were published, I told him that he had come second, thinking that he already knew, but it was the first news he had. During the first duplicate, he was sitting at one end and someone standing prevented him from seeing the tilde of the Ñ. He raised his hand, but he did not dare to make an oral appeal and this circumstance was not noticed because he was in a very cornered spot. A few seconds from the end, he was able to see the Ñ, but in extremis he put an invalid word, DAÑIA. He did not give any importance to this fact, he only said “it's ok, it's just a game."" This explanation makes Nigel's accomplishment even more astounding (if that's possible). In the one game of classical Scrabble that Nigel lost - from looking at the score sheet it seems to me he was forced to exchange four times!
Not sure how I missed that detail, that's amazing.
'It's just a game'. What a goat 🔥🔥
I'm beginning to doubt Macondo is a real AI. I personally think it is just Nigel on the other end. The reason it took hours to determine Lo was the right choice was because Nigel was busy memorizing another dictionary in a language he doesn't know.
😂😂😂😂 TRUTH!
This is so beyond ridiculous for such a vast number of nuanced reasons, I feel like it takes a lot of Scrabble experience to even be able to understand the depth of how unbelievable Nigel's accomplishments are. Every hobby's community has its members who are known for being the best in the world, but Nigel's level of Scrabble mastery is damn near impossible. It's scary to think of a world where he never happened to stumble upon the game.
It's difficult to make it come across properly, too. Every time I play in a tournament (in my native language, mind you 😅), I feel that very directly because I'm uncertain about missing a move or taking a wrong strategic turn on every other move, and the computer generally confirms afterwards that I get a lot of stuff wrong. Always makes me shake my head about how on earth Nigel just completely avoids getting anything wrong
12:02 I was so taken aback by the swearing, and then I looked at the definition. Well played Will, well played.
this is the kind of insightful commentary we come here for
This is a family friendly channel so if I'm saying that, there better be a good pun involved
Plot twist: Nigel didn't even speaks English. That's why he rarely takes interview.
the holy trinity of nigel richards accomplishments
"Saya cuma bisa bahasa Melayu"
Yet another banger of a video. Great breakdown. I loved how you explained the different equities in the two languages and provided a report card near the end to help create a baseline!
I probably should have made it clearer in the video that the "report card" results for the non-Nigel players is really closely in line with what I would expect from an English language tournament. The top Spanish players are fantastic, but Nigel is still Nigel.
10:08 "juega bien este Nigel"
LOOOL... well, that was a little understatement
It's times like these where it really feels like Nigel's genius knows no bounds. That bit at the end about him finding a play that a perfect engine took _hours_ to compute (in a foreign language, to boot) is especially impeccable.
To be fair, that's a kind of endgame that's much easier to solve as a human than as a computer, because a computer goes through millions of possibilities that a human would know to discard. Still extremely impressive though.
@@galoomba5559 nigel goes through all the possibilities too, so your point only makes him more impressive really. He's just doing the same thing, but faster.
@@miaowmiaowchowface A human physically can't do brute force calculation faster than a computer, or even come close. And Nigel isn't perfect, he makes way less errors than everyone else, but not zero.
@@galoomba5559 that's neither here nor there. The only point you made is some endgames are harder for computers to solve, which is true, based on computation time. Meanwhile, based on computation time, all endgames are equally easy or difficult for nigel, except the 1/100 he makes minor mistakes on.
To think Nigel is discarding certain game tree paths fails to understand that he is essentially iterating, like a computer does - he is not using shortcuts. His 99/100 would be impossible if it weren't true - discardable options are the correct path more than 1/100 times.
ok also just to point out that when commentators are discussing a nigel game, if nigel does something the computer doesn't recommend, particularly in an endgame, they generally assume the computer must be wrong and needs more time with the position. like nigel's known for being better at endgames than a comp when it comes to skill + speed
The word knowledge is somehow like the least impressive thing. The fact that he understands the rack leave values in Spanish and plays flawless endgames in another language, just mind boggling
Yeah when I see his duplicate performance, I knew he'd totally destroy every player in one on one
EXACTLY!
