Video Scrabble at Foxwoods

Has anyone come across a strategy to play video scrabble? This was recently featured at Foxwoods:

http://www.videoscrabble.com/index.html

The link shows what it looks like. I noticed a number of people losing a ton of money on these machines. I assume they were playing a less optimal strategy. I broke even out of pure luck.

From what I can see, the pay table is based on the number of points you score. Essentially you have to make a decision to keep the points in the first word vs the points that you could get on the second turn. I couldn't think about any basic strategy that would help as you would need to calculate probabilities to get letters that would form words.

I would assume that the only way to calculate any kind of strategy is to simulate millions of plays. I would imagine the manufacturer did this simulation.

Very cool and clever concept however, and I can see how this would totally catch on.

One of my favorite slot machines was a good ol' nickel 5 credit Wheel of Fortune slot machine that would actually assign you letters to a phrase in a bonus round. They were very popular where I played but they disappeared within about 6 months.

I played this game recently, and it definatly is a lot of fun. I too have been looking for someway to come up with optimal stratagy. I feel that because of the huge amount of less then optimal play then they could allow for a higher return. I was trying to keep higher value tiles since you only get 7 tiles in which to use and you have to score over 13 points to get a payout. Anyway whatever the optimal stratagy would be would have to be very complicated since there are so many combinations, and is probably unlikely to come out but I am still hopeful.

Hello again. So I was working on an optimal strategy and stumbled upon some interesting statistics. Perhaps you guys/gals can check my logic and tell me if you agree with the absurdity of the odds?

1.) I took what I believe to be the Official Tournament Word List of ~178,000+ words:

2.) I excluded the words exceeding 7+ letters, since you only draw 7 tiles and can't have an 8 letter word, leaving me a balance of 53,902.

3.) I adjusted the population for the words for the values assigned to each tile and excluding everything under 13pts, since you don't qualify if you can't hit 13 or more pts. This leaves me with 12,832 words.

4.) Then I excluded the words that have letters exceeding the tile count. 98 tiles, but you won't have a word like PIZZAZZ, since they only give you 1 letter "Z". This brings me down to 12,275 qualifying words.

And here's the ultimate kicker of the 98 tiles available on a 7 letter draw, the total possible number of 7 letter combinations is 98*97*96*95*94*93*92 = 69,725,442,286,080. WOAH! We're in the trillions. So the probability of being dealt a winning hand prior to the draw/tile replacement is less than one ten millionth of one percent ( 0.00000001760). Yikes, do you agree with the logic?

Quote: Asswhoopermcdaddy

Hello again. So I was working on an optimal strategy and stumbled upon some interesting statistics. Perhaps you guys/gals can check my logic and tell me if you agree with the absurdity of the odds?

1.) I took what I believe to be the Official Tournament Word List of ~178,000+ words:

2.) I excluded the words exceeding 7+ letters, since you only draw 7 tiles and can't have an 8 letter word, leaving me a balance of 53,902.

3.) I adjusted the population for the words for the values assigned to each tile and excluding everything under 13pts, since you don't qualify if you can't hit 13 or more pts. This leaves me with 12,832 words.

4.) Then I excluded the words that have letters exceeding the tile count. 98 tiles, but you won't have a word like PIZZAZZ, since they only give you 1 letter "Z". This brings me down to 12,275 qualifying words.

And here's the ultimate kicker of the 98 tiles available on a 7 letter draw, the total possible number of 7 letter combinations is 98*97*96*95*94*93*92 = 69,725,442,286,080. WOAH! We're in the trillions. So the probability of being dealt a winning hand prior to the draw/tile replacement is less than one ten millionth of one percent ( 0.00000001760). Yikes, do you agree with the logic?

Not quite. The total number of combinations is 98 * 97 * 96 * 95 * 94 * 93 * 92 / (7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1). The total number of combinations is 13,834,413,152, still nothing to sneeze at, still in the trillions. So the odds of getting a seven letter word is 1,127,040:1.

Excellent analysis.

Wife played it last weekend at Fwoods. Played 3 min up about $30 and she cashes out. I ask why and she says it's boring.

I certainly dont know anything about the math, but I played for about an hour and got dealt winning tiles before the draw many times so either the deal is not random or the math is off because a winning "rack" before the draw was not uncommon