Can You Solve This Scrabble Mystery? (I Couldn't.)
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- Опубликовано: 25 ноя 2023
- Typically, in a game of Scrabble, you'll have a decent idea of what your opponent is trying to do at any given moment. Are they going for a bingo? Opening or closing the board? Setting up a valuable tile? But in this game against top expert and superb Scrabble commentator Matt Canik, I was completely in the dark in a way I've never experienced before or since. Can you solve Matt's mysterious plan of attack in this game?
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
![Gunna - back in the a [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/oBrbejOHjLw/mqdefault.jpg)
Laying down the tiles leading up to the missing 'A' just to unnerve his opponent. That's a power play.
Hey, there’s a chance Will didn’t challenge.
That A tile was the difference between this game
Seems scrabble players love jokes like this: Remember the FINI on the French champ against Nigel to close the game, or the PORNO move on the highest scoring game ever? Both these plays show a great sens of humour :) And so does this play here IMHO :)
The plot is even thicker than this. I went to Scrabble High School with Matt Canik. In our yearbook, a bunch of us pulled a small prank on him, by putting "most likely to put tiles on the board only to take them back" in our personalized superlatives for Matt. He has taken those words as a personal guideline ever since then, and this game was no exception. If you ever find yourself playing Matt Canik over the board, just know that there is a 100% chance he will put tiles on the board, and then take them back to his rack. What a legend.
What an awesome story! Please tell us what is Scrabble High School? My ideas are running wild
ruclips.net/video/UteuLPxZ_us/видео.html 29:30 or so lmao@@IgnorantSeeker
Scrabble High School...in my day being a vertie would get you sent to detention but now we celebrate them as heroes on RUclips and Twitch. Nice world we live in.
Lol, Matt has done this to me a dozen times. Still hilarious as ever
Bro Stephen!!! Come play a tournament soon! Would love to catch up ;)
The absolute flex at 0:49, talking about how his opponent is an accomplished scrabble player, while showing his own name higher up on the leaderboard /j
I didn't realize that but it's really funny.
Crazy ending! I love that he still put his word down with the o instead.
Will, one of my favourite things about this channel is how you shed your ego and happily talk about games you lost, or plays that didn't go your way. And this time, you recap a game you *did* win, but where your opponent had a brilliant tactical plan.
The question must be asked - are you too nice?
Ha, thanks! I'm definitely focused on process over results. So if something amazing or noteworthy happens in a game I lose or play poorly, it's all good & I can still get into telling that story.
@@wanderer15 Will brings something that was so sorely missed in Scrabble for a while -- humility.
There was a generation of a lot of very poor sports (and a few nice folks scattered throughout) but I feel that, as a whole, the newer blood brings some wonderful positivity to the game. Will's a gem and we're lucky to have him.
Once you showed where he placed the two S’s, i finally saw ANEURYSMS. How the hell Matt could see it from five turns out is beyond me. Great video.
Me, who just learned the word ANUERYSMS exist
I actually saw the YSMS spot but couldn't find a word that fit. ANEURYSMS would have been really cool.
Same. That Y jumped out at me quite early but no way do I know enough Scrabble to fill it. Those plays through multiple disconnected letters are always beautiful
this is like the equivalent of a poker player showing their hand after losing the pot haha
Like losing a super bad beat after outplaying someone!
No idea if you'll see this T1J, but your Scrabble video from last year got me into the hobby for the first time, and it's the most involved I've been in a game in years. My average score bumped up to 20 this week, and I had my first 2-bingo game yesterday! It doesn't seem like that video is on your channel anymore, but I figured you should know that it made an impact. I play basically every day now, and I'm having an absolute blast
The plan itself gave you an aneurysm!
don't you mean oneurysm
if that last letter had been an A it very well might have
Something I truly adore about top-level play in a wide variety of games is how pros are able to use the game itself to communicate to other pros. Nothing more would've needed to have been said when the "o" was layed down for Matt to have conveyed to you every detail of what was going on.
I still remember my heart sinking as that realization dawned. It actually felt like I had lost regardless of the actual game outcome.
Funny how it isn't just your best play of FATTY, it's your best play OF FATTY
I have had a absolutely abysmal commute today, as my train was delayed due to a landslip and it was moved into a diversion route with no WiFi/phone signal. The only thing that could load on my phone was your video for the extra 3 hours I had to endure…
So thanks for keeping me sane! The challenge on “greises” was really smart btw, was even smarter the 7th time!
Haha! The replayability of this one might not have been so great with the big reveal, but hope you got back home safe & thanks for the kind words.
