What Happens When Nigel Misspells a Word?

His mistake being even more optimal than any legal word makes it so much funnier

"The board after vibrator is significantly more difficult to score on" was not a phrase I thought I would hear today.

If I would ever play Nigel, and he would misspell a word, I would just assume I've spelled it wrong all my life.

I love when Nigel makes an end game move and the computer says it's not the best, announcers just assume the computer is wrong... ...and it usually is!

love him or hate him, not a single computer on earth could have spotted the brilliant move HIARNETS

I bet it happened because the IA are adjacent in that order in Therians, he may have just scooted them over together on the board without realizing.

H I A R N E T S

We really take it for granted how these tournaments archive all their games, such that even almost 15 years later you're able to recreate these games and perform extensive analysis on them, like at 5:28. I'm sure there are even more fantastic games that were just never preserved and are now forever lost. Great video, Will. One could say you are the Landorus-Therian of textbook editors

What would be even more insane is if he had done it on purpose, knowing that his opponent would just assume that he doesn’t make mistakes.

Adding the orange for possible plays and green for optimal makes the videos so much more readable thank you!

And here I thought we might see the infamous B(Y)AGEE phoney. Maybe you should use that in your next video. That one was even funnier because not only did it stay on the board, his opponent later hooked it with an S, leading to Nigel challenging of course.

WHY AM I SO ADDICTED TO NIGEL VIDEOS

As someone who has never played Scrabble, I have no idea how you made it so hype and intense...

nigel trying to prove he's not a robot:

The fact that nigel doesn't play phonies honestly is amazing. Even in losing endgames he doesn't attempt to trick people to save the game or reduce point spread, he just plays the most optimal "fair" way.

Crazy. And what's even more amazing is that Nigel still should have lost even after his play went unchallenged.

Great job, Will! A few observations I'd like to share, being new to this forum. I thought long and hard when I had ACEEILS, and you are correct about my brain-freeze blending it with CELOSIA and CELESTA. Nigel put me on hold quite a while before challenging. I recall thinking had I simply played CAKE (14F, 16) for a 257-213 lead, keeping EILS on a very closed board may have been best, but then thought, "If CELESIA is good and I fail to play it, 14 years from now, Will Anderson's audience will all chime in, in unison, with: 'BWAAAHHAAHAHAHAA!'" :) .... Again, you were correct about my seeing Nigel's powerful rack and knowing he had many options. (I think it may have been AENRST?, making the AI-IA transposition less noticeable on both our parts.) The following year at NSC, I saw Nigel at Table #1 before Round 1 started. He looked at me, mussed his hair, and delightfully offered, "How do you like my HI-AR-NETS?" :) With a smile I replied, "It's okay, Nigel. I know how intimidated you must have felt." :) BTW, in the then 32-year history of the event, that was the first time a sexagenarian occupied first place at a NSC (David Gibson, Chris Cree, and Robin Pollack-Daniels have done so since), and I suspect Nigel may later become the first septuagenarian to do so. Love the game, love the memories, and...enjoy every turn!

If people start using "Hiarnets" as a joke term to mean "an accidental mistake that leads to good fortune" and it starts to spread and get popular enough in the language, could it one day actually be a legal word spawned from this exact scenario, I wonder?

When Nigel misspells a word, the dictionary is changed.

Impossible. Nigel is human? He's imperfect?