101 Ways to Win at Scrabble: Top tips for Scrabble success

20 Evaluate Your Rack

Good players can look at their rack at any given stage of the game and know what sort of move they should be trying to make. Most racks will fall into one of five categories; here’s what you should look to do for each type:

Too many vowels: Use one of the multi-vowel words or change.

Too many consonants: Use a multi-consonant word or change. There are lots of common five- and six-letter words which can help get rid of excess consonants: PRINT, TRUCK, CLAMP, FRONT, THRONG, etc.

Bonus-friendly: Good balance of vowels and consonants, mainly one-point tiles, no double letters (or one at most). Have a good look for a bonus word, either a seven or a playable eight. If you can’t find it, play off the least appealing letters to increase your chance of a bonus on the next turn. Don’t neglect to still get a reasonable score now if you possibly can.

High value: Two or more of the higher-scoring tiles (those scoring three or more) but with vowels to help you use them. Play the high-value tiles, making maximum use of premium squares. It helps if the high-value tiles go nicely with each other, like CHK, rather than being incompatible like GVW.

Just rubbish: Racks full of incompatible letters like IJUY, or low-value tiles that don’t look like they’re close to a bonus, like GLLNOOU. With this sort of rack you probably just have to play off as many as you can for as much as you can, or change.

21 The D

The D is one of only two letters worth two points (the other is the G), and this indicates its status as not being quite as common as the one-point consonants.

Its main use for bonuses is for forming past tenses and past participles of verbs – PLANTED, SPRAYED, INFLATED, REMAINED and thousands more. There are also lots of words with DE- at the beginning – DELOUSE, DEVELOP, DENATURE and so on. This does show the main weakness of the D which is that it needs an E to be most effective, although DIS- can also be a handy prefix, with words like DISPLAY, DISCORD, DISTRACT.

22 Short Ds

There are eight two-letter words with D:

AD an advertisement

ED an editor

ID term used in psychoanalysis; also a type of fish

OD hypothetical force or form of energy

DA a Burmese knife

DE of (found in place-names such as Ashby de la Zouch)

DI plural of deus, a god

DO

And here are some useful three- and four-letter words with D:

DSO, DZO, DZHO all alternative spellings of ZO

DOJO a room where martial arts are practised

JEDI a person who embraces the philosophy of the Jedi from the Star Wars films

DEXY a dextroamphetamine pill

DIXI interjection meaning “I have spoken”

DIXY a large pot for water

DOXY a religious opinion or doctrine

Not forgetting the ultra-useful QAID (a chief) and

QADI (a Muslim judge).

23 Making the Change

Nobody likes having to change letters, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. In most circumstances, if you can score at least twenty, maybe even fifteen, I would say make the move. The rack might just sort itself out – even IJUY might transform into JUICILY or JURYING. If not, you can always change next time.

If you do change, make sure you change enough to make a real difference. If you have AIIOUDP, don’t just change the U and one I. Especially if there are blanks or other good letters to come, change four vowels or all five, and maybe one or both consonants as well. Take a moment to count the number of consonants and vowels played, which will give you an idea of which you are likely to pick more of (there are 56 consonants and 42 vowels in the bag at the start of the game).

Above all, don’t go fishing. You might be holding COMPARV, leading you to think that if you change the V and pick an E, you will have COMPARE. Well, so you will. If you pick the E. Which you probably won’t. So score what you can with your high-scoring tiles and see what the bag brings you.

24 Before We Leave Those Vowels …

We’ve seen two-vowel two-letter words (like AE and OU), three-vowel threes (like AIA and EAU), three-vowel fours (like JIAO and QUAI), and that amazing four-vowel cry of Bacchic frenzy, EUOI. But we can raise the stakes higher still by giving you … an all-vowel six-letter word. Yes, if you’ve really got a rackful of vowels that you need to get rid of, the daddy of them all is – EUOUAE.

Wow! What? Yes! EUOUAE. It’s a word formerly used in Church music, taken from the vowels in the words Seculorum Amen. In those days, U and V were more or less interchangeable, so it was referred to as the more pronounceable EVOVAE (also a valid word). But EUOUAE held on as well, and it even has a plural EUOUAES.

EUOI and EUOUAE may help get you out of trouble, but they are unlikely to score you much and unless they enable you to play just what you want to get rid of, you may be better changing. EUOUAE does let you dump those two unpleasant Us (the least useful vowel) but you are also losing two nice Es, not something you want to do without careful consideration.