So that's the same Matt Canik who as a commentator keeps repeating how terrible he is at Scrabble and that we shouldn't listen to anything he says.
Usually Scrabble puzzles get much easier when you know to look for something spectacular, but here even that puzzle effect didn't help me spot it. What a brilliant play (and you need to live up to being GothamScrabble and put the !! symbol in the thumbnail!)
To be fair the only reason this video exists is because I played GREISES instead of GREISEN, implying that I am indeed terrible
@@mattcanik The legend himself...
@@mattcanik lol. U, sir, are FAAAAR, like miles away from terrible. That was ingenious, though unlucky
@@PelumiOTE2B but that's the beauty of scrabble -- no matter how good you get and how hard you work, you are always terrible (or you are Nigel)
There's a handful of players that make me want to transplant perfect word knowledge in their brains just to see how beastly they'd be, and Matt is one of those
So he's a "Genius" when he plays one tile 4 times to draw ANEURYSMS, but when I fish one tile 7 times trying to draw RETINAS on a wide open board I'm and
"idiot" who's "Bad at scrabble"? Crazy double standard.
Is retinas a valid scrabble word? I thought the word is retinae but I don't know the scrabble dictionary.
@@Fungo4they are both in the lexicon
@@Fungo4 Yup, retinas is good, it's one of the most common draws in the game so many players commit it to memory.
There are 9 total words in this rack:
ANESTRI, ANTSIER, NASTIER, RATINES, RETAINS, (RETINAS), RETSINA, STAINER, STEARIN
@@chrissmith9596 also RESIANT and STARNIE in CSW21
Muahahahaha
Bruh
What an amazing Scrabble video to end my night on. Must feel amazing getting the learning experience while also not having such a killer move actually played against you
I love your channel. I'm about a 1500-rated player and these videos are a real treat. This is a great one because the word he was fishing for is a pretty common word probably 90% of the people watching this video know. I had no idea what was going on.
Racing to my computer at the notification of a new Will Anderson video. :D
Jesus, the foresight to visualize ANEURYSMS is nothing short of breathtaking.
I am fascinated with the editing and production of these videos and can say these are high quality! Keep it up 💪
Thank you very much, and I plan on it!
Oh my! What a spectacular play between you too!
My god the storytelling on this one *chefs kiss*
wow! This game is one you'll both be telling people about for the rest of your lives. amazing!
That was wonderful to watch. I couldn't see his plan either.
Great story, well told. Love your stuff :)
Brilliant! Matt’s such a creative player
Loving the content ! I think it would be really cool to see some analysis of games where the final board had a unique feature. For example, things like:
most overlapping words / “densest” final board
longest/shortest average word length
most triple word bonuses used
most word repetitions
etc etc
There was one time when I accidentally misdesignated a blank and lost a challenge because of it. After I had played the word ZA with a rack of AACLVWZ (or something like that, the V and W aren't important but are just supposed to be letters that didn't make a bingo with A, C, E, L, and ?, because I remember I had no playable bingo), I drew an E and a blank, making ACELVW?. There was an open H on the board, and while my opponent was making their play, I thought of playing the word BLEACH with the blank as a B. I circled B on the blank designation slip already for some reason. However, the word my opponent played blocked that H, but created an open B instead, so I decided to play BLEACH with the open B, intending to use the blank as a H. However, the blank was still designated as a B, causing my play to be BLEACB instead of BLEACH, which was successfully challenged by my opponent.
i really want to see a video about the *174 point* comeback in the 1993 world championship!
Oh wow, I'm not even sure I'm aware of this one! Need to do more research!
@@wanderer15 I only know about it because the winner wrote about it in a book I have, hehe
Do Scrabble pros (or even begginer comps) have blank "unseens tiles" papers to keep track off or is it all in your head?
If you Google Image Search "scrabble scoresheet" you can find some examples of the scoresheets that are used in competitive play - we definitely use them to track the tiles that have been played.
I’m always present for high level scrabble🎉
That is so, so hilarious of a troll. I'd have loved to see your reaction.
This was our first time ever playing. He wasn’t ready to pay his troll toll 😂
Very high eyebrow raises and very slack jaw
A slow roll for the ages!
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Bro you have the best freaking videos. Thanks for doing your stuff homie
Appreciate the kind words & thanks for watching!
Very cool
I am really bad at Scrabble. This is something I have learned to accept
How do you get a list of the legal scrabble words to use for your analysis?
Makers of Scrabble tools such as game analysis or word study software acquire licenses to use tournament-standard lists. For my analyses, I use Quackle (people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/), which comes preloaded with lexicons.
That was genius!!
