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When I meet someone, and it comes out we're both Scrabble players, the next thing I usually hear is, "How many points do you score in a game?" Then I find myself explaining once again that points per game is not a very telling statistic under the best of circumstances, and in the case of someone like me who plays a mix of two-, three- and four-person games, is completely worthless.
The Scrabble statistic that always does the job is average Points Per Turn (PPT), and why the Scrabble world has not embraced it ranks up with the great mysteries of the universe.
Just as your batting average in baseball tells how likely you are to make a hit in any trip to the plate, your PPT in Scrabble tells how many points you're likely to score on any turn.
As good as the analogy is, there's a profound difference. In baseball, batting average tells only part of the story. One player may bat .320 hitting mostly singles; another may have the same average with a goodly number of doubles and home runs mixed in. Then again, a player may have a stellar batting average, but be a very weak fielder or runner.
In Scrabble, your Points Per Turn average is everything.
To understand why I say this, lets return to the more familiar Points Per Game statistic. Besides being a very coarse statistic, it's hardly interesting because the total points that can be scored is more or less limited regardless of how good you get.
Think about it: a Scrabble game always uses up the same tiles on the same board with the same pattern of premium squares. That yielded about 620 points per game back in the days of the first OSPD. (It would be somewhat greater now with the addition of QI, QAT, ZA, etc. I don't have data to work with for play with OSPD4.) Two novice players may take 21 turns to get there, while better players may take only 16. But they end up at the same spot. Heck, if two chickens could be taught to kick Scrabble tiles onto a Scrabble board, they would score in the same ballpark. (Be advised: sometimes I exaggerate ever so slightly to make a point and wake the reader up.)
Yes, there can be exceptional games where every power tile gets counted six times, but such games owe far more to the luck of the draw than developed skill. I'm assuming even those "novice" players above know how to look around the board for bright, colorful squares when they get an X, Q, Z, etc.
Expert players score significantly higher, but that's almost wholly due to their higher bingo production. Take away those 50-point bonuses and their final scores would look much like ours. Put the other way around, if you did detect a small upward creep in your average Points Per Game, it would be mainly due to increased bingo production. And that's something which would be more fun and useful to track directly.
Scrabble is about grabbing up those limited, available points in as big handfuls as possible - and that's exactly what Points Per Turn measures. Just add up all the points you score and divide by the turns taken. Ignore the adjustment for the leftover tiles, but you must count your 0-point turns! If you traded tiles, you did so for the sake of future points. If you got caught playing a bum word, well, that was a strikeout!
We've talked about batting average and PPT. There is another fantastic difference. A batting average only makes sense in the context of the "league" in which you play. A 12-year-old slugger batting .564 in his Little League probably wouldn't do so well against Major League pitching.
Your PPT in Scrabble, on the other hand, is almost rock-steady no matter what level of competition you find yourself in. After all, what difference does it make whether the board you are stewing over was cobbled together by experts or by duffers? Ironically, if you are a recreational player with a 19.6 PPT, say, you would probably see it rise a hair against experts, since their longer words open up more scoring opportunities for you.
Since there are so many turns in a game, a very meaningful PPT can be calculated in just a few games. It doesn't depend on games always being one-on-one. It would not be affected by a game being cut short, or games using more than 100 tiles. (In my club, we scoop a fresh set of about 110 tiles for each game from a mixture of three standard sets.)
I am not proposing that Points Per Turn replace the National Scrabble Association rating system, although I do think one would be hard-pressed to explain how the player with the best PPT average wouldn't also have the highest rating. If you score more points per turn than anyone else, then you are the greatest Scrabble player on earth. (Congratulations!)
PPT and rating can coexist easily. But while the rating is for tournament players only and involves an inscrutable calculation, PPT is for everyone - from kitchen-table player up to world champion.
PPT is simplicity itself. It shows you how your point production improves over time. It gives the most meaningful basis of comparison between yourself and all other Scrabble players. It provides a benchmark to gauge the play you just made. ("Uh oh, I only scored 30 points there. Now I gotta make 36 on the next one!")
So PPT is useful, you say, but that doesn't make it "everything". My claim is that there is no appreciable defense element to Scrabble play. Scrabble is very nearly a 100% offensive competition. As I said above, your mission is to grab up points while you can. Nobody can hope to get through a game of Scrabble keeping his opponent off the premium squares all the while. If you make a play just to tie things up, you are slitting your own throat as much as your opponent's. Of course, there are stupid things you don't want to do, but I hardly count that as playing defensively.
I have found that few, if any, Scrabble players agree with me on this point. The best I can do is offer a invitation. Stop on by for a game. All of your attention will be on defense. You will play solely to keep me from scoring points. You won't even tally up your own plays. See if you can keep me from reaching the mid-300s, or, more to the point, see how far below my current PPT you can drag me.
Looking ahead to when the Scrabble world does avail itself of PPT, let me propose a few auxiliary statistics. Scrabble points come from two totally different places, so to speak. There are "regular" Scrabble points which derive from the tile values and premiums on the board, and there are "bonus" points for making bingos. It would be useful and interesting to keep separate track of them.
We might call Regular Points Per Turn "RPT", and Bonus Points Per Turn "BPT". Then your total Points Per Turn, PPT, is simply the sum of the two: PPT=RPT+BPT. Another very interesting statistic, Mean Turns Between Bingos (MTBB), falls out directly from BPT: MTBB=50/BPT. In practice, you would just keep track of your total points scored, the turns taken, and the number of bingos played to work up any of these statistics.
Now, then, what's your PPT?
In case the Points Per Turn statistic sounds so obvious that you have a hard time believing it's not used by Scrabble players, consider a few observations culled at the time of writing this, May 2009.
A Google search on - scrabble "points per turn" - turned up only 62 hits (after Google weeds out "very similar" pages.) Several of these pages were, in fact, duplicates. Eleven of the hits were my own writings, either from my own web site, or pages that drew from my posts to rec.games.board.
The PPT mentions of any interest were only with respect to a single game, or perhaps a set of games, never a running statistic indicating a specific player's skill.
There were a couple of mentions in the book "Everything Scrabble", by Joe Edley, and one of those was lifted into Hasbro's Scrabble FAQ. It does not appear to get a mention in the 372 pages of everybody's favorite Scrabble book, "Word Freak", by Stefan Fatsis.
For the record, I calculated the PPT statistic for members of the Bowie Scrabble Club (Maryland) right from the start in mid-1985. And discussion of PPT was part of my original Scrabble page, which went up on the web as soon as I got internet access in 1997.
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