Keeping Score in Scrabble - Letter Tiles and Point Values How to Keep Score in Scrabble Keeping Score in Scrabble Knowing how to keep score in Scrabble is simple, but it’s also important. Each letter in Scrabble has its own value, while certain points on a Scrabble board are worth more points than others. Finally, there are a few special circumstances where Scrabble scoring differs than in other points of the game. Scrabble Letter Tiles – Point Values Below is a table showing the point values of each tile in Scrabble. I’ll include a table to show how many of each letter exists in a standard Scrabble game, as well. When you play one of these letter tiles on the Scrabble board, you get the point value indicated on the letter tile. Scrabble Point Distribution A – E – I – O – - U – L – N – R – S – T = 1 point D – G = 2 points B – C – M – P = 3 points F – H – W – Y – V = 4 points K = 5 points J – X = 8 points Q – Z = 10 points The following table shows how many of each letters there are in a standard game of Scrabble.

In all, there are 100 tiles to play in any given Scrabble game. Scrabble Letter Distribution 1: J – K – X – Q – Z 2: B – C – F – H – M – P – W – Y – V – Blank Tiles 3: G 4: D – L – S – U 6: N – R – T 10: E Double and Triple Scores When any of the letters of a word you place on the board covers a double or triple score, apply that modifier to your word score. If it’s a double or triple letter score, only modify the score for the letter on that tile. If it’s a double or triple word score, add up the score for all the tiles and then multiply the amount by the modifier. If you happen to cross two or more modifiers with your word, apply all of them. If you cross a triple letter score and a double word score, then multiple the triple score letter by x3 and then multiple the whole word score by x2. If you happen to cross two word multipliers, then remember to multiple the word score by both values. In this way, scores can reach large numbers.

There is a limiting factor to the scores made by these tiles, though. That’s because, once used, these tiles can’t be reused for the purposes of multipliers. Reusing Double and Triple Scores After a double-word or triple-word score has been used and figured, that space will not be worth a double- or triple-word score again in the game. The same goes for double-letter and triple-letter scores. For example, imagine that a letter tile saying double-word score, like the one you play off of at the beginning of the game, is “activated” at the beginning of the game. Whoever plays off that tile first gets a double-word score. But the next player who builds a word off that same letter does not get a double-word score. This rule is there for several purposes, but it keeps people from simply beating opponents by playing an -s or -ed or -ing at the end of words on the board. You can still do so, but you won’t score as many points (or more) if the original word played involved double- or triple-word scoring. 50 Point Bonus If at any time, you use all 7 tiles in your rack one on play, you get an automatic 50 point bonus.

This does not apply in the endgame scenario when you have less than 7 letters on your rack, of course. Final Scores in Scrabble Who “goes out” also has a big affect on the score. Eventually, the letter tiles will run out. When this happens, you will have a dwindling number of letter tiles on your rack. When this happens, the first person to get rid of all the letters on their rack on their turn “goes out”. The scoring is not yet finished, though. Every player with letters should add up the point values of those letters. These players should subtract that letter amount from their score. Once this is done, the point value for all those letters should also be added up collectively and added to the score of the person who “went out” or got rid of all their letter tiles first. In this way, the winner of a Scrabble game is often determined by who goes out first. This can be forgotten or only half-applied with new Scrabble players, so knowing how to score correctly in Scrabble is important. Scrabble: Should letter values change? - BBC News BBC News Scrabble: Should letter values change?

By Laura Gray BBC News 15 January 2013 Read more about sharing. Close share panel The values of the letters in Scrabble were assigned according to the front page of a US newspaper in the 1930s. Is it time the scoring system was updated to reflect today's usage? All Scrabble players know that Q and Z are the highest scoring tiles. You can get 10 points for each, in the English language version of the game. But according to one American researcher, Z really only deserves six points. And it's not just Z that's under fire. After 75 years of Scrabble, some argue that the current tile values are out of date as certain letters have become more common than they used to be. "The dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed," says Joshua Lewis, researcher and creator of a software program which allocates new, up-to-date values to Scrabble tiles.

"Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X, so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they are now much easier to play." Joshua Lewis's program is called Valett and it recalculates the letter valuations by looking at three things. What is Scrabble? Players make words on a board and earn points according to the value of the letters they use They have seven letters each Every word has to join a word already on the board So to get rid of all your letters, you would usually need to think of an eight-letter word The winner is the player with the most points when all the spare letters have been used and one player has no letters left How to win at Scrabble Firstly, there is the frequency of the letters in the English language. Secondly, the frequency by word length - how many times a letter appears in two, three, seven, and eight-letter words. And finally, he looked at how easy it is to play the letter with other letters. For example, Q is a difficult letter to play so would warrant a higher score than S, which can be played with many more.

According to Lewis's system, X (worth eight points in the current game) is worth only five points and Z (worth 10 points now) is worth six points. Other letter values change too, but less radically. For example, U (one point currently) is worth two in the new version, G (two points) becomes three and M (three points) becomes two. Not all letters change under these proposals but those that do tend to have fallen in value. In explaining why his overall point distribution is lower, Lewis blames Q which, as he puts it, is an "outlier", much harder to play than other letters. It is a game of luck and changing the tile values wouldn't achieve anything Philip Nelkon, Mattel, Scrabble manufacturer "You get this justified separation between Q at 10 and Z and J at six, and in general the non-Q letters are a bit more compressed in value." He looked at increasing the value of Q to 12, but decided against putting too much power in a single tile. Lewis is not the first to propose an updated version of Scrabble, says John Chew, co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association.

He says he hears from people once or twice a year saying that the tile values are incorrect. In fact this has been happening ever since the game was invented in 1938 by the American architect Alfred Butts, who calculated a value for each tile by measuring how frequently each letter appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Letter scores that would change Source: Joshua Lewis "Alfred Butts had a selection bias in favour of printed newspaper English which many people have suggested ought to be rectified," says Chew. But is there a market for a revised version of Scrabble? If the tile values changed there would be "catastrophic outrage", says Chew. "Some people would just continue playing with the old tile distributions because people who've played the game often enough tend to remember that the Q is worth 10 points, the Z is worth 10 points and so on." What's more, he says, seasoned Scrabble players know there is an important difference between the value written on a Scrabble tile and that tile's real value when played in a game, a notion he calls "equity value".

So a blank tile or an S have an equity value that far outstrips their face value because they can easily earn a player so many points. So could Scrabble tiles really be changed to adapt to our evolving vocabulary? No, according to Mattel, the company which manufactures Scrabble in Europe. "Mattel has no plans to change Scrabble tiles. It is not a game where fairness is paramount, it is a game of luck and changing the tile values wouldn't achieve anything," says Philip Nelkon, Scrabble's UK representative. More or Less: Behind the stats Listen to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, or download the free podcast More stories from More or Less Even Joshua Lewis, inventor of the new system believes the traditional valuations can make the game more exciting. "You're really lucky if you pick an X because it's over-valued and unlucky if you pick a V. So if they were to re-do the values of the tiles that would reduce the level of luck.

"That might be desirable in tournaments but it might not be as good in casual play where you want the less skilled players to have a shot periodically at beating the more highly skilled players." So those players who rely on good luck when playing Scrabble can breathe a sigh of relief. You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on Facebook 14 Fun Scrabble Facts | Mental Floss 14 Fun Scrabble Facts Hasbro Like us on Facebook To celebrate the release of the fifth edition of Merriam-Webster’s The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary, out today, here are a few fun facts about the game and the competitions it has inspired. 1. SCRABBLE was invented by an architect. In 1933, New York City architect Alfred Mosher Butts created an early version of the game we know as Scrabble. To determine how many tiles there should be and how many points each letter should be worth, he calculated letter frequency on the front page of the New York Times.

So, for example, “Q is a letter that occurs least often in English text, so it should be a letter that there is only one tile of, and that tile should be worth 10 points,” says John Chew, co-president of the North American SCRABBLE Players Association (NASPA). 2. It wasn't always called SCRABBLE. Getty Images Butts named his game Lexico, then changed the name to Criss-Cross Words. His friend and eventual business partner James Brunot came up with the name SCRABBLE in the late 1930s. 3. Initially, no game manufacturers would buy SCRABBLE. Hasbro So Butts made the games himself in his garage with Brunot's help, says Chris Cree, co-president of NASPA. “Around 1957, the president of Macy’s saw a game or became familiar with one and placed a huge order that Brunot and Butts couldn’t really fill,” Cree says. “Butts had to sell it to Brunot, who had to sell it to Selchow and Righter, who were the manufactures of the game when I started playing.

