Tweet
The topic of having previously seen a board lending itself to success has come up repeatedly. So, I thought I'd put it to the test.
Different players play for different goals. I tend to play for most points, so my experiment is slanted in that direction.
I took screen shots of several dozen boards over the last few months, complete with the final results and word lists. Then I filed those away, waited a few days, pulled up the boards, wordlists and results, studied these and tried to play them again. All of these replays happened off site.
Counting words and points was a bit tedious, but...
Seeing the boards definitely helped in finding new and longer words. Often, I found words that weren't played before. Just as often, I had no idea how many points that word was worth. So...
To cut to the chase and get to what was unexpected: I actually did worse overall, sometimes much worse, when I had previously scored 80% or more of my capacity. If the game was 450 points or more, I had a great deal of trouble matching or beating it. This despite having seen all the strings of high point possibilities. My mind was so tied up in trying to remember those strings that I couldn't focus as well on the board. And my typing skills aren't good enough to manage a bunch of longer words, so I'd constantly be hampered by retyping and wondering if the word was typed correctly.
On boards where I had scored under 325, I almost always did better, sometimes far better.
Which led me to wonder how well I would do simply typing the word list and seeing how many points I'd get. On boards with fewer words, I always blew away my previous best. On the bigger boards where I'd previously scored a lot, I'd almost always end up with fewer words and fewer points.
Weird.
So, there you have a limited experiment of one.
Different players play for different goals. I tend to play for most points, so my experiment is slanted in that direction.
I took screen shots of several dozen boards over the last few months, complete with the final results and word lists. Then I filed those away, waited a few days, pulled up the boards, wordlists and results, studied these and tried to play them again. All of these replays happened off site.
Counting words and points was a bit tedious, but...
Seeing the boards definitely helped in finding new and longer words. Often, I found words that weren't played before. Just as often, I had no idea how many points that word was worth. So...
To cut to the chase and get to what was unexpected: I actually did worse overall, sometimes much worse, when I had previously scored 80% or more of my capacity. If the game was 450 points or more, I had a great deal of trouble matching or beating it. This despite having seen all the strings of high point possibilities. My mind was so tied up in trying to remember those strings that I couldn't focus as well on the board. And my typing skills aren't good enough to manage a bunch of longer words, so I'd constantly be hampered by retyping and wondering if the word was typed correctly.
On boards where I had scored under 325, I almost always did better, sometimes far better.
Which led me to wonder how well I would do simply typing the word list and seeing how many points I'd get. On boards with fewer words, I always blew away my previous best. On the bigger boards where I'd previously scored a lot, I'd almost always end up with fewer words and fewer points.
Weird.
So, there you have a limited experiment of one.