It's time again for the ABC Wednesday entry, where I try and cover some of the basics of competitive scrabble, while somehow trying to relate it to the current letter of the week...actually it's Thursday eve as I post this! Where does the week go?
When I say 'bingo', I'm not talking about the popular game of chance often found in church meeting halls. A bingo, in scrabble, is when a player is able to use all of their tiles in one turn, for which they are awarded an additional 50 points. It may not surprise you to know that in most cases, the player who is able to 'bingo' the most in a game is the player who will win. Better players are able to bingo an average of 2 or more times per game. In a recent record-breaking game, a player actually played all his tiles in 8 out of 9 of his turns!
For most casual players, though, the idea of playing all of one's tiles seems like an unreachable goal. Fear not, though, it's not as difficult as you might think! Here's a few tips for getting there:
1. Start out with the assumption that there may actually be a word contained on your rack. The first hurdle to get over is to even look for longer words- there are plenty of ordinary words that you may not ever see, simply because you didn't try. Add to that the open letters on the board with which to play through, and there are unlimited possibilities.
2. Look for common letter combinations. The most obvious of these is if you have ING on your rack. There are 3,628 ING words alone (made of 7 or 8 letters, and good in scrabble), so chances are you may be able to spot one. There are plenty other common 2 and 3 letter combos, which I'm sure you can figure out.
3. Balance your rack. Balancing your rack means keeping a good blend of consonants and vowels, and not keeping too many high point tiles at once. The better you get at doing this, the more often you'll be able to bingo. I'll talk more about this in a future post.
4. Study words! Ok, most people may not be at the point where they're actually going to learn new words for the sake of playing scrabble. If you aren't there, you may just find it fun to write down all the letters from each turn and then after you play, use an anagram generator (a website that will find words for you) to look and see if you missed anything. If you are ready to study words for the sake of scrabble, you can do a search for 'high probability bingos' and find dozens of lists to start learning. The top of most of these lists will feature words that can be formed from the letters AEISNT or AEIRST.
I'm going to close out with a few examples of bingos- click on the links below and see if you can find the answers before hitting the 'Forward' button.
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
2 comments:
8 out of 9 bingos? Yikes, that's impressive.
BYW, the library was having a used book sale, and I just bought WORD FREAK by Stefan Fatsis, which I assume you are familiar with.
ROG, ABC Wednesday team
Yes! I've read it twice, and someone actually bought it for me for Christmas, so I'm looking through it again. A great read. You should know, though, that it was written before the last edition of the scrabble dictionary came out, so there are a couple words mentioned in it (most notable QI) that have since been added. The addition of QI changed much of the strategy of the game, at least regarding how to handle the Q.
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