And they held it until they sold it to Coleco Industries, which sold it to Hasbro.” 4. Despite its long history, SCRABBLE hasn’t changed much. Getty Images “The previous squares are exactly what they were when I first started off—the same 100 tiles and the same distribution,” Cree says. “That’s something pretty neat about the game. It hasn’t changed one iota and it’s still popular.” Still, there are crazy variations that people play, including one called Clabbers. “That’s the anagram of Scrabble,” Cree says. “You can play words in any order you want to and play the letters in any order you want to as long as the letters can make an anagram of a word.” 5. But the game might not stay the same for much longer. “There was some controversy last year over whether or not—given how much the nature of the game has changed based on the expansion of its playing lexicon in the 60 years that the game has existed—we should still be playing with the same tile values as they get increasingly out of whack compared to the original statistics on which they were based,” Chew says.

“To be specific, there was a major change in the strategy in the game when the word qat was introduced, I think in the 1980s, and more recently, when the word qi was introduced. Playing the game before you had either of these words as options, if you got the Q, you were pretty much stuck with it until you got a U. And even then, you weren’t sure you could score a lot with it. So we would think that whoever got the Q on average was going to get ten or fewer points in their game. Now the Q is a much less negative tile to hold on to, so there are some people who think it should be worth 8 points instead of 10 points.” 6. You can use the word Bingo while playing. Getty Images When players use all seven of their SCRABBLE tiles to make a word, it’s called a bingo. Yell it out to confuse your opponent! 7. NASPA uses different tiles for competition. Charles Goldstein/NASPA “If you reach your hand in a bag of wooden set of tiles, you can kind of feel what doesn’t have anything on it and know it’s a blank,” Cree says.

“We play with smooth tiles to make sure no one can Braille anything.” 8. There are different word lists for different levels of competition. Getty Images If you’re playing at the school level, the competitive level, or the international level, NASPA has different lists. “Those are all sort of inclusively nested so that you just have to learn more words as you get on and on to a higher level,” Chew says. “The nature of the vocabulary changes—if you’re playing at a school level, you’re not allowed to play words that could possibly cause offense, even if used in the most polite situations. If you’re playing at an adult-level, you’re supposed to be able to play any word a well-read college educated person should have seen in print in some way. And then if you want to compete at an international level, you have to memorize things like misprints in Shakespearian manuscripts and Syrian texts, names of various obscure animals and plants from around the world and words in Indian and things like that.” 9. The game is played competitively in other languages—which can make things complicated. Getty Images Chew says he thinks the game is best played in English, though, for a number of reasons.

“Some of the aspects of the board and the rules in terms in the spacing of the bonus tiles and the way you build words is best utilized in English,” he says. “For instance, in French, it’s a little bit too easy to make words because most French words they can stick an E or an S at the end of so, every time you make a word, your opponent just sticks more letters and gets more points. It’s kind of frustrating that way; everyone scores more points overall.” German SCRABBLE players have the opposite problem, Chew says; it’s hard to turn an existing German word into a longer German word, which creates a looser word grid—and led to a debate about whether they should use the standard seven tiles or up it to eight. “There was a substantial body of players who felt that there are relatively few words that are interesting in German that are less than eight letters long,” he says. “There’s no point to playing with just seven letters.” Eventually the dispute was resolved, and today, Germans play with seven letters, just like the rest of the world does. There are also tiles specific to certain countries. “In Spanish, there’s a single tile that has two Ls on it,” Chew says.

“Or Catalan, which has two Ls with a dot in between it, or Dutch, which has an I and a J on it that look a little bit odd to our eyes.” Professional linguists have determined the values of those tiles. 10. NASPA’s Rule Book is 50 Pages Long. Getty Images “Basically every rule that you look at is a result of someone coming up with a weird interpretation or weird situation,” Chew says. If two games are happening at one table, they try to use different colored tiles so they don’t get mixed up (although that sometimes still happens). Each player has 25 minutes total to play his game, and opponents shouldn’t address each other. And there’s computer adjudication of words, too. 11. There have been a few scandals. Charles Goldstein/NASPA Before players start a game, they lay out the 100 tiles—in four groups of 5x5 squares—to make sure all the letters are there. One player, says Cree, allegedly saw the blanks and made sure to pick them out and hide them under his leg. “Various times during the game he would introduce them from underneath his leg to his rack,” he says.