25 Keep Scoring

It can be useful to hold on to the one-point tiles AEIOU and LNRST as these are the commonest letters and therefore the ones which are most likely to form a bonus word.

But you must resist just blindly putting any of those letters to one side of your rack and holding on to them grimly, come what may. As you get more of them, you are playing with fewer and fewer tiles until you get your bonus, and almost certainly getting low scores.

So try to keep scoring at the same time as knocking your rack into shape. With, say, an A, an I, an N or an R, don’t be afraid to play it to help you get a decent score, especially if there are a few of them still to come. Even the better letters like E or S can be worth playing to keep your score moving along. Only the blank should definitely be kept for a bonus or other high-scoring move.

Early on and in the middle of the game, you should very seldom be scoring less than about ten for a move. Only a dire shortage of either vowels or consonants, or perhaps getting rid of real rack-spoilers like three of the same letter, should cause you to score so low. And unless it’s a move that lets you play more or less exactly the tiles you would want to get rid of, you may be better to change.

26 Play Parallel

From the second move of the game onwards, most players’ instinct is to play crosswise; that is, to play at right angles to a word already on the board, using a letter in that word.

It’s often better to look for a parallel play. If a word has been played horizontally on the board, try to play another horizontal word in the row above or below, using the two-letter words to do so. In a following move you might be able to do the same again, turning some of the two-letter words into threes.

This way, you score not just for the main word you make, but add in the score for the twos and threes as well. Of course if a word has been played vertically, you can do the same thing by playing in the columns to the left or right.

If you do this, the tiles end up looking like solid blocks on the board, which has the added benefit for both players of making better use of the board’s limited space. This helps prevent the game from becoming blocked, which allows you to play good words for longer and makes the game more fun.

27 Ode to the E

Ah, the E, lovely E. The best of the vowels, ranking perhaps equally with the S as the best letter of all. One of the most frustrating things for the Scrabble player is to go rack after rack without an E. Especially as the Scrabble set contains twelve of them, three more than any other letter.

It’s almost impossible to say what are the best ways to use an E – there are so many. Prefixes like DE- and RE-, suffixes like -ER, -EST, -ISE, -ATE, -IES, -ED and plenty more. It will fit with almost any promising looking six-letter combination to make a seven, and likewise with most reasonable sevens to make an eight. Even having two or more Es isn’t as bad as having duplicates of other letters. Indeed, it’s quite possible to use four Es in a seven- or eight-letter word. Here are a few interesting ones:

DEERWEED a plant

ENTETEE obsessed

EYETEETH

GREENEYE a small fish with green eyes

REPEREPE the elephant fish, a large fish with a trunklike snout

SLEEVEEN a sly, smooth-tongued person

SQUEEGEE

WEEWEES urinates

28 Short Es

In the unlikely event of having too many Es (and even that has a silver lining – you may be depriving your opponent of any), there are plenty of short words to help you get rid of the excess:

EE Scots for eye

CEE the letter C

DEE the letter D

JEE exclamation of surprise

MEE Malaysian noodle dish

NEE born

PEE the letter P

REE a walled enclosure

VEE the letter V

ZEE the letter Z (US)

EME South African word for uncle

ENE variant of even

EEK exclamation of mild fright

EEN plural of EE

29 You Can Put an E After That?

A more unexpected use of the E is that it goes after a lot of other words to form new words, or, in Scrabble jargon, it is a versatile ‘hook’ (because it hooks onto the word). The large number of these E hooks means you might be able to fit in a seven-letter word or other good play that might otherwise have had to go unplayed. Here are a few E end-hooks:

HEM becomes HEME

HET becomes HETE

TIG becomes TIGE

FORM becomes FORME

LENS becomes LENSE

LOWS becomes LOWSE

RARE becomes RAREE

COMIC becomes COMICE

CARPAL becomes CARPALE

PENSION becomes PENSIONE

Many of these words are just old or variant versions of the word without the E (as in ‘Ye Merrie Olde’). A TIGE is the trunk of an architectural column, a RAREE show was a carnival, and you might know the COMICE is a pear and a PENSIONE is a small Italian hotel.

30 Six-Letter Stems

The secret to playing the big bonus-scoring words is … you’ve got to know them! Obvious really, but you won’t always get a nice simple word like RETAINS or ENTAILS popping onto your rack. You might end up with a rack like ETESIAN (a Mediterranean wind), GENITOR (biological father, as in progenitor) or VENTILS (valve on a musical instrument). But if you don’t know it’s a word, you won’t be able to play it.