What are the rules about fixating on your oponents eyesight to know which words/postions on the board he is thinking about?
No rule prohibiting this! I would say that very few players make use of this because Scrabble is already difficult enough to get right with all the basics, but there are some techniques like this that could give you the tiniest extra edge if done properly. (I myself don't pay much attention to them)
It all went to the last A tile
It would be interesting to have a scrabble tournament in which people have to know the meaning of the words they memorized.
I get the sentiment but I doubt it would actually be interesting. We would just start memorizing meanings and recite them. If anything it would look even nerdier to outsiders 😅
I have often thought of incorporating this requirement into my club!
@@AlexDings that would probably be the result. If people are willing to memorize extremely niche words like ch, they will memorize definitions.
You would probably need some kind of stripped down dictionary of frequently used words if you want a scrabble Match with recognizable words.
@@AlexDings I think it would only really work as a one-off. Get a bunch of scrabble players together and say that for this game/match/tournament only, you must be able to recite the meaning of a word/use it in a sentence/whatever if challenged. It wouldn't be for money (or not for much), just fun, and people wouldn't have much time in advance to study. That could maybe be entertaining.
When I play with family and friends, I tend to self censor myself slightly on the obscure words. Maybe I’ll play HEATING over GAHNITE, FUNERAL over its 2 more obscure anagrams, etc, because it makes bingo finding appear more attainable to new players, and thus competitive Scrabble overall seem less daunting. If I am playing obscure words, I share definitions when I know them. In competitive play, the opposite is true. The more obscure the word, the more likely it is to elicit a challenge, raising the play’s value.
At a high level, it’s just not possible to know definitions for all the words you learn, but knowing the definitions can be both fun and helpful. Does BAYER take a back -S? If you know the definition, you know.
Can anybody tell the probability of Matt drawing the needed A in the 4 turns? Seems pretty good, maybe 65% at a glance?
Hahahaha, what a troll.
I fully deserved it & love it in retrospect
Oh yeah it's so good.
How many points was that play worth?
85
@@iankrasnow5383 including overlaps?
yes@@Speedster___
given that it didn't hit a double or triple word score, 85 points is actually a lot for a bingo to score (the overlaps got it up that high)
@@wanderer15I was seeing ghosts and thought the M was placed down on a double ketter
are swear words allowed? You should make a video on the funniest or worst words people have played.
A tournament game a year or two ago had F**KWIT and the commentator (I don't remember if it was Matt) was rather enthusiastic about the legitimate excuse to say it over and over.
it was me and I was having an absolute blast@@Ceruleanst
Let's not ignore that 'tits' was also played in this game
the real legendary play
Looks like someone's a bird lover!
@@wanderer15 fun fact: the last time I saw Will, we played wingspan. So we're 2/2 on games with tits on the board now
Almost-clever isn't quite the same as clever. He bet that he'd get the A, which is gutsy and pretty clever, but we can crown it as clever if he gets the A, eh?
There were two A's for me to draw until Will selfishly played them both on JIAO and PEA
@@mattcanik To be clear, there isn't a play either of you made in that game or any other of your games that I could make. I admire greatly the skill and imagination that both of you have, that's why I'm watching. It's a frustrating game sometimes, because your bet was a solid one that did not pay off. Thanks for your note.
Oh, and no offense was taken! I just wanted to drop in comments somewhere that I wasn't fishing for *an* A like the video leads you to believe, I was fishing for one of two A's @@qqw743
I'm all about the ideas/process as opposed to results, which is why even though Matt didn't actually hit the play he wanted, I've still never forgotten how impressed I was (and how dumb I felt).
2:10 He draws such an insane bingo of Ahribot and plays a pityful thio... no surprise he's not even top 10
1) AHRIBOT* is not a word; the word with those letters is BOTHRIA
2) Neither AHRIBOT* nor BOTHRIA is playable in the position
@@jellomochas Yes. It's just a joke referencing League of Legends
I was totally gonna look up oneurysm haha. Was so happy he finally got his word :)
Saw PAROXYSMS in the pool after a long hard look - it's so cool that there are multiple words that fit.
I think had I even considered that spot I would've spotted at least one of the two but I was completely blind to it since it was so obstructed
I'm just a bit confused at 6:15 - so Matt played ONEURYSMS, and you challenged it off? Did he know it was not a valid word? @wanderer15 sort of skips over what actually happens here.
He laid it down to slow-roll / troll me, playing the final O right at the end for maximum effect, making me think I had lost until he revealed that final tile. He didn't end up playing it - he then picked up the letters and played a normal endgame. Sorry if that was unclear!