Hey Guys! I'm Mack Meller, the 2024 North American Scrabble Champion and #1 ranked player in North America. I played my first tournament at 10 years old and have continued to enjoy the game since for its strategic complexity, excitement, and great community of players.
My main goal with this channel is to grow the game overall and, in particular, to help people improve and find joy in playing. My content includes instructional videos, crazy in-game positions, and cool variants, among lots of other fun things.
Check out my website at mackmeller.com for more info about me. I do private Scrabble lessons (including with kids -- it's a great way to improve vocabulary and math skills), as well as group presentations, so please reach out if at all interested or with any other questions or feedback!
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12:12 Wouldn't yAUTIAS give back huge plays on the B column, that are probably easier to hit than huge plays in the A column after AmAUTIS ? (A bingo would probably put the game out of reach even without a TW, so the concern is these 30+ point plays with DL/TW or TL/DW, and these seem more common on the B column.)
What scrabble site is he using?
woogles.io!
@@mackmeller Thanks!!
you call those "mistakes"? cmon bruh 🤣🤣
If you have a high-scoring tile like the Z, it makes sense to place COVE that way, making sure that it can't be all blocked easily, as there are no parallel plays to COVE. This almost ensures good score for your tile.
The Scrabble Swiftie crossover is 👌🏻 Great video, thanks!
I hear that phrase ALL the time on the golf course
Haha when I was like 10 I was golfing with my dad, 13th hole of our local course. I was probably 60 yards off in the rough. Absolutely skulled my chip with a pitching wedge, it scurries through a bunch of rough and across the green, slams into the flagstick, and abruptly stops and drops into the whole!
what site do you use to play scrabble?
it's woogles.io
woogles.io!
Not only would it normally be shocking that you would chicken out of TITULARY, but TITULARY is not just some random word. It's one of the words that I famously set up in my patented one-short-of-the-TWS openings. It should be required Scrabble History knowledge to know of all of these opening plays. TITULaR H8 against Amnuay Ploysangngam at 2014 Nationals (annotated game 19245 on cross-tables) was I think my first time doing such a thing. Ironically, RUTTILy is probably the best play in that position, and I had absolutely no clue regarding its validity. But I'm me... :)
I'm sorry I let you down my friend 🙁. If you send me a full list of all of these I promise I'll make a video on it in order to make up for my sins
Well played Mack. Great videos. Keep to em coming.
Was doubting TITULARY a similar thought process to doubting HONEY - intuitively assessing its validity as an adjective and looking past the noun? (TITULARY is probably valid both ways; but it looks pretty suspicious as an adjective, while the noun is more common ["full royal titulary", etc.])
Hmm, maybe -- I definitely was thinking it was an adjective if it was valid, though I could also see the noun being just TITULAR as TITULARS is valid
Everyone else's definition of luck: "I missed seventy bingos but I won anyway" Mack's definition: "I lowered my win chance by 1/36 but didn't get punished" Goes to show how crazy the standard is at the top. If this was one of the biggest mistakes of your tournament it's no wonder you won it all
Haha, in all seriousness though it's not so much that I squandered 1/36 win %, it's that I was unsure of an 8-letter word, which is wholly, completely, absolutely, utterly, and entirely unacceptable
Big fan. I’d love to see a series of you ”speedrunning” the ”spelling bee” game from the newyork times.
Thanks, and that's a great idea!
I typically stop trying when I'm down 170 pts. To me, the interesting thing about this game is not that you got lucky after making a suboptimal play in the endgame, it's that you won at all. For me, being down 170 pts at any point in the game against a top expert like Jason Li would mean there's no hope of winning at all.
It actually bothers me when people stop putting full effort when they get behind. Like the spread still matters and it's unfair when the winner gets a bunch of free spread, when others don't get to play against someone not trying their best.
@@JasonVaysberg At major tournaments, I guess I still try when I get behind for the reason that some people get upset if I stop trying. But otherwise in most of the tournaments I've been in, I've never felt like I had any chance at winning a cash prize, and even if I did, it wouldn't be a significant amount of money, so I rarely care about spread.
@@JasonVaysberg Only thing I would add since it's unclear from my original post, is when I say "I stop trying" it's not like I'm just playing crap plays quickly but it's more that I'm not actually trying to win the game once it gets in that range.
@@asdfasdf4924but it does happen fairly regularly that someone comes back from a 150 (2 bingo) deficit - it's one of the cool things about the way the game is designed.
Was that picture on thumbnail from 2018 or something?
Haha nope it was from this past SPC!
What if I'm neither? Double negative equals a positive, right?
not if you add them :P
with that opening rack, I was hoping that the bot would give you an E or an R to test your vision of FJORD and FJELD 😉
Hahaha I should just have an internal alarm that goes off whenever I have F and J on my rack at this point
this best bot seems to be getting better but it makes it all the more exciting when you get a win. well done 🎉
Thanks! Yeah was about time I finally beat this thing haha, been a while 😂
The blank power tiles thing reminds me of the time i had a rack of IIUUST? and my only playable bingo was through a J and making the blank a second J. (didn't see it)
Whoa that's wild... INUKSUIT would've been pretty cool too if it'd played!