I can’t even begin to comprehend Nigel. I know everyone will get worked up about Nigel’s mastery of the dictionary particularly at longer words greater than 10 letters, which in English no one even really bothers with and yet Nigel seemingly has complete mastery with in MULTIPLE LEXICONS. His ability for retention of words when every single other expert has to study constantly in order to not have retention loss in one lexicon. And yet this would seem to suggest he has complete mastery in Spanish, French, Collins, and NWL (American English). And don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to diminish how completely unfathomable that is, but in my opinion the words aren’t what’s most impressive. It’s how he can seamlessly switch strategy wise, play finding wise, and evaluate leaves correctly in other lexicons WITHOUT AN ENGINE. Only with his own intuition. And he still only spends about a minute or 2 on each turn, which would seem to suggest that he sees all the options (even if it’s a disconnected 10 or 11 letter word that no one else on earth would find) very quickly and is just choosing between them. That kind of play finding, and the ability to adjust extremely complex strategy like endgames or pre-endgames that engines need hours to compute, is why Nigel is truly an Alien.
Totally totally felt the same. It's not just 'guy with amazing memory', its his ability to PLAY the game flawlessly which is insane.
also when tested, AI did several times better than the other best players but several times WORSE than Nigel
The amount of emphasis you placed on the insanity of this feat is 100% deserved, I'm glad you really brought that out.
Thanks for this excellent commentary!
Minor nitpick: while we Scrabble players understand what Macondo is, I somewhat wish Cesar's name could have been mentioned, as he just added Spanish support this year (and I see your pinned comment about this, so I won't belabor the point).
match me cesar
Yes, Cesar continues to churn out incredible tools & resources for all of us!
You've done it again Will! Thank you for what must have been ALOT of work on this. I just found myself laughing through the whole thing as each achievement of Nigel just gets more and more wild.
I laugh my ass off frequently doing videos about him myself. That feeling when I have no clue why he's done something and then piece together the reasoning is *chef's kiss*
@@wanderer15 incredible. And its that situation as you so well described of it not just being about having an amazing ability to remember the words, but to be able to PLAY in the best way for the language just takes everything to that next level.
I spent so long wondering "how is that guy max doing so well but not featured" before i realized it just meant maximum 😭
3:59 lmao
Amazing recap! The only thing I could even hope to improve on here might be your Spanish pronounciation, although I really enjoyed SABURRRRROSA at 8:04 🤣
The craziest part for me is that he doesn’t own a computer🤯
He IS a computer.
Yeah, it's insane that he could adjust to tile combination values without studying with an engine. I don't think a Spanish Scrabble strategy book would help him either since he can't read it.
or a TV, or a radio, or the internet
He's better than the computer...
This video is so masterfully done. The story telling, the editing, the pacing, everything lol wow.
Literally the only thing that could've made it better is some quote directly from nigel that you requested via an interview.
That would be quite the scoop (and thanks!)
Damn this feels like the culmination of all your Nigel videos. You feature his old games so many times i wonder how his current skills fare. And now out of nowhere he descends from the mountain and destroys the Spanish Armada lmao. Truly a great moment in Scrabble History.
I admire this mans dedication to not learning Spanish
I’ve been spanish since I was born and this guy knows words I have never heard of in my language. Deyeccion 💩 Kudos to the goat of scrabble for this video and to Nigel Richards for his magic.
Yo deyeccion la había leído ya alguna vvez en textos médicos... PERO TOLOACHES. Este tío es una CPU andante.
@ tal cual
When I saw it in the news that Nigel Won the Spanish language scrabble, I knew a video would follow soon. Thank you for showing what he did. I didn't even know he won with such a margine. Crazy to see what this man can do in scrabble.
Excellent breakdown as usual, to show how crazy Nigel's plays are for non-Spanish players!
