Better Know a Letter - S

In this long-awaited episode of Better Know a Letter, Will breaks down the S, a letter that will quickly endear itself to the heart of any Scrabble player. But there are some aspects of handling the S that can be tricky and unique!

Sometime soon, I plan to resume streaming on my Twitch channel:

[furutapark]

so this is why it's called "s-tier"

[ajaxmajor]

babe wake up from ur 3 year coma, get to know a letter is back

[Heamer]

Such a powerful letter that a man named Nigel Richard added it as an S hook to his own last name, and the rest is history.

[rnengy]

At 3:44 I believe Player 1 has the beautiful bingo of ASSFACE

[micahvisser]

Can we PLEASE have more videos on the history of Scrabble's development/game design? That was an incredibly interesting part of the video!

[cnupdates]

Better Know A Letter is a perfect name for the series

[dakineprotoss]

i recently played in a small scrabble tournament, and I won!

It was not a competitive tourney, and I attribute a large portion of my success to the fact that I "out metagamed" the rest of this field with this type of game knowledge.

thanks will

[gurchyy]

finally! after 3 years of waiting, I now know how to effectively use the S

[mattcanik]

My crude analysis shows that drawing all four esses in a game actually increases a player's win percentage more than drawing both blanks. Will nails his writeup on this one -- S scores and bingos like no other letter.

[johnwilder]

(C) UPBEARER & [SAV]VYING - like the sneaky fun hooks and extensions you worked in. Also, super important to remember that the S is the most common front hooking tile too, great point. The fact that Butts *playtested and then reduced the number of S’s is also fascinating, I didn’t realize that was a step in early board game design!

You packed a lot of great strategy and history into this one, glad to see the return of this series!

[sjoerdglaser]

Those examples where the S is both a both a front hook and a back hook was beautifully done!

[alexpotts]

Interesting to see that P is the second-most common front hook. I'm guessing a lot of those words that take a front P are words beginning with the RE- prefix becoming PRE- words.

[JeenutPvZ]

And when the words needed him most, he returned.

[MinhAIPet]

Next: The blank (GOATed bingo tile, worst scoring tile).

[JM-rmlt]

Been watching all the old ones. Amazing to see a new upload. Your presentation is simply superb Will.

[hiimemily]

The only tile stronger than the S is the blank, and even then it's arguable just how big the gap is, because a well-placed S can still be worth over a dozen points by itself. A blank is only ever worth zero.

[XANDOAndy]

YES! Been waiting for this for literal years! I hope we can see this series completed some day 🎉

[komododragon]

Please finish this series - great educational resource :)

[dustybud]

glad that it's back! binged all of these back then when i found out about your channel ❤

[drspa]

Are there statistics on which letters the blank is most often used for? I would expect S or E would be the most common, but the most advanced players with perfect word knowledge would have a more varied distribution. A novice would never assign a blank to be a J or a X, but it would happen occasionally in tournaments.