“He was suspected first year of doing so, and it was reported he drew both blanks in 29 out of 31 games. The next year, people were looking for him and he was caught.” There’s also something Chew referred to as the “strip search incident," which occurred during a world championship. "In the world championship, we get a huge cultural divide between the way the people play SCRABBLE in different countries,” he says. “The rules are slightly different around the world, and definitely the etiquette is different around the world." In this particular incident, a Thai player was facing off against a British player. It was near the end of the game "to the point where there were few enough tiles in the bag that they were keeping track of all the tiles they didn’t play, all the tiles that were sitting in front of them on their rack, and tried to figure out what tiles were still in play and work out all the possibilities and maximize their score regardless of what tiles were in the bag," Chew says. "And they realized that there was a tile that was missing from the game.” The players assured the officials that they had counted the tiles as they were supposed to, but that this tile was gone.

“It’s not unheard of for this to happen,” Chew says. “Sometimes people turn the board too energetically or brush up against it and a tile falls off. In this case, whether or not the missing tile was in the bag, or was active in the game, affected the win/loss of the game. It was played in the tournament, so there was a lot riding on it. So the emotions were quite heated because the two players didn’t know each other, and the Thai player didn’t really speak English and couldn’t express himself in English to his opponent. It was a situation where if the tile was not discovered or brought back into play, the Thai player would win and if not, the English player would win.” So someone asked the Thai player to turn out his pockets, which made him very angry; he wanted his opponent to turn out his pockets, too—which the Brit didn’t feel like he should have to do, because there was no advantage for him to hold on to the tile. “Then this escalated to well, maybe it’s not in their pockets, maybe it’s down their pants,” Chew says. “Maybe they should be strip searched. Maybe they should be taken to the bathroom and undergo a thorough examination at that point.

At which point, the British press got a hold of it and I don’t think they ever reported who ended up winning the tournament, but for several days all the tabloids wanted to talk about the missing G.” The missing tile was later found in the coat pocket of a player who had played in the game before. “What happened was, instead of making four 5x5 squares for the players to verify that there are a 100 tiles, these guys made one 9x11 square,” Cree says. “Which when you just sit down and look at what you think is a square and it’s actually a bit of a rectangle, 9x11, 10x10, you just glance at it, it looks fine.” 12. The most valuable tiles depend on your level of play. Getty Images “When you’re at a lower level, you probably want to hang on to higher value tiles because you don’t know enough about board strategy to get double or triple value for the high value tiles," Chew says. "At the lowest level, if you get a blank, all you’re going to score with it is 0.

But if you get even to the bottom rung of competitive play, then the blank becomes by far the most important tile to hang on to. It lets you occasionally make the 50 point bonus for playing all of your tiles. In theory, if you’re paying at your best, or if you’re a computer program, then that blank is worth about 25 points to the average future value of your score.” S is also a good tile to save, Chew says, and a good combination to keep on your rack is “ER or ERS or as many letters in the word RETINAS as you can hold on to.” 13. There are tons of new words getting added to the dictionary this year. Charles Goldstein/NASPA They include geocache, chillax, beatbox, frenemy, hashtag, joypad, mojito, selfie, soju, texter, vodcast, vlog, and yuzu, among others.

But the ones that will make the most difference are the two letter words, Cree says, the addition of which "allows words to fit on the board that otherwise wouldn’t have." The two-letter words being added are gi, po, te, and da, which is actually making a comeback—it was in the first edition of the Scrabble dictionary, but Chew had it removed for the second edition. “I’m a little bit relieved and nervous about da coming back into the dictionary,” he says. “I got [death threats] for about 10 years after it was removed. I’ve learned that if there’s one thing Scrabble players can really get united on—despite the fact that they disagree about everything else—it’s that they don’t want anyone messing with their words. Add new ones if you want, but don’t take away the old ones. Ever since then, I’ve made sure we don’t delete words except in extremely unusual situations, and we definitely don’t mess with the two letter words.” 14. It’s possible to score 1782 points on a single word.

iStock That word is OXYPHENBUTAZONE, and to get the points, player Benjamin Woo played it across the top of the board, hitting three Triple Word Score squares while making seven crosswords downward. More from mental_floss... Scrabble Tile Distribution and Point Values By Erik Arneson Updated September 29, 2016. One of the first things that beginner Scrabble players should learn is the game's tile distribution. It's vital to know that, for example, only one J, K, Q, X and Z are in the bag -- and that they provide the best opportunities for high scores.