Is trackmania a word?
I'm afraid not, unfortunately, as it's a proper noun and those aren't typically valid unless they have another meaning. Thanks for watching btw! (guessing you came from Wirtual haha)
@@mackmeller I did come from wirtual I did watch the video and I did enjoy this video 😁
Yayyy! Mack won! Here is Macondo analysis: JOG is best, VAX sims 4th (29.42%) behind LAV(AGE) and LOV(AGE) (30.26%, 30.43%) and FOLD wins sim with 30.98%. OWED, SHIPME(N)T, UTERUsE, STRETTE, and CONIN all sim best! MILIA sims ahead of MILCH (99.25% vs 98.85%). Pre-endgame was perfect, endgame was 1 single point away from perfection. Well played, Mack.
Good stuff, thanks!!
You’d think after following this series for a while now, I’d have remembered which Collins 2 letter words are not valid, but I still keep forgetting.
If it makes you feel better, earlier this summer I was commentating a CSW game with Matt Canik, and I had to be like "wait, Matt, DI is a word in Collins, right?" 🤣
Hey, Mack. Have you ever done/thought about doing a bot vs bot match? I've been using Scrabulizer (with results sorted by value) against HastyBot. Did 6 matches and the results were 3-3. Maybe an interesting video idea, unless you've done it already of course.
I have not but I'll definitely keep it in mind, thanks!
29:45 D(I)SP(I)RI(T)ED!
Sick!
My college made up a 3-letter word with a Q and a V in it (vaq).
I play blank J's more than I should, since whenever I have RETINA?, I play NARTJIE, or NAARTJIE if I get the chance, just to be funny. I like playing words that people rarely see, even at a sacrifice of points.
On not seeing the STRETTE placement with (KAVA)S earlier: before the bot played KID, KAVA was AVA, which doesn't take an S (in the North American lexica).
Ah, good point, I had specifically been thinking there was no S hook for a while so the adjustment probably did throw me off
MACK
SPOILER!! Get in there! Well done.
8:48 wouldn't the X show up more often as a blank because of the EX prefix? great video btw
Thanks! Maybe, though I still feel like -IZE with a blank Z shows up a lot more than EX-. It's quite possible X would at least beat J because of that, there really aren't any prefixes or suffixes with a J
@@mackmeller Hi Mack! Good way to end a bad streak! talking about -IZE How underrated / overrated do you think the -IZE suffix is? (without blanks)
wow, j q x z all drawn almost immediately
The unlucky streak is broken!
Finally! Let's hope I can keep it up
29:42 I went and checked, and with your unseen tiles, B(I)OP(I)RA(T)ES, (I)RR(I)GA(T)ION, and D(I)SP(I)RI(T)ED all fit, with BIOPIRATES and DISPIRITED being double-doubles for 106
I kinda like FOLD better than VAX. The V doesn't go that bad with the X (VAX, VEX, VOX all valid, and there are other words with V and X together) and you're getting 28 and turning one more tile, you're taking the big spot for double doubles as well as the hooks for -AGE away. It just seems better
“Oh ship!-ment” made me laugh out loud haha. I do have a mental age of about 10, but it did sound a little naughty
Holy ship!
Just 3 of the 24 turns this game were vertical plays (two by the bot and one by Mack), with the remaining 21 all being horizontal plays. I'm not sure how common of an occurrence this is but I found it interesting.
I don't have actual stats but that feels pretty unusual -- interesting observation!
9:20 (O)UTqUEER (to be comparatively more queer than another) 13:55 NONCHIM(P) (the state of not being a chimp) 29:53 B(I)OP(I)RA(T)ES (an unauthorized group who performs theft from biological resources)
Now that you are champion, you represent humanity against BestBot =P
I'm doing my best!
BIOPIRATES 👀
Ooh nice!
