Scrabble … The Absolute BEST Tips and Pet Peeves

I confess.

When I first got laid off from my job, I became addicted to online Scrabble. I found it through a Google search and the next thing I knew I was playing 3, 4, 5 games daily of the Agarwalla brothers’ game, Scrabulous.

It was fun, quick moving and I got to play my favorite word game with people from all over the world.

I had recently seen the movie Sicko and thought that Michael Moore’s portrayal of Canadian health care was far different than we had been led to believe. So I began polling every Canadian I played (truth be told, probably over 100) and found out that, overall, yes, they do love their healthcare.

Then gloom and doom hit and Hasbro – that miserable corporate entity – won a lawsuit against the brothers. Scrabulous was no more.

Damn.

Well, I figured that at least it would free up some time for job hunting and working on my own, neglected, endeavors.

Which was quite true.

Until I stumbled onto ISC. Short for Internet Scrabble Club.

While admittedly clunkier and not nearly as user friendly or aesthetically appealing, ISC does allow you to play true Scrabble. I haven’t come across quite the same eclectic range of people from all nations (generally when I log on there are anywhere from 50 to 350 people playing … nothing like the thousands available on Scrabulous).

At first I was so irritated by my perceived imperfections of ICS compared to my beloved Scrabulous that I didn’t really enjoy the game.

Aesthetics and variety of users aside, however, ICS is Scrabble and I love Scrabble.  So now, unfortunately, I am back to 2-3 games a day.

But I digress.

Here are my best tips – culled from a mother who runs the Scrabble club back in Michigan and over 30 years of play.

1. Memorize the 2/3 letter official Scrabble words. At the very least, you need to know that qi is a word, that qat is a word, that za is a word (short for pizza?), that ai is a word.  
2. If you find yourself faced with a rack of IIIOUUA, do not hesitate to skip a turn and swap your tiles. Do it as often as necessary. You can always make up for the lost turn with a bingo (a seven letter word with a bonus 50 points). This is one of my best tips (got it from mom).
3. Don’t play defensively/offensively. I have – seriously – played folks who played so defensively that they would not play a bingo if, heaven forbid, it gave YOU the triple. People who play like that are jerks. The bad karma is going to come around and kick you in the butt.  I tend to be a generous player – I’ll sometimes play a 6 letter word that garners me little points just to open up the board and I have no qualms about opening up the triple for my opponents.  But when I sense one of those offensive/defensive sorts (methinks that they think that they are being “strategic”) I clam up.
4. Open up the board sometimes just to be nice. Seriously. Some folk know one strategy and one strategy alone. I call it stacking. It’s the strategy of making several 2/3 letter words. Sometimes you end up with a stairway … going nowhere. If that is your only strategy, eventually you’ll have no where to play.
5. Do not waste a blank. Seriously. Blanks are for bingos. The only excuse for not hanging onto a blank until you can make a bingo is in a case where it will net you at the very least 50 points. No excuses (except that you got the blank at the end of the game!).  I recently played someone who used TWO blanks to make the word “jays” on a triple, garnering him somewhere in the vicinity of 44 pts.  It was early in the game and I knew that winning would be like taking candy from a baby with that kind of dumb strategy.  It was.
6. Lastly, have fun and be polite.  Would it absolutely kill you to return your partner’s “Hi and good luck!” greeting?  Sure everyone doesn’t like chatting during a game but a simple greeting sets the tone of the game.  Don’t accuse someone of cheating merely because they are winning or have a better vocabulary than you.  Don’t attempt to abort the game merely because you are losing.  Don’t curse at your opponent.  Oh, and would it kill you to congratulate the winner?

Want to play? Check out the Internet Scrabble Club!

One Response to “Scrabble … The Absolute BEST Tips and Pet Peeves”

1. Kevin Phoenix says:

   May 19, 2009 at 2:40 am

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   Regards

   Twitter @underutoo