The quirks of computer tile selection

I think I've blogged about this before but I'm going to blog about it again.

In my goal to use every single word in the Scrabble Dictionary, I play a lot of games online at Wordbiz.com.  (You play real people from around the world, but it's the computer that hands out the tiles.)

And whenever I win, 90% of the time, it seems that I win because I get all the good letters - that'd be the power letters, and my opponent gets nothing. And whenever I lose, it's the other way around. Very rarely...maybe 5 to 10% of the time, if that, are the tiles distributed evenly so that it really comes down to skill and knowledge as to who is going to win.

Yesterday I challenged a guy ranked 100 points above me. I wasn't worried. I've got the knowledge to be ranked 100 points higher than I am. Plus I'd won 5 games in a row.

So I'm playing a guy ranked in the 600s while I'm in the 500s...and I get nothing. 6 vowels and 1 consonant or vice versa. I'm reduced to playing very simple words because that's all I could play. He beat me by a hundred points. VERY ANNOYING.

But, I don't get too upset... after all my main goal is to cross off word after word in the dictionary. (Indeed, on more than one occasion I've passed up a high-scoring word in order to play something off another word - a conjugation of it - to make sure I can cross that word off. So that plays havoc with my scores on occasion!)