Scrabbler Q&A: Matthew O'Connor

Welcome back to our Scrabbler Q&A series! It's, um, been a minute. Originally, we set out to meet with a member of the Scrabble community once every month or so for a lengthy interview, then publish it here. Recent events have made meeting with humans a little more difficult, but we're still looking to bring you a Q&A every now and then.

Today's interviewee is someone who's taken on an interesting role during these pandemic times. There hasn't been much in the way of live Scrabble lately, but that hasn't stopped Matthew O'Connor from teaching virtual Scrabble lessons to players all over the world via Twitch. Matthew holds these sessions once a week, on Tuesday nights, at twitch.tv/64bitscrabble. You can also check out an archive of all his work right here on our site, at cocoscrabble.org/strategy.

I had a video chat with Matthew recently to discuss what he's been up to, both on his Twitch channel and otherwise.

EVANS: I feel like the best place to start is just... how is your life going? I haven't seen you in person in like, two years, and I'm guessing a lot of other Scrabblers haven't either. So, what's up with you? Where are you at, what are you doing with your life, and how are you navigating this crazy pandemic world we're all living in?

MATTHEW: Yeah, so, like a year ago or so, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin. I was working at Epic, which is a medical software company. Then I left, and I moved here, to Bellevue, Washington, where I moved in with my uncle. For a while, I was just not doing anything, but now, I'm at least trying to be a professional poker player. I'm grinding poker now.

EVANS: Are you playing online, or...?

MATTHEW: Nah. I mean, I have an online game, but I go to Fortune Poker in Renton in the mornings. That's at least what I'm doing right now.

EVANS: Is that working out for you? Do you think you'll stick with it for a while?

MATTHEW: Yeah, I think so.

EVANS: Cool. So you're playing poker, and you're doing your Scrabble streams on the side? Not bad.

MATTHEW: Yeah.

EVANS: So, your Scrabble streams are the main reason I wanted to interview you. You've been producing this great educational Scrabble content on Twitch, going live every Tuesday. What's the origin story there? When did you start streaming? What made you want to get into that?

MATTHEW: I guess it was during the BlitzChamps tournament. I wanted to stream my matches, but then I was like, "I've got all the equipment, so I might as well stream something else too. This tournament's not going to last forever."

EVANS: (laughs) Thank god.

MATTHEW: So I was thinking, maybe I'll try to do something unique. It didn't seem like anyone was doing exactly what I was planning to do. There were people doing commentary, which is sort of educational, but I thought there might be people out there who just wanted to be, basically, taught a lesson. So I set out to do that.

EVANS: What was the learning curve like for you? Did you pick up the streaming technology pretty quickly? I've done some of that myself, and I know it can be a little bit tricky at first. How were you able to get a feel for it?

MATTHEW: (laughs) Yeah, well, I had to make multiple trips to Best Buy.

The first was just for the camera. And then it was like, now the room's not light enough, so I had to get a couple of lamps and put them just out of the shot when I stream. And then... oh God, what else...

Nah, it was just, I had to toy with the lighting a little bit, and I had to toy with the camera angle a little bit. I also had to get used to the Streamlabs software, and set up a page that people would see when I stream.

EVANS: Then there's also the whole "playing Scrabble and streaming at the same time" thing. I've tried playing and streaming, and it can be hard - you kind of lose focus on one thing or the other. You're trying to play well and also speak coherently at the same time. Was that challenging for you too?

MATTHEW: Uh... yeah. To some extent. You kind of have to learn to just not talk a lot if you're trying to focus.

But I haven't done that in a while, anyway. I've just been doing the educational stuff.

EVANS: So, about the content of your streams. I've been keeping up with the lectures you're doing, and you've had one recently about leave values, one about time management, one about how to use Quackle, and so on. What's your creative process like? How do you come up with ideas, and how do you develop the slide decks you create and the lectures you do?

MATTHEW: I guess I sort of just thought, well, there's a bunch of different things that go into being a good Scrabble player. So I just think of them and go. Like, my first one was about when to exchange. That seemed like a reasonable idea to talk about. Exchanging is something you do sometimes in Scrabble, but you might not know when to do it. So I was like, OK, let's do that.