Definitions of Interesting Words Played in Game 24: BAIZA (38 pts) [noun] - variant spelling of "baisa"; a monetary unit of Oman equivalent to ¹/₁₀₀₀ rial [from a Hindi-derived colloquial Arabic word] ONIONY (39 pts) [adjective] - flavored with or tasting or smelling of onions [from a Latin-derived French word plus an English combining form] FRAE (30 pts) [preposition] - (Scottish) from [from Old Norse] SHIPMENT (92 pts) [noun] - the act or process of shipping, the delivery of goods to a carrier for transportation [formed from English and Latin-derived French combining forms] ELATIVES (82 pts) [noun] - plural of "elative"; in linguistics, either the absolute superlative or a grammatical case denoting motion away from UTERUSES (59 pts) [noun] - a plural of "uterus"; an organ in female mammals for containing and usually for nourishing the young during development previous to birth that during pregnancy undergoes remarkable increase in size and change in the condition of its walls [from Latin] KAVA (31 pts) [noun] - an Australasian shrubby pepper (Piper methysticum) from whose crushed root an intoxicating beverage is made [from Tongan, an Austronesian language of the South Pacific] STRETTE (79 pts) [noun] - in music, a technique in counterpoint often employed at the end of a fugue in which statements of the subject enter at shorter time intervals than at the opening so as to overlap [French, from Italian] GNAR (25 pts) [intransitive verb] - snarl, growl (used chiefly of dogs) [of imitative origin] CONIN (20 pts) [noun] - variant spelling of "coniine"; a liquid alkaloid C8H17N with a penetrating odor and burning taste that is found in the poison hemlock and is a powerful poison that paralyzes the motor nerves; 2-propyl-piperidine [made up of Greek and Latin parts] LEU (16 pts) [noun] - the basic monetary unit of Romania and Moldova [Romanian, from Latin] MILCH (24 pts) [adjective] - (of a domestic animal) giving milk, specifically bred for or suitable for milk production as distinct from other uses (as meat or wool production or draft) [from Old English] GAPY (28 pts) [adjective] - of or relating to a disease of young chickens, turkeys, and other birds in which nematode worms (Syngamus trachea) invade and irritate the trachea causing coughing and labored breathing often with the neck extended and the beak open [from an Old Norse word plus an English combining form] BIRSE (24 pts) [noun] - (chiefly Scottish) a bristle or tuft of bristles, anger [perhaps from Old English]
That's a lot of interesting words! Thanks as always for sharing! And BAIZA and LEU a testament to the Josh Sokol-ism "when in doubt it's a monetary unit"
I have a beautiful idea for something fun you can do with a human opponent… a “Bingo Derby”, in a similar style to a Home Run Derby in baseball. Every turn has to be a bingo, otherwise you have to exchange or pass. How would that change strategy??? How would you avoid (or encourage) a six-pass?
@@hypnovia I’d love to do this! The issue (as you alluded to) is Woogles doesn’t allow disabling six-pass, and with that games would end prematurely very often
SPOILERS😂
44:10 you have GAYBUSH* on your rack. rhymes with MAYBUSH...
The COPER/COOER/etc endgames got me wishing CONER* was valid. That's a slang we used in the (US) submarine fleet to mean the people who worked primarily in the front of the submarine, which is called the cone.
OERLIKON# - (Swiss) a type of antiaircraft cannon [n -S]
@@jellomochas I remember you pointing this out in the postmortem in person - wild
I guess kilo wins much more than 50% considering Chris probably didn't play bah with 3 ds, and likely kept an o.
@@redreoicy6698 Yeah very true, with DAH available he probably had 1 or maybe 2 Ds at most
I also have a Scrabble channel where I mostly analyse games from major events like Nationals, I'm in the process of going over all the games for Word Cup. For those blowout games you talked about, I tend to just analyse the game until it's clear that I have no hope (for the games where I am the blowout winner I'll sometimes just showoff just for fun)
I saw gnaw straight away (please disregard the fact that it was because you mentioned aperies front hooks like half a minute earlier and that I wouldn't have spotted waxen even if it was better)
On the other hand: if Ian went first you might have drew better to win much more easily
@@Николай-э6ф true, we’ll never really know what would’ve been different, but it’s interesting to think about
for those wondering just how much of a boost going first in a BO5 series is, assuming an even matchup, it's a little under 2%. If each game were 50-50, then it would be 37.5% for the series to reach game 5, which is the only situation that the going-first advantage matters. Technically, it's slightly higher, because we know each player gets 2 firsts in those first 4 games, so there are two 55% wins and two 45% wins for each, but that only bumps the odds up to 37.8% of reaching a game 5. In that situation, the player going first in game 5 has a 5% increase in win%, and 37.8% of 5% is about 1.9%. Therefore the person going first in a bo5 series has about a 51.9% chance to win it. That might not seem like a lot, but when a huge Scrabble tournament (and $10000) is on the line, it sure seems nice.
Well, there were $5,000 on the line since that's the difference between the money for first and second place... but that still means that winning the game shown in the video increased Mack's expected winnings at the tournament by $190 😀
Thank you for the analysis. This is straight math. Also Mack's game 1 and game 2 loss counters the dogma. But, one could argue having a greater chance of winning game 1 may change the odds over real life progression of BO5 series. 😛
@@5cr4bb13 Thanks for going through that! I guess this game was really a 4% swing then in my final win %, from 48 to 52. Not huge but definitely not meaningless!
7:40 I like how you took the time to explain that you scoring 100 points would be bad for your opponent 🙃
Haha, I read this comment before watching the video, and I was picturing him spending 15 seconds explaining WHY it's bad😂
@@AlexDings But it would be good for my opponent’s opponent! 😀