Scrabble Tiles Listed by Point Values 0 points: blank/wild (2) 1 point: E (12), A (9), I (9), O (8), N (6), R (6), T (6), L (4), S (4), U (4) 2 points: D (4), G (3) 3 points: B (2), C (2), M (2), P (2) 4 points: F (2), H (2), V (2), W (2), Y (2) 5 points: K (1) 8 points: J (1), X (1) 10 points: Q (1), Z (1) Scrabble Tiles Listed Alphabetically Blank/Wild: 2 tiles, 0 points A: 9 tiles, 1 point B: 2 tiles, 3 points C: 2 tiles, 3 points D: 4 tiles, 2 points E: 12 tiles, 1 point F: 2 tiles, 4 points G: 3 tiles, 2 points H: 2 tiles, 4 points I: 9 tiles, 1 point J: 1 tile

, 8 points K: 1 tile, 5 points L: 4 tiles, 1 point M: 2 tiles, 3 points N: 6 tiles, 1 point O: 8 tiles, 1 point P: 2 tiles, 3 points Q: 1 tile, 10 points R: 6 tiles, 1 point S: 4 tiles, 1 point T: 6 tiles, 1 point U: 4 tiles, 1 point V: 2 tiles, 4 points W: 2 tiles, 4 points X: 1 tile, 8 points Y: 2 tiles, 4 points Z: 1 tile, 10 points Scrabble FAQ: Answers to Your Scrabble Questions | Hasbro (8 points)- J, X (10 points)-Q, Z I looked up a legitimate word using the SCRABBLE online dictionary and it wasn't there.

Why not? The SCRABBLE online dictionary offers only words found in the The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, Fourth Edition which lists over 100,000 playable two- to eight-letter words. For a word to be included in The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary, it must be found in two of the five most popular American dictionaries. Additionally, The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary lists shorter words and longer words are included as inflections of the shorter word. The SCRABBLE online dictionary is only able to search the shorter listings. For example, searching for FOCUS in our online dictionary will also turn up FOCUSED and FOCUSING, but searching for either of the longer words will turn up no results. What are acceptable plays in SCRABBLE? In SCRABBLE, it is acceptable to simply add one or more letters to a word, to either the front or back or to both the front and back. If you want, you can add just an S to a word already on the board. You may play at right angles to a word. You may play parallel to a word as long as adjacent letters form words horizontally and vertically. What is an unacceptable play in SCRABBLE?

You may not play tiles diagonally across the board in SCRABBLE. Note: The tiles you play must be contained in one word or played in a straight line. Can you extend a word in two directions simultaneously in one turn? For instance, ARM is on the board, and I'd like to extend it to CHARMED in one turn? Is that within the rules of SCRABBLE? Yes, it is perfectly acceptable to extend in front of and/or at the end of a word in one turn, as long as all the letters are played in the same turn. So, in this case, since the C, H, E and D are all used to spell CHARMED, it's well within the rules of SCRABBLE to do so. Can I exchange tiles whenever I want? A player may exchange tiles (from one to seven) as long as there are at least seven tiles still in the bag. Decide which tiles you want to exchange first. Then remove them from your rack and place them facedown on the table. Only then may you draw your new tiles, place them on your rack, and replace the exchanged tiles back into the pool. When playing Scrabble, how do I challenge a word played by another player?

