Carlsen Retains World Chess Champion Title By Winning Tiebreak

Wow! On his 26th birthday, Magnus Carlsen was able to defend his world chess championship title over a challenge from Russian Sergey Karjakin by winning the 4-game rapid chess (25 minutes plus 10 seconds per move) match 3-1 today. After two draws, Carlsen won the last two games, finishing the very last game with a flashy Queen sacrifice which forces mate in two moves! (Do you see it?)

Today is National Chess Day!

Today, October 13, 2012, is National Chess Day!

Scrabble™ turns 60 today!

Accordng to National Public Radio, the word game Scrabble™ was granted a copyright on December 16, 1948. Scrabble™ was created by Alfred E. Butts in 1938 as Lexiko. It is the most popular board game in the United Kingdom. It has gained popularity with free online versions (like at the International Scrabble Club and Scrabulous Lexulous).

MadProfessah is a big fan of board games like Chess and Scrabble™. Congratulations on your 60th birthday, Scrabble™! My favorite Scrabble™ memory was playing AST(E)RNAL through two triple letter word scores for 98 points as my last word to end (and win) the game!

Checkers Is Solved

According to the Los Angeles Times, scientists at the University of Alberta have completely solved checkers. They have written a computer program which has enumerated all 500,995,484,682,338,672,639 possible board configurations and shown that with best play, the game of checkers is a draw. Their computer program, named Chinook, can not be defeated by any human player. Marion Tinsley, a mathematics professor who is widely regarded as the best checkers player who ever lived lost two games to Chinook, while only losing seven other games in a forty-five year career of competitive checkers.

Word of the Week: SALTERNS

Recently I have been playing Scrabble online at the Internet Scrabble Club for awhile now. Did you know there are exactly 95 legal 2-letter words? Well, it depends on which word list that you use. I am talking about the TWL98 which contains 169,092 words and is based on the Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary, used in North American and Canadian tournaments.

Anyway, I also downloaded Quackle, a program which was written by an MIT sophomore named Jason Katz-Brown who has been the highest rated Scrabble player in the United States. It's a great program to play scrabble against the computer, against a human or also explore legal words available in a tray. When I got it I asked it what words were available in a ERSTNL A, mis-remembering that list as the most commonly appearing letters in English (apparently it is ETAOIN SHRDLU). However, the program produced a handy list of "bingoes" (7-letter words that receive a 50-point bonus) such as ANTLERS, RENTALS, STERNAL and SALTERN.

A few hours later I was playing scrabble online and as my last word of the game (down by 12 points) I had SLTRNS? with an available A on the board. I played SaLT?RNS across two triple word scores (as well as completing another triple word by playing the S onto hooters to form Shooters) for a total of 146 points. Game over.

What is a Saltern, you may ask (though sadly, in Scrabble what a word means is absolutely immaterial, it's whether the word appears in the word list that counts, and where you can play it on the board for the most points). Here is the definition of saltern from answers.com:

salt·ern (sôl'tərn)
n.
A saltworks.

[Old English sealtærn : sealt, salt; see salt + ærn, house.]

Indeed.