Lucksack Tournament Helper
Lucksack Calculator : Guide
This is the screen you will see when opening up the Lucksack Calculator.
The caluclator essentially takes a rack, constraints in the form of pattern matches and tile bag contents and gives you the chance of drawing a bingo.
Firstly, you can go ahead and click on either the RACK or the RACK TEXT FIELD and type in the rack you want. With the latest update, the rack will be automatically updated as you type.
Note that the contents of the tile bag have updated to show that these 4 tiles have been removed from the bag.
But before proceeding, quickly head into the settings and enable the calculator to search for 8s.
DO SEVENS must be turned on for it to search for sevens and DO EIGHTS must be turned on for it to search for eights. Atleast one of the two must be turned on.
Then just go ahead and hit the CALCULATE button, and the calculator will start performing the calculations.
So basically how this works is,
for each iteration,
it will draw tiles from the bag to fill the rack,
check for a 7 letter word,
check each of the 26 floaters available to see if there is an 8 letter word,
and then return the drawn tiles back to the bag.
If a 7 letter word is found, it adds 1 point to Lucksack % (7).
If a 8 letter word is found with any floater, it adds 1 point to Lucksack % (8).
What you have as the final result is the chance to draw a 7 letter word given the rack and given the contents of the bag.
In other words, LUCKSACK % (7) = Chance to draw a 7 letter bingo.
And the chance to draw a 8 letter word given the rack and given the contents of the bag, assuming all floaters are avaiable.
In other words, LUCKSACK % (8) = Chance to draw an 8 letter bingo.
Pretty neat right?
But of course, you can do quite a bit more.
Notice the PATTERN (7) box?
You can use it to type patterns that the words must comply to.
For example, you can say that the word must end with an S.
So only bingoes ending with S add 1 to the score. You can draw ARENITE for example, but it doesnt count.
With this, you can search in context to a position on a board, where only bingoes starting with certain tiles or ending with certain tiles will be playable.
After typing out the pattern, you must click on the PLUS button next to it to actually add it to the list of patterns to search against.
Note that these patterns are added with an OR clause, so the more you add, the less restrictive bingoes need to be.
Similarly, the same can be done with PATTERN (8).
With PATTERN (8) however, there are 3 different ways you can specify the pattern constraint for the word.
The first will be simply specifying the floater available on the board, which you can do by typing in a single letter as above. Note you can always only specify one floater per constraint. Add another constraint to specify a different floater.
The second way will be to specify both a floater and a pattern. Say there's an E on the board but its on the top row so your 8-letter word must start with it. Specify that as follows in the picture above.
You can also just specify only the pattern. In this case, all 26 floaters will be considered and the bingo will be accepted if any one conforms to the pattern above. For more precise results however, it is encouraged to specify floaters that are available.
Remember that you ned to hit the PLUS button after typing the constraint to actually ADD IT.
In order to view all the constraints you have active, you can click the GREEN ARROW button to swing out the list.
The YELLOW ARROW button closes the list and RED MINUS buttons are used to remove filters from the list.
Now run the calculation again. As you can see, the probability of drawing a 7 letter bingo has gone down significantly as you have specified the bingo must end with an S.
And you don't have an S on your rack, so you do have to firstly draw that or a blank from the bag thus accounting for the reduced odds.
As for the probability of drawing an 8 letter bingo, the odds have also dropped by about 30%.
This is because you have specified that bingoes must EITHER make use of an D on the board, start with an E on the board, or start with an A.
As a result, a fair amount of racks such as say AEENTRR that previously added to the score no longer do so in this iteration.
To go even further, you can also click on AUTO to change it to manual.
Then you can proceed to specify the contents of the tile bag in the position you are trying to analyze.
Changing it from auto to manual also allows you to specify any rack you want. If set to auto, the rack you specify has to be drawable from the bag.
Note that you can STOP A CALCULATION prematurely by clicking on the CALCULATE button while it is running.
Also note that the percentages given are NOT EXACT. If i ran this same calculation again, I will get different numbers, but the variance will be minimal.
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