When can I challenge? What is the outcome if the challenge is incorrect? Any play may be challenged before the next player starts a turn. If the play challenged is unacceptable, the challenged player takes back his/her tiles and loses that turn (and any score.) If the play challenged is acceptable, the challenger loses his/her next turn. All words (not just one) made in one play are challenged simultaneously. If any word is unacceptable, the entire play is unacceptable. Only one turn is lost on any challenge. When do bonus squares increase the score of a play in SCRABBLE? The bonus is only scored for the player who originally covers the bonus square, and only for the one turn. Subsequent turns that use a letter already covering a bonus square don’t score the bonus points. For example, suppose FAZE is placed with the Z on the Double Word Score square and scores a total of 32 pt. If someone later adds an S to form FAZES, the Double Word Score is NOT counted. How do the remaining or unplayed tiles in SCRABBLE affect scoring? When the game of SCRABBLE ends, each players' total is reduced by the sum of his or her unplayed letters.

In addition, if a player used all letters, the sum of the other players' unplayed letters is added to that player's score. Where can I find a copy of the Official Scrabble Tournament rules? The Official SCRABBLE Tournament rules are available on the SCRABBLE Tournaments page . How much time do players have to make a play during a SCRABBLE game at a club or tournament? There are two commonly accepted methods for controlling the time of a SCRABBLE game. First, a three-minute hourglass may be used to time each play. After 54 minutes the game is over and both players now have one more play before totaling the final scores. Second, chess clocks are set up so that each person is given 25 minutes to complete all his/her turns. That way, a player may play quickly for easy plays and save up time in order to take five or more minutes for the difficult plays. If a player uses more than 25 minutes, then s/he is penalized 10 pt. every minute or fraction of a minute used more than the original 25. Can I purchase a new set of tiles or other replacement parts for my SCRABBLE game?

SCRABBLE replacement parts order forms for both Standard SCRABBLE and SCRABBLE Deluxe Edition for U.S. customers can be found on the Hasbro Customer Care web page. Canadian customers may contact our offices in Canada at 450-670-9820 to discuss the availability and cost of replacement parts. How can I purchase SCRABBLE replacement score pads in the United States and Canada? SCRABBLE replacement score pads can be ordered through Hasbro Customer Care . Stefan Fatsis is the author of Word Freak and A Few Seconds of Panic and is a panelist on Hang Up and Listen . Follow him on Twitter. Any Scrabble player can tell you that the X is actually worth eight points. But as Butts was creating the game, in a fifth-floor walkup in Queens, he tinkered—with the layout of the board, with the total number of tiles, with their distribution, and with their respective point values. “It’s not hit or miss,” Butts said long afterward. “It’s carefully worked out.” Seventy-five years later, Butts’ carefully worked out point values are under attack.

Late last month, a University of California–San Diego, cognitive science postdoc and casual player named Joshua Lewis conducted a computer analysis to recalibrate Scrabble’s letter values based on the game’s current lexicon. Lewis reposted his findings to Hacker News, and they were picked up by Digg and went viral. Around the same time, Sam Eifling, writing for Deadspin, asked a programmer friend to do the same . Both were inspired by the fact that while the language had changed dramatically from the time Butts performed his calculations, the game of Scrabble had not. Advertisement It’s a fair observation. Since Scrabble was adopted in chess parlors in New York in the 1950s, competitive players have dissected its strategic quirks. One early realization was that short words have outsized value, so players scoured the preferred source (the now-defunct Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary) and compiled lists of two- and three-letter words.

They also recognized that the most common letters showed up in a lot of words, so they recorded and memorized seven- and eight-letter words—ones that would earn the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles at once—that contained A, E, I, N, R, S, and T, among other single-point letters. You didn’t need a computer to see that the Q, though worth the most points, was a pain in the rack but the Z not so much. Since the publication in 1978 of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, a compilation of several standard college dictionaries, the game’s word list has grown by tens of thousands of words. From a playing vantage, the addition of QI (a Chinese life force) and ZA (short for pizza) in the last lexicon update, in 2006, were game-changers. Players feared the new words would cheapen Scrabble, boosting scoring and elevating the role of chance. It didn’t happen. The Q became less of a hindrance, a slightly fairer tile than before, and players adjusted strategy to account for the new gimmes.

