one for joc -
A trio of words -- one that\'s slang for pizza, another defined as a body\'s vital life force and a third referring to a snoring sound -- have conspired to change the game of Scrabble.
Za," "qi" and "zzz" were added recently to the game\'s official word list for its original English-language edition. Because Z\'s and Q\'s each have the game\'s highest point value of 10, those monosyllabic words can rack up big scores for relatively little effort. So now that those high-scoring letters are more versatile, some Scrabble aficionados would like to see the rules changed -- which would be the only change since Alfred Butts popularized the game in 1948.
For non Scrabble-rousers, there are analogs for the proposed re-evaluations in other leisure pursuits. Some notable mispriced assets: Vermont Avenue in Monopoly, three-point field goals in basketball and football and overtime losses in hockey. Yet traditionalists say rules should endure; it\'s up to players to exploit them.
In Scrabble, players form words on a 15-by-15-space board using 100 tiles -- two of them blanks that can stand in for any letter, and 98 tiles with letters and corresponding point values. Players draw seven tiles to start the game and refresh their set after each turn.
Mr. Butts, without aid of spreadsheets, marked up newspaper articles and counted the letters in common words, according to Stefan Fatsis, author of "Word Freak." The inventor confirmed what typesetters and cryptologists had long known: E is the most common letter in English, and Q, J, X and Z are among the least-common letters. Mr. Butts included more tiles for the most-common letters and assigned the least-common letters more points because of the relative difficulty of forming words around them.
Competitive Scrabble players admire the durability of that technique, which is preserved in game editions in other languages, including Indonesian and Estonian. Yet while a basic Scrabble set hasn\'t changed since its initial marketing, its maker, Hasbro Inc., has approved expansions of the playable-word list. The most recent update, the fourth version, made way for "za" and its ilk, making the rare letters easier to play.
For some -- especially opponents -- "za" is too cheap and easy. The New Yorker recently published a letter from Matthew Butterick, a Los Angeles lawyer and Scrabble player, bemoaning the preservation of the original tile values as long as the new words are being added. He acknowledges changing the rules might hurt his won-loss record: "I realized that fewer people wanted to play me because I like to use words like \'xi\' and \'xu,\' which most casual players consider to be a form of black magic."
Larry Sherman, who has been ranked as high as 35th by the National Scrabble Association, also would like to see score changes. "X, Q, Z and J were originally assigned high values because of their rarity in our language," Mr. Sherman says. "Dictionary additions that make it much easier to use these letters contradict the game\'s internal logic."
But his brother Joel, a former champion, responds, "Good players adapt their play to the changes in the dictionary; changing the values only accommodates weak players."
Other games also find it difficult to extend the same set of rules across both casual competitors and the world\'s best while preserving the value of the games\' basic scoring system. Consider football and basketball, which award three points for field goals -- in football, for kicks between the uprights, and in basketball, for shots from behind a designated spot on the court.
For amateurs, these are hard points to come by. But as professional kickers have specialized and improved their technique, field goals have become more common. National Football League teams last season made nearly 85% of field goals, compared with barely 60% in 1974, according to Brian Burke of Advanced NFL Stats. There were two successful field goals for every three touchdowns last season, compared with barely two for every five touchdowns in 1974.
In college basketball, meanwhile, three-point shots are falling with about the same level of accuracy of closer jump shots, even though they\'re worth 50% more. To address this, the three-point line has been moved away from the basket by a foot, as college-hoops fans may notice during March Madness. Yet shots from 21 feet and 22 feet, the shortest three-point distances, were accurate more than 37% of the time this season -- easier than those from any distance between five feet and 19 feet from the basket, according to college-basketball analyst Ken Pomeroy.
In 2000, the National Hockey League began rewarding teams for ties at the end of regulation by granting a point in the league standings to teams that lose in overtime. That makes overtime games worth one more point than other games, because winners of any game get two points. In the nine seasons since that rule change, the probability of games going to overtime has increased by 21% compared with the nine seasons before the change, according to Justin Kubatko, vice president of Sports Reference LLC, as teams have scrambled to hold on for overtime and the guaranteed point it confers.
And in Monopoly, paying $50 for that hotel on Vermont Avenue pays itself off in fewer than 15 rolls of the dice by your opponent, compared with more than 40 rolls for other hotel-adorned squares, according to simulations of 32 billion rolls by Truman Collins.
These imbalances could theoretically be addressed by narrowing the football goalposts, bringing the three-point line closer to the basket and raising some Monopoly prices. But removing these strategic advantages, and the ability for smarter players to exploit them, can make a game boring, some say.
"If there was no discrepancy, it would be less fun," says competitive Monopoly player David Myers.
Changing the rules also devalues the record books. And there will always be an element of luck in Scrabble so long as there is a random draw. Brian Sheppard, who has programmed Scrabble games, says, "The fact that tiles aren\'t all equally valuable is what makes things interesting."
It\'s also not obvious how to recalculate Scrabble letter frequency and values. Though certain words have entered the lexicon, the basic hierarchy of letters has shown remarkable resilience. A worksheet Mr. Butts used to tabulate his letter-frequency studies from periodicals such as the New York Times and Saturday Evening Post shows that about 12 of every 10,000 letters were Q\'s, and 12 of every 100 were E\'s. Those numbers hardly changed for a collection of nearly four million words from 2002 Times articles assembled by the American National Corpus.
There are more sophisticated approaches. Mr. Butterick, the New Yorker letter-writer, suggests using simulated games to figure out tile values that would bring today\'s game in line with the original version. Alternately, as some Scrabble scientists have suggested, you could adjust scores upward or downward based on how lucky, or unlucky, players were in their tile draw.
Take such an approach and "you might end up with a game more challenging and logical from the Scrabble expert\'s point of view," says Jim Harrison, who helps design editions of the game in other languages, "but not for those of us who are mere mortals."
With the aid of neither a calculator nor computer, Alfred Butts tabulated the frequency of letters in words of various length, and used the numbers to design his word game of enduring popularity. Click on the image to see a larger version.
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