Wednesday 15 August 2007

Scrabble Help and Tips to Boost your Scrabble Scores.

There are nearly 100 2-Letter Words and 1000 3-Letter Words in the OSPD. Of these, about half will be familiar to most people. Try taking your time to learn the other 500 or so words and you can add at least 50 points to your average score.

Feel your tiles move them around, and you may be amazed at what you can find. Some words look really bad until you add -IER after or UN- before them.

Don’t play an s just because you can. Estimates of the value of an S range from 8 to 20 points. What that means in real terms is that before you even consider playing an S, you should make sure the play is worth at least 10 points more than your 2nd best play. Throw away an S and you might as well be handing your opponent an extra turn.
The blanks, by being able to substitute for any letter, are by far the most valuable tiles in Scrabble. About the only time you should play a blank for less than 50 points is when you're stuck with the Q, all the U's are out, and you need the points too much to change tiles.
Q can be a quite scary letter. However there are 21 words in the OSPD that use the Q without a U.

The Tournament Rules booklet is about 16 pages and takes less than a half-hour to read through, but at almost every competition there's at least one argument caused by a new player who doesn't know how to proceed and a veteran whose nerves are on edge. Read the rules and learn the game.

Don’t try to find loopholes to circumvent the rules. More than a few players have tried to "quick draw" to avoid challenges, call excessive holds to use up an opponent's clock, and a few other tricks.

The OSPD lists over 54,000 7- and 8-letter words. With that many to choose from, almost any letter combination can be hiding a bingo. No matter how bad your rack looks, it's worth taking 30 seconds to look. You may not find one, or recognize it if you do find it, but you'll always berate yourself for missing one you didn't look for.

To make things easier, we're just going to list a few of the basic defensive strategies:

o Try not to open a game with an E, S, R, or T on the center square. It gives your opponent too many bingo chances from the TWS.

o A vowel next to a colored square is a hot spot your opponent can score on.

o The C, Z, Q, and V are useful for playing near the triple lines because they don't take hooks. J and K are also strategic because they only have back hooks.

o A 3-letter play parallel to another word can effectively block off up to 5 bingo lines while scoring good points.

o Avoid giving away two letter word score plays. Really avoid giving away triple-triples.

o Learn words that don't take an S hook and use them.

o If you're going to leave a hook, it helps to have the letter needed for the hook already in your rack.

Here’s a short list of perfectly valid Scrabble words, but which your opponent will presume you’ve spelt incorrectly. They, of course, will challenge you and reach for the Scrabble dictionary. You know that you’ve just got yourself an extra turn. Try this more than once and you may get your bluff called.

There are piles of words in the Scrabble dictionary that fit the description; these are just a few examples.

AMUCK APATITE ASBESTUS ASPERATE COALA CHICKORY CIGARET CUNDUM CUTLAS CYDER DORNOCK DROWND FANTOM GALIVANT GOODBY GREWSOME JALOPY KREEP KULTUR KUMQUAT MUSTACHE PEEPUL PENCEL PENSIL RABBET SKEEING SYCOSIS.

Hope these scrabble help scenarios have provided some good tips.

For more Scrabble Help visit http://www.specialist-online-dictionary.com/scrabble.html or even try using the online Word Unscrambler to help unscramble those difficult words or anagrams then use http://www.specialist-online-dictionary.com/word-unscrambler.html. For a selection of Specialist Online Dictionaries visit the home page at http://www.specialist-online-dictionary.com, thank you.