That need to adjust validates Lewis’ and Eifling’s suspicion that the values assigned to letters aren’t in perfect harmony with the frequency of their use in English or in its narrower subset, the Scrabble word list. The two approached the problem differently. Eifling and software developer Kyle Rimkus totaled the number of letters in Scrabble-eligible words (1.58 million), isolated the frequency of each letter, and then calculated how overvalued or undervalued each letter was compared to its existing point value. Lewis’ approach was more complicated. He weighted letters not only by appearance in the Scrabble lexicon but also by the frequency with which they appear in words of different lengths (with emphasis on two-, three-, seven-, and eight-letter words) and by their ability to “transition” into and out of other letters. The findings don’t differ much. In both analyses, the values of about half the letters change by one or two points. One or the other found that B, C, F, H, K, M, P, X, Y, and Z are overvalued, which makes some intuitive sense.

For instance, the X (eight points) and the Z (10) can be easy money, especially since they occur in a number of short words; bumping them down to six points apiece is a logical move. Similarly, the H was set by Butts at four points, but it now appears in nine two-letter words and combines beautifully with other letters, while the M appears in 12 two-letter words. Living-room players detest the C, but they haven’t studied seven- and eight-letter “bingos,” in which C’s abound. The clunky U and V, by contrast, are undervalued—ratcheting them up to two points and five points respectively seems reasonable. Advertisement While the media pounced on the story (I joined in ), the Scrabble community has been largely unmoved. Why? Several reasons. One, the game’s owners, Hasbro in North America and Mattel overseas, aren’t changing anything. Two, such proposed rejiggerings aren’t new. Three, players understand that variances, in letter values and tile distribution (too many I’s, the Q without a U), are part of the game and strategize accordingly.

Four, there are other, arguably more sophisticated ways to assess tiles values. Five, and most important, adjusting any core variables would create a completely different game requiring different strategies. “It's basically saying, Let’s change the game to make a new game,” Jason Katz-Brown, a software engineer who co-wrote Scrabble’s best computer player, Quackle , told me. Let’s examine the potential effects of the “new” values. In both Lewis’ and Deadspin’s calculations, 10 tiles decrease in value, four increase, and 12 don’t change. More tiles fall in a band of two to five points, bringing the utility of each closer together. The consensus of my math-brained Scrabble colleagues is that this would be like a dose of lithium for the game, flattening scoring and eliminating swings that keep games interesting. Big but still-reasonable values for some tiles, especially the X and Z, are good because they improve the odds of comebacks, make tile positioning a compelling strategic consideration, and give players with lesser word knowledge a slightly better chance against those who are booked up.

“Except for the Q, Josh [Lewis] basically squashes the volatility,” said Eric Chaikin, co-director of the Scrabble documentary Word Wars . “His values take the fun out.” Quackle co-writer John O’Laughlin, a software engineer at Google, said the existing inequities also confer advantages on better players, who understand the “equity value” of each tile—that is, its “worth” in points compared with the average tile. That gives them an edge in balancing scoring versus saving letters for future turns, and in knowing which letters play well with others. “If we tried to equalize the letters, this part of the game wouldn't be eliminated, but it would definitely be muted,” O’Laughlin said. “Simply playing the highest score available every turn would be a much more fruitful strategy than it currently is.” In response to Lewis’ findings , John Chew, co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association and a mathematics doctoral student at the University of Toronto, wrote that Scrabble has always had an “intentional” imbalance between the face value and the equity value of the letters.

Whenever the game’s lexicon changes—a fifth edition of the Scrabble dictionary is due in 2014—players adapt. “The tile values were chosen to make an interesting game, not to accurately represent the statistical properties of a particular lexicon,” he wrote. Advertisement In fact, for Alfred Butts, the face value of the letters was secondary to their distribution. That’s because Butts’ original research was for a word-formation game called Lexiko, which didn’t involve a board and didn’t assign points to individual letters.* In the early 1930s, on spreadsheets containing 26 rows, one for each letter, Butts tallied tens of thousands of letters from the pages of the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Saturday Evening Post. Then he compared the frequency with which the letters occurred, both on their own and as part of words of particular lengths. From those tabulations, he determined how many of each letter should be included in his game. Criss-Cross Words, Alfred Butts' prototype for Scrabble Courtesy National Scrabble® Association.

