The yips..........

[RussDNails]

...........really suck.............I'm not much of a typist but one of my goals is to break 1200 on the 5 x 5. Just set a personal best but was at 1150 with about 30 seconds left.

Took one look at the timer and it was all over. Totally panicked and only managed about 3 more words in the last 30 seconds. Now I need a Valium

[dannyb]

Or: As time is running out and you see a nice combination and then get a case of the "frabjubab" fingers where you can't type anything correctly.

[bwt1213]

What if the time pressure could be substantially reduced? I get the yips, too, and my typing speed seems to max out at about 45 wpm on this game. Almost every game I play, I can see lots and lots of words and I just can't type them in 3 minutes. I'm in favor of having a brand-new game that is EXACTLY like this one, but with a word shot-clock: you must enter a valid new word within 10 seconds or the timer runs out and the game is over. So long as you can enter a valid new word within 10 seconds, the game continues (that's a typing rate of 6 wpm). Pretty clearly, none of the existing records would apply and people hunting for long or high-scoring words would stay with the existing game (though I can imagine lalatan and some of his buddies setting records on the new game, too). I think that people who are now scoring 1000+ would see a modest boost in their averages. I think that some people (especially poor typists and people with various disabilities) might see some really astounding transformations. But, as I said, this version of the game would be as different from the previous ones as the 4x4 is from the 5x5. All the records would be new. But code maintenance should be pretty easy -- only the timer part of the game would need changing. Everything else would be identical.

[BoggleOtaku]

It's the certainty principle. The second you observe you're cruising with a great score and the time left, the more certain it is that what follows will have little resemblance to what preceded.

[RussDNails]

Yup, that's exactly what happened. Not the best typist but once I took one quick peek at the score and timer, I completely froze up entirely for the rest of the game. Literally couldn't type to save my life when for 2:30 I was going at a pace I never reached before..........

[BoggleOtaku]

For me having just one more long word I'm trying to type seems to cause endless fails, or at least the most haunting ones. If the probability of mistyping a given letter is 1% normally but 5% or even 10% under desperate straits, the probability to successfully type a 23-letter-long word drops from (1-0.01)^23 = 79% to (1-0.05)^23 = 30% or even (1-0.1)^23 = 9%. But it seems more like 98% chance of mistyping the 23rd letter and quickly hitting enter; not evenly weighted...

[BoredInTheCar]

I'm in favor of having a brand-new game that is EXACTLY like this one, but with a word shot-clock: you must enter a valid new word within 10 seconds or the timer runs out and the game is over. So long as you can enter a valid new word within 10 seconds, the game continues (that's a typing rate of 6 wpm).

That sounds really fun! I'd love to try that.

I get the yips too. Not that I'm anywhere even close to as good a player as RussDNails - I'm not. But this is an opportunity to point out something I admire about his playing: on rare occasion, when I am playing a 5x5 where he holds the high score, I beat him! This (plus the fact he manages to make the top 10 lists for average score and total number of points at the same time) tells me something, which is that he doesn't "curate" his games - in other words, he plays through all his games to the end no matter what, and doesn't quickly cancel the game in the last 5 seconds if he's got the yips.

That makes his records all the more impressive. If I want to make the top 10 average score list in a given month, I can usually (just barely) manage to do it - by eliminating my "yip" games before they are recorded. If, on the other hand, I play through every game I start to the end (as I am this month) my average score is much lower.

RussDNails, I stand in awe.

[RussDNails]

That sounds really fun! I'd love to try that.

I get the yips too. Not that I'm anywhere even close to as good a player as RussDNails - I'm not. But this is an opportunity to point out something I admire about his playing: on rare occasion, when I am playing a 5x5 where he holds the high score, I beat him! This (plus the fact he manages to make the top 10 lists for average score and total number of points at the same time) tells me something, which is that he doesn't "curate" his games - in other words, he plays through all his games to the end no matter what, and doesn't quickly cancel the game in the last 5 seconds if he's got the yips.

That makes his records all the more impressive. If I want to make the top 10 average score list in a given month, I can usually (just barely) manage to do it - by eliminating my "yip" games before they are recorded. If, on the other hand, I play through every game I start to the end (as I am this month) my average score is much lower.

RussDNails, I stand in awe.

Jeez, thanks for the kudos, that’s really nice of you to say To some extent I do curate games in that I don’t normally play a lot of boards with low word counts but yes I do submit most games I start. Not trying to brag at all but like many folks on here I do keep track of some of my stats. For this month my top 50 games would put me at an average of about 1070. Nowhere near the top players like fasteedie, Estive, Megaword (and apologies to anyone I missed). I just can’t type that fast—my vocabulary is fairly strong and I always see more words than I can key in, especially on some of the newer boards. All the z and q”s help to boost my scores. It’s also just not that fun for me to curate games; i like to play a lot and playing the “harder” boards is the best way to learn new words too……

Cheers,

Russ

[Naboka]

This is sort of the yips: becoming frantic about the spellig of some long word.

Does anyone else sometimes have trouble spelling certain words because the actual spelling differs from how we pronounce it? We know the word...

but...

Not how we're necessarily supposed to say it, but how we tend to due to allophonic and phonological variations we're used to. And how we hear it in our brains?

Was doing a board that had equatorial. My mind hears equi-torial rather than equa-torial.(Even though equator always rings the a bell.)

So, frantically wondering why equi-torial wouldn't play, pseudo pops up. Yikes! Fumble, fumble, fumble. About to dump the board, when it dawns. "A" you idiot, try "a." Which worked.
But, what a panicked scramble. All in a few seconds.

Kindergartens like to spell tree chree, which approximates how we say it. Saw oftens sounds like sol to them, so they'll bring up a sentence: I sol a chree. Trying to teach spelling to 5 year olds is an adventure in the absurdity of the english language. All the weird phonological and allophonic varitions. (wanted to spell it alli-phonic with an i versus an o as the i inin)

pseudoequatorial 16/34. Wouldn't have posted it, but it's out in public anyway now, so it's gonna get more finds.

(even just now, tried typing pseudoequi-torial. Yikes! What an idiot.)

[dannyb]

Having suffered from dysgraphia as a child, I still type some peculiar words. I had to sort it all out by myself in the sixth grade. There was no interventions for learning disabilities back then. Only my first grade teacher figured out that something was wrong, but she had no training to deal with any of the learning disabilities.

In the seventh grade I found some of the comic books that I wrote and illustrated in the fifth grade, and believe me, they were unreadable.