Having written what I believe is the best bot out there, since that article (BestBot on https://woogles.io), it beats many top players around 55% of the time roughly, but still has so many fundamental issues that we have not solved yet. I believe if we matched it against the top player or two in the world that it would be roughly even. I would not put money on it beating Nigel Richards over a 100-game series. We have a while to go until we build a truly superhuman bot; this is not the case for Chess/Go.
As to what you're possibly missing here - it's that Scrabble is more than just about finding the top-scoring word. There's a lot of board shape considerations, inferences, volatility, etc that current engines, including mine, don't yet take into account.
Having written what I believe is the best bot out there, since that article (BestBot on https://woogles.io), it beats many top players around 55% of the time roughly, but still has so many fundamental issues that we have not solved yet. I believe if we matched it against the top player or two in the world that it would be roughly even. I would not put money on it beating Nigel Richards over a 100-game series. We have a while to go until we build a truly superhuman bot; this is not the case for Chess/Go.
As to what you're possibly missing here - it's that Scrabble is more than just about finding the top-scoring word. There's a lot of board shape considerations, inferences, volatility, etc that current engines, including mine, don't yet take into account.