Scrabbler Q&A: John O'Laughlin

Today, we're introducing a new feature on the CoCo blog. Once every month or so, we'll sit down with a member of the community for a lengthy interview about their life in Scrabble - how they first discovered the game, what they've achieved in their careers, and so on.

First up is John O'Laughlin, who's been one of the top Collins players in North America over the last two decades, as well as a co-creator of Quackle. We hope you enjoy!

EVANS: What's your Scrabble origin story? How did you first discover the game, and when did you know that you wanted to play tournaments?

JOHN: I played with my family from a very early age. We played a lot of board games, and word games in particular, like Scrabble, Boggle, Perquackey. My main opponent was my dad. We would play a lot one-on-one, and I'd play some with my grandma too. We were decent players, for casual players in the '80s and '90s who didn't know about the world of Scrabble. We'd just play like, a game a month or something, but it was my favorite game.

When I went to college, I was interested in playing Scrabble. I had the computer game - like, the Hasbro CD-ROM with Maven on it. I remember buying that at the store. So I played that, and at some point I also started playing a lot of Literati and Word Racer on Yahoo. I knew the twos. I was a decent player. I got good enough that people started accusing me of cheating, and that was annoying, so I had to level up and find another site.

Eventually I checked out MarlDOoM. That was definitely a different environment. I went from thinking I was hot stuff to having Kenji Matsumoto and Joey Mallick and David Weisberg watching my games, and, you know.

EVANS: Judging you harshly, I'm sure.

JOHN: (laughs) Yeah, not to pick on them, but that's what they did. They would just hang around, not play, and watch and make comments like, "Aw, you probably should have done this, but it doesn't really matter at your level."

I remember I started playing on MarlDOoM right when I moved into my dorm at UW-Madison. I had transferred from Whitewater. It was like a year after that before I went to club, but I was playing a lot. I was like, obsessed with my MarlDOoM rating. I remember I had a summer job at Walmart the next summer, and I'd be studying my flashcards - like actual, handwritten notecards with the top 1,000 sevens and top 1,000 eights on them. I had all that stuff down before I set foot in a club.

The reason I went to club finally was I was going to play the Wisconsin Dells tournament, and I was like, "You know, I should not be in the bottom division." So I went twice before the tournament. I played Mark Kenas and Richard Lauder, and I impressed them enough - Mark said something like "I think you're maybe an 1800 player."

So I went to my first tournament in October 2000. I was in Division 2. I think I went like 5.5-6.5, something like that. I had an initial rating of 1393. I was probably unhappy with that at the time, but you know, it happens. I was stuck with that rating for another six months before I could get myself to another tournament.

EVANS: So, you mentioned your study method, with your paper flashcards. I think there will be some people out there in our audience who don't know what Scrabble was like 20 years ago, in terms of the technology people used for learning the game. I was wondering if you could enlighten us a little - if you wanted to learn words or learn strategy around the year 2000, what was that like?

JOHN: So at first, I didn't have Maven. And I didn't even really understand what people were talking about when they talked about Maven.

Brian Sheppard was a guy who wrote a really good Scrabble AI. He started it in the 1980s and sold copies to the Scrabble community. Eventually, he licensed it to Hasbro to be in the Scrabble CD-ROM. At first, I was really confused about the situation. I was on CGP [Crossword Games Pro], and people talked about Maven as being this powerful tool, and that it did sims, but I just had the CD-ROM that said it had Maven, and it was pretty basic. It didn't appear to be doing anything fancy. It was basically just a Speedy Player kind of player - score and leave.

But people were illicitly passing around Maven. It wasn't until I was a tournament player that people would say to me, "Oh, I'll email it to you." So I had it for Mac and for Windows, but not until I was already an expert.

I also had LeXpert. It was the big deal then - it was great for a long time. Even early on, I was writing my own programs to generate word lists. I've always done that. But those early flashcards were probably LeXpert. I would make printouts of word lists and copy them down on notecards.

EVANS: So, you can probably guess the question I'm getting at. At some point, you were inspired to come out with Quackle. I'm wondering - how did that idea come about? How was Quackle developed?

JOHN: So, I had Maven, and I was interested to use it to analyze my games in more detail. And there was some ability to do that - you could do what they called "logging" the sims, and it would show you the plays that were made in the rollouts where you draw the tiles for each player. So then you could look and try to find the reasons for a play. Like, "Oh, this play is vulnerable because of this hotspot." Or, "This spot that I thought would be a big deal, they're not actually playing there that often." You could try to get a sense of some things, like, "Do I need to bingo to win this game?" You could look at the actual outcomes and see, like, do you ever win it without bingoing, or something like that.

But because I didn't have the source code, I couldn't make it give me more information. And I definitely couldn't change how it played, or experiment with other strategies. There was nothing else out there, either. So if I wanted to do that, I had to write my own program. That was the motivation. It was really for my own Scrabble education. No one else was going to do it, so I had to.

