Anyone play Scrabble seriously?

Post Reply New Topic

I've just started to play it semi-seriously. I used to have a high rating on Scrabulous before it was shut down and a mediocre rating on the Atari website, before they sold their rights to the game. I joined the ISC recently and was beaten quite horrifically in the timed games, but I've recently started winning again. I might join the local Scrabble club after Christmas.

Does anyone have a trick to spotting 7 letter words. I've been focusing on memorising the two letter words and hooks for three and four letters because that's my bread and butter. A way off getting 7 letters down to turn a match around would be satisfying.

I play Scrabble on my computer. I played scrabble on Pogo.com, but when you get hot and bingo twice in a game, I think folks think you are cheating....

I am very good at shuffling tiles and spotting bingos--when I play a lot I can shuffle them in my head.

Try common endings ing ite and so forth

Helps to read a lot--I spot a lot of works I recognize reading somewhere, even though I don't know what they really mean.

I'll play any word in the Scrabble dictionary. Don't forget that if it has to be capitalized, it isn't in the dictionary--Zener, for example.

Don't forget the possibility of 8 and 9 letter bingos.

I play against my computer so I can't gauge how well I play. I do play on Pro & Expert level, though. My win rate is about 1 in 4. I've gotten 7 letter words. If this was attributable to Asperger's Syndrome, then I welcome it with open arms. I'd like to join the local Scrabble group but my extreme avoidance issues prevents it.

You might experiment with different approaches--what helps you remember most reliably? Some of us, like Temple Grandin, are great at memorizing pictures. Others, do better with strings of letters--I've read about some Scrabble experts effectively using that approach.

In practice, I'll play odd words like MYC and CWM just so I'll remember them--even though they may not be a good play in terms of winning that game.

I'm notoriously bad at Scrabble...the only words I can ever come up with are very short ones like "cow", and then I run out of places to put new words very quickly =|

A Scrabble club should be a great place to learn how to socialize--I regularly went to a chess club in college. You could just say hi and play chess. Most people were too busy playing chess to do much socialization.

I am very competitive with Scrabble when I play. I always strategize to get the most points! But what I find much more enjoyable than Scrabble is Word Bubbles on Lumosity. I am addicted to that now, seeing how many different words I can think up in the allotted time!

Especially with timed games, you can simplify the game by only looking at the plays involving triple letter, triple word, and double word/double letter combinations.

Not so much with a computer, but playing a lot of high value plays quickly tends to fluster most opponents, as they don't realize they need to slow down the game...

I'm not that great at spotting bingo's. To make up for it, one thing I try is to hold on to "I-N-G' or 'E-R-S' if I can get those letters, since a lot of 7 letter words end with those sequences, and sometimes you can get lucky and your other four letters will combine with those to make a bingo. However, this can also hinder you since you'll be limiting yourself only to the other tiles on your rack. Also, I tend to give up on this if it seems like there aren't enough empty areas on the board to be able to make a 7 letter word easily. I can't tell you how horrible it is to have a 7 letter word sitting on your rack with no where on the board you can place it, and then having to use some of those precious tiles, negating your bingo-that-never-was, or pass a turn and hope your opponent creates an opening for your bingo.

My other bread and butter is to try and take advantage of any time there's a vowel adjacent to a double/triple letter score tile, and then to try and use H, Y, P, even X etc on those in conunction with my own vowel, i.e. "AH" & "OH" with the H on the triple letter score - that's usually around 26 points - cheap points, but if you can do that maybe half the time and score a couple of 30+ point words during the game from other tactics you're going to beat a lot of people.

^ You beat a lot of people in real life that way (non-tournament) but at tournament level and with high-rating players on servers, it's no enough to stick letters like X on triple letters. You need bingos to beat the really strong players, I find.

If you look, there are likely to be lists of frequently played words you can memorize. No sense in memorizing words that aren't likely to be played.

Last edited by BTDT on 23 Nov 2012, 9:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I love to play Scrabble, especially with my parents (they taught me how to play). I'm pretty competitive when playing, and most of the people around me aren't that serious, so I don't play as often as I'd like and I'm probably a bit rusty. I wouldn't mind playing a game sometime soon, though...

Crap at it. lol

Not disagreeing. If I play the Hasbro iPad app I can beat it reliably on medium level, but hard is just brutal because it seems to literally do a brute-force search for whatever play it can make to get the most points, and it can realistically bingo on almost any turn.

Another way of winning, assuming your have grabbed the lead, is to systematically block the bingo lanes and other high scoring options. But, you can't play too much defense--I found that is usually worth taking a double word/double high letter, even it opens up a triple word opportunity for the opponent.

Love it. I play a lot of Words With Friends on Facebook, which is similar, just a different board layout. I average over 300 points per game. My single game best is somewhere around 526, and best single turn is something like 129.

Using two-letter words, and hooking with an S are my most common plays. I'm a decent defensive strategist too.