So, rather than some much-needed desperation scrabble studying, I spent a large part of the evening at the house of a friend's brother, playing my friend a backgammon match. I'm pretty much completely new to backgammon, other than watching my dad play one of our family friends for surprisingly high stakes, but I somehow managed to upset in our match to 11, winning 11-8. he says that he's the best player at yale, which means that I got seriously lucky (including one memorable roll of double 5s when anything else would lead to certain defeat).

anyway, looking at backgammon, you can make colossal blunders, as I did several times, but a lot of being a good backgammon player stacks up to picking plays that are only separated by a couple of percent wins. Obviously, their closeness is such that the difference won't necessarily be reflected by what happens in a single game; nevertheless, these are tangible differences that separate a good player from a really good player. Backgammon therefore seems to me like a game of small edges.

The ultimate game of small edges has to be checkers. There are very few general principles of checkers, as far as I can tell, and being good at it seems to boil down to very, very small subtleties that take many turns to manifest themselves. They certainly exist, however, reflected by the existence in backgammon of one unbelievably dominant champion, marion tinsley, who lost 9 games total between 1954 and 1994. His success evidently lay in his ability to see the repercussions of moves further into the future than his opponents could (wikipedia has a great anecdote about him pointing out a mistake by a computer program on move 10 which led to its defeat 26 moves later). Another neat thing about this example is that small edges doesn't necessarily have to correlate with luck.

So, what about games with big edges? To me, a lot of the sports seem that way. The top competitors in tennis and basketball, roger federer and michael jordan, demonstrate(d) skill at their prime and athletic ability that was simply a cut above their rivals. It's something I notice in ultimate too - even in team games, having one exceptional competitor tends to change the entire course of the game one way or the other. I suppose these are all physical rather than mental activities, but how about ken jennings' run on jeopardy? I'm sure there are other good examples.

so the question is - how do you treat scrabble, as a game with big edges or a game with small ones? I think that my personal approach tends to be the latter simply because I try to find the best move on every play of the game. But the ability of the top players to win tournaments as consistently as they do seems to point to big edges. I'm not saying that I know exactly what they are, but do they point at there being more to scrabble than just making the right fish?

ok, bedtime!