I was expecting to see another play featured actually: in one of his perfect endgames, Nigel managed to L-stick his opponent. Sticking a tile in English (especially non-Q/V/C) is already hard enough; to be able to stick your opponent in your tertiary language with a less conventional tile in your first tournament, was mind-blowing to me.
Shame you didn't have time to include it in your video. But I blame Nigel for this, for having too many other plays worth featuring 😐
I'm scouring the comments here to see what else people might like to see, so I'll include that 😊
Edit: We had compiled 14 annotated games of Nigel, but he played 15 on stream. The game you're referring to was the one missing. Maybe Will just never saw it for that reason, because after checking out that game now, I'm sure he would have featured that... it's ludicrous
Nigel is truly an alien. Like, so far beyond what should be humanly possible that it's almost hard to understand.
Excellent video, Will. This makes my record against Nigel seem more undeserving and absurd...
I don't even play Scrabble but I am just so fascinated by Nigel videos. It doesn't just seem like he is far better at Scrabble than anyone else is, it seems like he is better at Scrabble than anyone else is at anything! Seeing some of these Nigel plays is similar to watching top Chess Engine moves where the only reaction you can have is "well that's simply not possible for a human to find".
Nigel you're an absolute specimen
My native language is Spanish and I didn’t knew 90% of the words in this video ñ_ñU
The Scrabble dictionary seems to be much, much bigger than a normal person's working vocabulary in every language. This is definitely a feeling English speakers have looking at English games too.
@@wanderer15 i think its even crazier in spanish, it might be because every dialect of spanish has been so influenced by regional vocabular
I'm truly in awe at his scrabble brilliance. Great video Will
C'mon Nigel, stop chickening out and accept the Icelandic Scrabble challenge!😁😁
He did it again?! We can't leave this guy alone without him winning another foreign language Scrabble championship!
Every time you post a video about Nigel I am more impressed. What are his limits? What can he do if he steps out of scrabble? Nigel Richards is truly no ordinary man
He does own a computer btw; it's a laptop at least 10 years old that runs Linux :D I don't think he uses it much, though.
holy based
6:13 Something I noticed about the tile values here is that there are 5 tiles in Spanish Scrabble that are worse than the Q in English Scrabble. This makes Nigel's 23-1 run even more astonishing, as it seems like you could get saddled with bad tiles much easier in the Spanish game, so the fact he was this consistently excellent is insane.
Consider though that most of the poorest tiles have only one instance in the tile set, whereas the very useful vowels are everywhere - the 6.5-equity A has 12 copies in Spanish, for example. I think the sample size was small to make firm conclusions but my gut tells me that scores are not only higher in Spanish, but their standard deviation is lower.
France, Spain...
Italian Scrabble champion is sending Nigel free Greek Scrabble box and dictionary right now.
It's incredible to witness, in real time, the achievements of the worlds greatest scrabble player of all time. No one will come close to this. Praise Nigel Richards!
While all of this is very impressive, the thing that is truly incomprehensible to me are his flawless endgames. The game turning into a perfect information game in the last couple moves essentially forces you to brute-force all the possibilities, because estimated scores don't matter anymore when you can calculate exact ones. For him to never miss even the most obscure endgame sequences is insane.
This is the only sport I know where people (rightly!) trust a players evaluation of a full information position more than that of the best engine.
The same thing happens in other strategy board games like chess it’s just even rarer (in chess the engines are more developed). Generally it’s because the human sees a heuristical reason for something (in this case he needs to block the bingo) and focuses on that in a way engine fails to do so
"...in fact, after hours of processing time Macondo does eventually concur that 'LO' is the best endgame move. Just to be clear here, Nigel came up with moves that the World's strongest Scrabble engine takes hours to verify in his first ever tournament in a language he doesn't speak." -Will Anderson
Probably the most concise sentence ever written that demonstrate the meaning of GOAT in this context.
A future, Scrabble playing general AI will have fond memories of Nigel as it's early teacher and didactic father.
I love stumbling upon videos like this one. Great job with it.
