Quick thoughts

[baxwest]

I had never seen the name Brett Smitheram before today. I am so out of touch, even inside the small provincial world I live in.

Just judging from the scores at the Causeway tournament (which Mr. Smitheram leads), it seems as though there are many blowouts and very few tightly contested games. I realize this is a cursory judgement and an unscientific

Comments

[jalapic]

Brett's has been putting in top results in the UK for at least 10 years. i think he won the UK nationals in 2000 (he did - i just looked it up)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Scrabble_Championship_(UK)

[hector31]

JG in OZ, November 1999, Day 15. I hope he never takes this stuff off the web, it's highly re-consumable.

After loading up on stuff, run into Brett Smitheram, who has brought a set and is flying Greek airlines or something back to London. We play speed scrabble, and I get smoked.

[jigsawn]

It would be interesting to see average margin of victory data for Collins and TWL tournament Scrabble, which would give us some objective hold on the issue you bring up. Otherwise, one may be liable to see what one wants to see. Let me be clear that I bring up this caveat as much for myself as for you.

Based only on a superficial glance at the scores, I just don't see it. I'm guessing statistically that since Collins games tend to have slightly higher scores, they also probably have slightly higher variances, and thus slightly higher margins of victory on the average as well. But it doesn't seem to me, prima facie, that the scores are all that different from what we see in TWL tournaments at the top level. Just glancing at the leader Brett Smitheram's scores (whose results you would expect to be very skewed in his favour), it looks like he's had some big blowouts, but also quite a few close games, including two victories by a single point.