Mack Meller is North America's best Scrabble player and has a very instructive YouTube channel. On that channel, he has just finished a 100-game match against the current strongest Scrabble bot, aptly called BestBot. That match went to BestBot with 58 - 42 wins.
Mack has just announced a rematch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_DgVkIWc_4).
In the first match, Mack scored 408 points on average and BestBot scored 434.
The bot has the following capabilities (not changed significantly since the first match):
It knows all the words in the Scrabble dictionary
It has precomputed values for how good every combination of letters is
It simulates the next moves of the game in advance through a Monte Carlo process to determine its top play
It can perfecly calculate the best possible sequence of play in the endgame, when both players know which tiles the opponent still has
It can similarly calculate some pre-endgame situations fully, although its 3-minute time limit per move might be to short to finish the calculation
The bot does not:
Play invalid words as a bluff
Explicitly take context into account (such as "is an S worth more on this particular board than usual") - this only happens implicitly through the Monte Carlo approach
Infer what tiles its opponent is likely to be holding from their previous moves
EDIT: ...take into account very low-scoring moves (only the 40 best candidate moves are looked at more closely; this is almost always enough to identify the best move in the position, but can miss some unusual, sneaky low-scoring plays)
The match is played to a 20-minute time control and North American challenge rules (playing an invalid move means you lose your turn; Mack cannot look up whether a word is valid during the game).
Resolution criteria:
If the match ends 50 - 50, spread is the tiebreaker unless Mack decides to play a 101st game to break the tie, in which case that counts
If the match ends 42 - 58 (same score as last time), resolves to "Mack doesn't to better than last time" regardless of spread
If Mack doesn't finish the series by EOY 2025 for whichever reason, resolves NA
The bot getting any significant upgrade while the match is ongoing doesn't affect this market