Saturday, April 01, 2006

What I Know To Help You Win At Scrabble

Get ahead, stay ahead.
Melbourne scrabble guru, Geoff Wright chants these words most games he plays. Even if your opponent plays DOG for 12 points, make it your only mission to play CAT for 14 points.

ALWAYS resist having more than one of the same letter in your rack, ALWAYS.
No exceptions, even if you have two S's. Get rid of one because if you pick up another, it'll take three goes to get rid of them.

Good tiles are like fish. They can go bad.
Hold on to the Q for three moves, waiting to pick up a blank to make a bingo and meanwhile your opponent plays three dumb looking words and has made a 70 point break on you.

Resist the staircase.
When you play little words to stick around the double word score tiles, the board starts to resemble a staircase. This closes the board real quick. If you're behind, it's hard to catch up and if you're ahead it's hard to post your best ever score.

Learn words.
There's quite a few good books out there. Good scrabble buddy, Andrew Fisher wrote a brilliant one called How To Win At Scrabble which is available at yer local bookshop. He also put me on to downloading the fun word game training program, Lexpert.

Make it a house rule to play with the two letter word sheet which comes with the game open for everyone to see. It speeds up play and helps a boring game end before the late movie starts. Here's one if you don't have a copy and here's a big page of other word lists.

Good words to know. QI, QAT, QAID, SUQ, EUOI, KOA, KOI, AA, AE, AIA, REV, TAV, VAV, JO, ZO, AZO, DZO, AZON, ZEK, ZEL.

Click here to read all my scrabble stories. You may learn some more....

3 comments:

Glenn Peters said...

Indeed.

Glenn Peters said...

According to a strange scrabble man at yesterday's Langwarrin Scrabble Club Annual Tournament, the secret to scrabble is "ARTE and when to play it."

Wouldn't have a clue what he was on about.

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