He is a pioneer, that cannot be followed. He will be a thing of legend.
What kills me is that judging by the games, Nigel also MASTERED Spanish conjugation
THAT IS NOT IN OUR DICTIONARIES.
I assume he used a scrabble dictionary, not a regular dictionary, to study. Which would include the conjugated forms. What I wonder is whether he just bruteforce learned all the conjugated versions of verbs, or he learned the rules of conjugation. The latter would make sense for most people, but I think Nigel is capable of just learning all the conjugations as their own separate words
Love these videos, Will. So glad I found your channel
The Lo play has to be one of the craziest I've ever seen
As you say, there's much more to this than just learning the words. For me, the most amazing thing is being able to consider your opponent's options: work out what tiles they're likely to have (or in the endgame, know exactly what they have), what their best potential plays are and how you can block them. Casual players can't even do that in their own language (although of course the pros can); Nigel is doing it in a language he doesn't speak.
Oh, so I finally learnt what the bingo phrase means. Thanks! Awesome video, as always. Big fan of Nigel and your channel.
Absolutely astonishing. Mind is boggled.
nigel is truly the goat. he’s insane
Nigel has an extraordinary brain - thank you for this insight into Spanish language scrabble
I'd love to hear from the native players. Did they know in advance Nigel was playing? Did they expect him to play that well?
My brain is melting at the absolute awesomeness of this
The hours of verify time part is maybe the craziest thing I have heard in a while
Conclusion: Nigel Richards is a time traveller. He has seen his own wins in his personal past and merely memorizes the words he played. Still an impressive feat.
Thanks for the update and the breakdown! Great video.
Once again I can barely comprehend Nigel's brilliance
I'd love to see Nigel try Polish, playing ŻYZNY hooking BIOMASAŻ for example
“…for a shitload of points.” You cheeky bastard. 😂
You should do a video on the differences between various scrabble languages and which one's considered the hardest
11:21 this is one of the craziest sentences ever spoken. Nigel is truly superhuman
Nigel is a machine. Holy moly
Nigel has a truly unique brain, what an amazing person
11:23 - "Just to be clear here, Nigel came up with moves that the world's strongest Scrabble engine takes hours to verify in his first ever tournament in a language he doesn't speak". Absolutely brilliant video
16:08 Nice paraphrased nod to Lisa in re Nelson. :D
This is one of the craziest things I have ever heard of in sports. This is like Steph Curry quitting the NBA, becoming a gymnast, and winning gold in the next olympics
Nice! I was struggling to come up with a good analogy. I thought maybe it would be like a top boxer quitting and dominating MMA, then dominating jiu jitsu or something like that.
I think nigel did this because the meme of his win in french was dead, so he wanted to bring it back by winning in spanish as well
Dans le monde du scrabble francophone, on le surnomme "E.T.", c'est tout dire!
A comparison to the other Scrabble languages to English would be a really cool video. I had no idea they straight up added new tiles to the game, are there any other languages that do do stuff like that?
German Scrabble has Ä Ö Ü
Duh, any language who uses a different alphabet to English has to use different tiles. Although the inclusion of digraph tiles is interesting
@@galoomba5559They were considered letters until the late 2010, to be precise in 2010 it was made clear they never were.
Guess Scrabble decided it was better to leave it as it is now.
Yes of course, the letters in different languages are different.
This is mind-blowing!
6:02 Interesting how the name of the engine is the same as the one in the greatest Spanish language novel of the XXth century, Cien años de Soledad.
Developer of Macondo here, that’s on purpose. I’m Latino (born in Venezuela 🇻🇪) and have always wanted to get support for my native language. I hauled ass the week before the world championship to get Macondo/woogles to support Spanish and thank goodness, we were able to get 15 Nigel annotations shortly after 😅
Could you link the article you show at 14:15?
Yeah, I'd also appreciate that.
It's translated from Spanish. It's from "Scrabble Santandreu".
scrabble-santandreu.com/2024/11/nigel-richards-en-granada-por-jose-fernandez/
@@wanderer15 Thank you!