And then, take relative leave value. A lot of people forget that, you know, maybe this particular tile is better on this board or worse on that board. So I figured, I can talk about that. I'll just try to make 30 minutes or an hour of content about it.

EVANS: Hmmmm, OK. So where did you find content for that? Do you dig into your own games that you've played, like, to find examples of these concepts?

MATTHEW: I always try to find a real game where something actually happened. But if I can't find a good example, I'll just sort of set something up in Quackle. A lot of times, those will end up looking pretty contrived, but they can still explain the point OK, so I'll do that if I have to.

EVANS: Do you find it tricky finding the right skill level to teach to? Like, for "How To Use Quackle" for example, the approach is obviously very different for a new player versus, say, for an 1800 player trying to climb up to 2000. How do you find the right level?

MATTHEW: Yeah, so, with that one specifically, I knew it was going to be sort of tricky. The very basic stuff with Quackle, I knew that was going to be geared toward beginners, but then I sort of started talking about the algorithm behind Championship Player, so that was a little more advanced.

I don't know. Generally, I kind of feel like anyone who wants to take on Scrabble with a mindset of learning and who knows, like, the very basics can get in and not feel overwhelmed. And as for higher-rated players, like even someone at your level, I bet you can learn at least a little bit from each video.

EVANS: Do you ever get questions from the audience where people are asking you to explain things at a higher level, or explain them at a lower level, or...?

MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah. So the general format is I'll have a Google slide, and it'll show, like, bullet points, and I'll talk about them one at a time. So I'll take one concept, and each one will have sub-concepts, and for each sub-concept, I talk about it for a little bit and then I show a position in Quackle where it happened, or a contrived position that I made. And if I know the sim should work properly, I'll show the sim, and I'll be like, "OK, here's the play that's simming best, and this is why it's simming best."

EVANS: OK. So... what's the engagement been like from your audience? Do you get a lot of questions? Do you have a lot of, like, back-and-forth conversations with people in the chat? What's that been like?

MATTHEW: Yeah - I try to. If there are questions, I definitely try to answer them.

EVANS: Your streams are generally pretty long - they'll be 30 minutes, or even up to 45 sometimes. How do you find enough content to fill that much time? Is it really built around what's written down on your pre-prepared slides? Or is it more driven by how the conversation goes between you and your audience?

MATTHEW: Yeah, it's a mix of the two. And I'll definitely go for longer if there's 10 or 20 people in the audience asking questions, because that'll spur some discussion.

But yeah, I have a lot of stuff set up in advance, and sometimes I just happen to choose a topic that I know is going to last longer. Like, I chose to do pre-endgames and endgames as one thing. Obviously, that's going to take a while. I went pretty in depth. I did, like, the pure stick endgame, where someone bingos with one in the bag and draws the Q and you stick them with the Q. Then the hybrid one, where they have the Q and some other stuff on their rack. Then we did some general basic endgame principles, and then pre-endgame. And then some more game theory-type stuff. And... yeah.

EVANS: (laughs) That's... that's... that's all the hardest stuff in Scrabble! And you're just covering it all in one lecture? You're just going for it?

MATTHEW: Yeahhhh, I don't know. Perhaps I should have done endgames and pre-endgames as two different slides. But I just figured they were similar enough.

EVANS: Do you ever feel like you're running out of topics? Or is there always more stuff to explore in Scrabble, and you'll keep finding new ideas?

MATTHEW: I am getting worried about that at this point. But if I ever run out of topics, I guess I can just go over annotated games. That's sort of an infinite resource.

EVANS: Hey, there you go. There's a few tens of thousands of those out there. I guess you're right.

MATTHEW: I can also just go and play a game on Woogles myself and generate more content that way, if I have to.

EVANS: That works too. That works too.

All right, I guess I've just got one more for you, which is just, what's your future Scrabble outlook looking like? A lot of people these days are getting vaccinated and getting ready to reenter real life... are you looking at getting back into in-person Scrabble?

MATTHEW: Yeah, I'm actually going to my first tournament in a few weeks. I probably have to get back into studying a little bit before that. I was studying during COVID, but just not so much during these last few months, because I've been focusing on poker.

But, other than that... yeah. I would say I'm ready.