Also, you know. I was a college student, and then also an underemployed college grad, and I needed basically a portfolio of having made something. So that was a big motivation. I was pretty much totally unemployed for the first five months of working on Quackle.

EVANS: So then... you created Quackle? What part of it did you do, and when did Jason Katz-Brown come along, and how was he involved? What was the creative process there?

JOHN: So at first, there was another program I worked on just a little bit, with a friend of mine named Brian Wickman. He was not a Scrabble player, but he was a grad student who was interested enough in Scrabble that he wrote a program called Landau. I was not at that time really up to doing all the programming - it was beyond me. I hadn't learned all the algorithms, and I was just inexperienced. So I was mostly the Scrabble expert consultant who helped him with the rules of the game and basic strategy.

Anyway, once he wrote his thesis, he wasn't interested anymore. So I went and wrote my own program, legitimately from scratch, not using the Landau code. And I had it doing some basic stuff - I was doing sims, and I even had it playing Clabbers. This was before Jason came in.

Especially initially, where Jason was a big help was getting the whole graphical interface set up for the desktop Quackle. Jason had done a lot of apps - open-source, Linux, desktop apps - using the Qt toolkit. So he was like, "I can help you with this." He was really excited about it. So we got something together relatively quickly, and we announced it to the world around the 2005 Worlds. I remember I had it on a laptop, and I showed it off to people in London.

Jason did a lot more than just the UI, but I was very dependent on him for that part especially. He just had a lot more software engineering sense than I did, despite being much younger. I was very, very green. It's interesting that he learned more from doing open-source projects than I did from getting a degree in computer science.

EVANS: Really makes you question the value of education, doesn't it?

JOHN: (laughs) A little bit. But also, he's just a really, really smart guy.

Anyway, I cringe sometimes when I look back at that Quackle code now, especially my hand in it. It's not perfect. It's not well thought out in all cases, and I could do a much better job today if I had time. If only.

EVANS: So, over the last 15 years, when you look at the Scrabble world, everybody's now using Quackle. It's really transformed the way people think about strategy. Did you anticipate that this would happen - that it would become this earth-shattering thing in Scrabble?

JOHN: No, no. I mean, at that time, Maven was still around. I was still using Maven. People would do both Quackle and Maven sims. I guess people still do, if they can figure out how to get the dictionary in there.

I was not terribly ambitious about making Quackle be perfect. I thought that something better would come along - and if it did, I would be happy to switch. I remember I was very excited about Elise when that came out. It was a phenomenon, and it was cool to play with. Though I was frustrated that it was Windows only. I would run it in the Wine emulator on my Mac, it would crash, and so on.

I thought by now that some other young person in mine and Jason's situation would come along and make the next thing. Especially considering that a lot more is possible now that computers are so much faster. Alas, that hasn't happened.

But yeah, it was pretty quick that people started using Quackle. I wish I could have kept up with it more. This happens a lot, though, with any kind of software. You have this rush to get it out to the world, and that's very motivating. But once it's out there, especially if it's open-source, it's just not fun to fix the bugs. You're not getting paid, and it's not always fun work. That's probably why Quackle's been relatively stagnant, except for updating the dictionary.

EVANS: So... I'm trying to think of a way to phrase this next question that's not, like, hack sportscaster-y. But I want to ask you about legacy. Do you think that long-term, people will look at your place in Scrabble and think of you first as a player, or as the Quackle guy? Which of the two would you prefer?

JOHN: Well, working at a company like Google, with lots of people who are smarter than me, sometimes you think, "Everything I'm doing, there are people levels above me who could do a better job of this than me." But they're busy doing other things. And so you have to find the work that you're well suited to.

I was probably, at the time, the best person to be working on a Scrabble program. I was capable of doing the programming work, and I also understood the Scrabble world. People like Chris and Brian, even though they're better programmers than I was, or am, they weren't inside the Scrabble world to care about the details that we care, possibly too much, about. There are some features that Jason and I added just because they were fun Scrabbly things. We were Scrabble insiders all the way.

EVANS: So it sounds like what you're saying is, it's both. You're both the player and the Quackle guy, and the two are interconnected.

JOHN: Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like I probably just about maxed out my Scrabble achievement. I didn't max out my Scrabble programming, though. I think if I had the time and the incentives, I could do a really good job and have a Quackle that I'm totally proud of, and that people respect without reservations.

But I have more regard for my Scrabble than my programming. It was more time. It was more work. And I feel like - and maybe I'm not done, I don't know - I won some tournaments, I went to the Worlds a bunch of times, I did respectably some of the time. So... yeah. I was up there for a while.

EVANS: I'm hearing a lot of past-tense sentences! You don't feel all the way washed up, do you?

JOHN: (laughs) Not all the way, no. I'm in maintenance mode at this point. And that's something to be proud of, too.

EVANS: It's hard, maintaining!

JOHN: Yeah! I hope people respect that I can still show up, legitimately cold. I haven't cracked many books - maybe like 5 hours of study, total, in the last 2 years or something. But I can still hang with these people who play every weekend.