He’s like a reincarnation of Bobby Fischer, doing moves so great the computers at the time had no chance against him. Truly amazing to be alive at the same time as this legend. He is special.
What does it say about elite scrabble that even though I’m a fluent English speaker and don’t know any Spanish, watching these games felt exactly the same as watching English world championship games
What’s really funny is that I opened my Google feed today and found an AP News article on the EXACT topic of this video.
I like how he plays the first perfect game ever in Spanish duplicate, then just does it again the next game 😅
Awesome! Thank you for doing this!
Carlos González was not playing in this World Cup, it is a mistake, because he has the same name and initials as me: Carlos Garcia
I’m very sorry for this mistake, thank you for letting me know.
I don't have Scrabble memorization experience, but I'm a Portuguese speaker.
I assume long words are way easier to memorize in Spanish than English because of the verbal conjugation system. Most long words will follow the same pattern of shorter ones, you just need to know the root of the verb and then attach the same
Yeah, the verb inflections inflate the size of the dictionary a lot. For example, in Polish the dictionary has about 3 million words, most of them obscure inflections, while the number of base words is comparable to that of other languages (100-200k).
@@galoomba5559 Oh hey there, fellow Marioer. Heavily synthetic languages sound like a nightmare for dictionary makers more than for people trying to memorize them. :P
I do wonder how much more/less advantageous these are in comparison to English, cause the chances of stringing them together must be also different.
@@Marcotonio A major difference i've noticed in Slovene is there's a lot of hooks. For example, in English a lot of words take S hooks (plurals of nouns, 3rd person singular for verbs), but that's the only common hook. In Slovene on the other hand, word forms take a variety of back hooks, some as many as 6 (root forms of most verbs take all of JLMTŠ and some also N). Front hooks, though not grammatically as regular, are also way more common. It's not rare to get a 10 or 11 letter word on the board through consecutive hooks.
As for dictionary making, I'm actually compiling a Slovene lexicon with all the inflections that the official dictionary doesn't explicitly list. It's painful, but I've managed to automate most of it.
What an absolute monster. One logistics question, how does he get through these events without speaking the language? I'd have to assume he's got a translator or staff to help him out.
Why would he? Most places you can communicate in English at nowadays pretty well. And heck, I spent 3 weeks in Brazil incl. rural areas with almost nobody speaking English, and I knew about 10 Portuguese words only.
I hope he write a book someday on his techniques. It will be very valuable not only for scrabble but maybe in other branch of sciences. His brain/mind operates in a whole other way.
I don't think it will be, specifically for the reason his brain doesn't function within the standard deviation of human memory storage and recall.
He's stated he doesn't really do anything more than read the scrabble dictionaries once over and it's likely that his brain fills in gaps such that he "sees" words on the board with minimal concious effort.
There's not really much to be gleaned from what he can put into words. Brain activity mapping while he plays scrabble or memorises a scrabble dictionary could be rather worth looking into tho.
Great presentation.
This guy is not human
Posessed
Ty
I hope well see him play German Scrabble some time :D
Truly amazing
babe wake up, new Will Anderson video about Nigel just dropped
13:27 now this more feels like Nigel's opponent's arent master enough to block Nigel's setups. Then again this is literally their first time fighting him
that Duplicate round looks like it would be a lot of fun, even for someone who is purely casual at Scrabble like myself. and honestly, that could be a sort of side event if large Scrabble tournaments (i'm talking hundreds of players) were more common
"I could make a million videos about Nigel..." - Please do ☺
I'm lost for words... 😊
Which proves you are NOT Nigel Richards
@annayosh INDUBITABLY
Honestly, as a non-native English speaker who regularly watches English Scrabble content it remains funny to see top Scrabble players mispronounce words they are playing. Even some words I know they must have heard before. It’s just that English pronunciation can be so confusing that you might not make the connection between the pronounced word and the written word, when studying word lists.
Wonderful video Will.