Saturday, November 25, 2006

Strongest Scrabble Nations

Following the Trans Tasman tournament in New Zealand in which the best players from Australia and New Zealand battled it out I have decided to comment on the international ratings and my thoughts on the best Scrabble Nations in the world, (mainly for SOWPODS).

I have noticed that in the top 10 players there are only four countries with more than one player: Canada, Thailand, Malaysia and Australia. Some players have migrated from their countries to other countries which could vary the results but I will just take the ratings as they are, for the purpose of this analysis.



Malaysia and Thailand appear to be the powerhouses of the Scrabble World based on the top ten ratings. Most of us would consider Thailand one of the strongest scrabble nations in the world. As I dug deeper into the scrabble ratings I found some interesting results. Nigeria came out on top, looking at the top 50 players. I summarized the countries in order of the number of players they have. Amazingly Thailand came in at 5th with only four players in the top 50. When I looked at the top 200 they came out on top however.



The result here is very interesting. Nigeria tops the list with 11 players, followed by the US, whom use a different lexicon. I find this result very interesting. The US has the largest population of the countries listed, but I found Nigeria a big surprise to top the list.

I also looked at the top 100 and top 200 players and the entire rating list.





Continents with most players in top 50

In the following table I have examined the continents with the most scrabble players in the top 50. Africa came out on top, helped mainly by the high number of Nigerian players. This is again interesting considering that Africa is still made of many largely developing countries. So Africa is the strongest Scrabble continent in the world! (depending on how you look at it.)



Summary

Looking at the top nations from the top 50, 100 and 200 and taking the proportion of players as a percentage I came up with the following.



So the strongest scrabble nation is based on numbers of players, is Nigeria. Interestingly Thailand comes in at number five, which is lower than I would have expected.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder where WHALES is -- near DOLPHINS?

Anonymous said...

Did you realise that some ratings would be inflated due to not playing over 60 games, or not playing in a very long time? You're stats seem to be rather ... wrong.

Henry Yeo said...

never mind, there will be a chance for these nations to address that imbalance at the Causeway Scrabble Challenge. 45 games between 50 players from 10 countries. WOOHOO!!!

Online Casinos said...

Oh my! gotta learn and love playing Scrabble this time!

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