"Wat is dit voor waterzooi?" "Ja."

@@patrykochmanski6156 We hebben een serius probleem.

Completely agree with everything here!

I thought of it, but then again, I speak Dutch, so that's kinda cheating lol.

It's interesting how regional word knowledge is. As someone living close to Belgium, waterzooi is decently obscure, but still known. But I would have never guessed it was an English word too.

@@Ten_Thousand_Locusts Also you watched the video and saw the thumbnail.

@@donnydont the thumbnail says waterzooi?

Damn, that is insane!

Fun fact: I know peter Goossens. My parents in law are his neighbours

@@justaguy3310always people on the internet who know a guy that knows a guy

@@spimbles haha world is small like that

same here! I’d love to improve my end game. I do use distraction techniques but I’d have given up this game as lost! 😮

I knew I was messing it up, but didn't realize how badly :) Thank you for the advice & thank you for watching!

Awesome questions, Sam. Thank you. 1. In situations where your winning chances are so low with "traditional" plays, it's difficult to know with full assurance whether you've analyzed every possibility. That's because you're basically picking the best far-fetched plan you can come up with, with moves way off the beaten path. In this case, the plan Jim picked was really well considered and of course, there's a bit of bias in favor of it because it actually ended up working out, but I think it resonates with competitive players for good reason. 2. It was possible that he might draw into something at the base of the board, though there are deceptively few things he can actually hit holding EIORW (WORRIER, etc.). 3. 9-letter words are indeed quite rare, but even then, the lion's share of them are inflected 6s, 7s, and 8s (RETAINING, PLASTERED, FLATLINES, etc.). WATERZOOI is just completely otherworldly.

Sorry if it's superfluous, but waterzooi is a dutch(flemish) word, meaning stuff (useless) from the sea. Am surprised it's recognized in USA.

Half Dutch here was thinking the same thing. Never heard of it before but that name is hilarious to me. Iiterally just means a bunch of water stuff tossed in with eachother because of the seafood, so funny

Echt een geweldig woord

dat is waar@@joelhoeve

it tastes really bad imo but its a not uncommon flemish dish

​@@alexavermeulen8847That's not the right etymology. 'Zooien' is an old Flemish word that means to boil. It's close to 'zieden', for instance. 'Waterzooi' means 'boiled in water'.

Damn, I’m a huge fan of his…high praise. Thanks!

@@wanderer15 wow, that was my initial impression of this as well! In fact, I'm recommending this video to a friend because I know he plays a lot of recreational Scrabble and follows Jon Bois' stories.

Let's dig deeper on this. I'm agreeing with you that that first draw involves 14/17 instances of not drawing an A or a T and 3/17 instances of drawing either an A or a T. In those 14/17 instances, you're dead - you can't draw AT because you've just drawn a different tile. Therefore, your chance of drawing ONE of the two tiles you need is 3/17, or 17%. Doesn't it make sense that the chance of drawing TWO tiles that you need would have to be smaller than 17%, not greater? The math is actually: Chance of drawing A: 1/17 Chance of drawing T subsequently: 2/16 Chance of drawing T: 2/17 Chance of drawing A subsequently: 1/16 Both of which are 1/136, so together it's 2/136 or 1/68. About 1.5%. In a quick computer simulation, Jim was able to play WATERZOOI 11 times in 1000 iterations after BE, so that seems to check out.

There's no question that from a single-game standpoint, Darrell absolutely should not challenge. But keep in mind that the cumulative margin of victory is used as a tiebreaker, and in a short tournament like this one, it's very likely that valuable places on the World Championship team would be decided by that tiebreaker - so challenging the word off the board to secure a much larger margin of victory would be a strong incentive as well.

I knew I was butchering it - thank you!

Ah, thanks - knew I was likely butchering it.

This is on my to-do list!

Good question - a reconstruction of the game exists for the turns preceding WATERZOOI only. The precise order of earlier moves isn’t known for sure, only the score of the game at the time of the fish. The players couldn’t remember Darrell’s following move, but Jim remembered his outplay to be INK.

Just the way it’s done in tournaments - not sure of the reason (probably just arbitrary). Either way would lead to the same margin of victory, which is what really matters.

Also the U from Fuss completes Amogus

Legit lol at this as a former MTG player myself

@@wanderer15 That's awesome

The board position prior to Jim's fish was known, and the final score and last play of the game were known, but I had to reconstruct some of the details to make the final scores fit, and there were multiple options for that one move that could have led to the same final score.

type of pasta

It's dutch so the w is like English

@@ThePizzabrothersGaming Most English dictionaries list it with a 'v' sound.

@@JorWat25 okay? it's not an english word? German has no distinction between W and V, dutch and by extension flemish has a clear distinction. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/oN6pgL1em8W-h40.html

I will try to get this right when I do a short form version of this!