Butts manufactured and sold a few hundred sets of Lexiko from his Queens walkup, but Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers, among others, rejected it. In 1938, Butts decided to add a board. That’s when he assigned values to letters roughly corresponding with their frequency. Butts’ files, which I read while researching my book Word Freak , contain pages of spreadsheets and notes about letter frequency and tile distribution. But there’s little about how he settled on the point values for his new game, which he named Criss-Cross Words. He did experiment, though. I found one iteration in which the Z was worth nine points; the K and V six; and the B, F, and W five. And there’s the plywood evidence of my six-point X. My conclusion: Butts coupled intuition with direct observation of the game in action—he tested it on his wife and their friends—to arrive at values that he felt balanced equity and volatility. (Not that he would have used those words.) So, for instance, while Butts might have suspected the X was logically worth six points, he understood that eight would make the game more exciting.

Similarly, while Butts included a lexicographically reasonable seven S’s in Lexiko, he knew the letter was so valuable for pluralizing words that he should reduce the number in his board game, which he did, to four. (As with Lexiko, Butts made and sold Criss-Cross Words from his apartment with no success. In 1948, he sold its rights to a small businessman, James Brunot of Newtown, Conn., who renamed, redesigned, and manufactured the game. Five years later, Scrabble became a national sensation. Butts received royalties until 1976. He died in 1993.) Scrabble inventor Alfred Butts Courtesy National Scrabble® Association. Advertisement Lewis and Eifling performed a statistical exercise that can help lay players reconsider particular letters based on the overall lexicon. “Get rid of your J and your Q as quickly as possible, because they’re just damn hard to play and will clog your rack,” Eifling concluded, correctly. A deeper dive would involve valuing each letter based on how it is actually used in Scrabble, because words of certain lengths or lexicographic properties might be more or less useful when playing the game.

Lewis’ program didn’t consider, for instance, longer combinations of letters, or the importance of four- and five-letter words. “The game isn’t about drawing words at random from the dictionary,” Chew wrote. “It’s about actually finding places to play them on the board.” Chew’s and O’Laughlin’s approach to reconsidering the face values of the tiles involves adjusting their equity values. Equity value in Scrabble is similar to advanced baseball stats that compare players to an “average” replacement. Scrabble theorists have been calculating this stat—let’s call it VORT, or Value Over Replacement Tile—since the 1980s. “The Barry Bonds of the Scrabble set,” O’Laughlin said, is the blank, with a VORT of about 25 points. That means a blank plus six random tiles will likely net 25 more points than seven random tiles. At the other end, the Q has the lowest VORT, about -7 points.

To perform a revaluation using VORT, Chew and O’Laughlin would shift the equity value of positive tiles downward and negative tiles upward, have Quackle play thousands of games against itself using those new values, and keep adjusting the values and making Quackle play until the equity of each tile approaches zero. At that point, the tiles could be given corresponding face values, which would be based on how Scrabble is played by the world’s best player. Chew and O’Laughlin said they aren’t interested in conducting that analysis because it would be time-consuming and wouldn’t add to the understanding of the game. But they have begun trading emails with Lewis, who told me he’s eager to work with the Scrabble quants to learn more and find ways to study the statistical properties of the tiles further. Which shows how, in contrast to the way this story is being framed in the media—Scrabble Controversy!—it’s really just a bunch of curious living-room players and super-smart computer guys swapping ideas about game theory and analysis. Lewis isn’t demanding that the game’s manufacturers change anything, just performing an interesting statistical and intellectual exercise.

Still, he does believe, as he wrote in a new post on Wednesday , that tweaking Scrabble’s tile values would “keep the intentional luck in the game and remove the unintentional luck that has crept in over time as the use of English has changed.” He’s perplexed as to why competitive Scrabble players wouldn’t favor mediating some of the luck, because that might make the results of games and tournaments more accurate. I can answer that. Because Scrabble players understand that the game’s inequities are on the margins, and that figuring them out is a crucial part of learning to play well. And we respect, and are in fact awed by, how Alfred Butts, without the benefit of computer programs and language databases, came damn close to nailing both letter distribution and letter valuation, and in the process created a game that exquisitely, often maddeningly, balances skill and luck. Making the X worth six points won’t improve on that. Correction, Jan. 19, 2013: This article originally misspelled the name of Alfred Butts’ first word game, Lexiko.

Question: In the game of Scrabble, the ‘C’ tile is worth how many points?
Answer: 3