A Friend of Crescat sends along this story about Michael Cresta, who scored 830 in a recent Scrabble game, making his the highest recorded score in club or tournament play. Stefan Fatsis, the author of the story, seems mostly devoted to trying to debunk the legitimacy of Cresta's score, pointing out all of the ways that his score was A, a lucky fluke, or B, caused by his opponent's suboptimal play.

Of course, thanks to what we know about probabilities, over a large enough pool of players and a long time, any high score will be caused by at least one lucky draw that could be described as a "fluke." Similarly, since nobody plays perfectly all of the time, nearly any high score will very likely be caused by a bit of suboptimal play on one's opponents part. Part of being a good Scrabble player is being able to take advantage of those openings when they happen.

Of course, were a nationally-recognized expert player to have scored 830 points in this game, few people would doubt the legitimacy of the score, even as they criticized his play. The difference is that Cresta is not a particularly consistently good player (although he is probably better than I am). So what?

If you care about records like the highest score, you should expect to have some oddball variance there. That's what comes of studying the very end of the tail of the curve.