The trouble is there are over 33,000 seven-letter words to learn … A lot of players have embraced the concept of six-letter stems as a way of learning seven-letter words that are likely to come up. This means taking a combination of six letters which you are likely to get on your rack, and which combine with a lot of other letters to make a seven-letter word, and learning those sevens.

At the end of this book, you will find a few resources you can look into to help you make a list of seven-letter words using six common letters like RETAIN or SATIRE. There is a very useful book called Collins Scrabble Trainer, or for the more computerate there are computer programs that can help you.

31 Retain Those Good Letters

To take the best of the six-letter stems, RETAIN goes with every letter except A, Q, V, X, Y and Z to form at least one seven-letter word. Learn them all, and you will automatically have your seven if your rack reads RETAIN with any of the other twenty letters. Here are some of them – a definition is given for the more unusual anagrams.

32 Using the F

Not a favourite tile for most players, the best use of the F is often just to hunt for a handy vowel or Y which has a premium square beside it, and use that to play a two-letter word, preferably going both ways to double the value.

So if, say, an O has a triple-letter square to the right, you could put the F on it to score thirteen. Then play downwards if possible, even with another two-letter word, and your score is into the high twenties.

The two-letter words with F are:

FA, FE (Hebrew letter), FY (whimsically strange), EF, IF, OF

Useful threes with an F include:

FIZ, FEZ, WOF, FAW, FOU, FAP, AFF, EFF, IFF, OFF, FUB, FUD, AUF, OOF

A FAW is a gypsy woman, a WOF is a fool, a FOU is a bushel, and FAP means drunk. There are two wonderful fours which both come from the Muslim world – FIQH (law) and WAQF (charity). In the same vein you can also play FAQIR (Muslim who spurns worldly possessions).

33 Bonuses with an F

Your best chance of a bonus with an F may involve the prefix FORE-, such as FOREARM, FORELEG, FORENAME. The likeliest suffix is -IFY (RECTIFY, IDENTIFY, etc.). If you haven’t got the Y, see if -IFIED or -IFIES are any help. There aren’t so many seven-letter words with these endings but there are a few nice eights, like RATIFIED/RATIFIES and PACIFIED/PACIFIES.

With six one-point tiles and an F, you might have SEALIFT, FANSITE or INSOFAR. Or with another one-pointer on the board, you could come up with FILTRATE, FARINOSE (containing flour) or the rather wonderful OLEFIANT, an adjective meaning ‘oil-forming’.

34 Seven-Letter Stems

Just as you can use six-letter stems to help you remember lots of useful seven-letter words, you can take seven-letter stems and use them to find eight-letter words. About half of all bonus words played are eight-letter words – you can’t afford to neglect them.

Let’s take a rack like AEGILNR; you may be able to play one of the seven-letter words it makes – ALIGNER, ENGRAIL (decorate a coin), LAERING (from laer, make a circle with wagons), LEARING, NARGILE (another name for hookah), REALIGN, REGINAL (queenly). But if it’s the sort of board that’s more amenable to eight-letter bonuses, it’s good to be able to call on the likes of these:

35 Q but no U

For most casual players, the letter that fills them with more dread than any other is the Q. Needing a U to be able to use it with any ‘normal’ word, it can leave you effectively playing with six tiles (removing any chance of a bonus, of course) or force a change and miss a go. So thank QI there are words with Q but no U, and as they are so crucial to getting rid of this rather unwanted letter, we should take a look at some of the most useful:

FAQIR worldly-posession-spurning Muslim

FIQH Islamic jurisprudence

INQILAB revolution (in India, Pakistan)

MBAQANGA South African pop music

NIQAB, NIQAAB veil worn by some Muslims

QABALA, QABALAH, QABALISM, QABALIST ancient

Jewish mystical tradition QADI Muslim judge

QAID Arabic chief

QALAMDAN writing case

QANAT irrigation channel

QASIDA Arabic verse form

QAT African shrub

QAWWAL from QAWWALI

QAWWALI Islamic song

QI life force

QIBLA direction of Mecca

QIGONG exercise regime

QIN Chinese instrument

QINDAR, QINDARKA, QINTAR, QINTARKA Albanian coin

QOPH Hebrew letter

QORMA same as KORMA

QWERTY

SHEQALIM plural of SHEQEL

SHEQEL Monetary unit of Israel

TALAQ Muslim form of divorce

TRANQ

TSADDIQ, TZADDIQ Hasidic Jewish leader

WAQF endowment in Muslim law

YAQONA Polynesian shrub

All of these can have an S added to them except

QINDARKA, QINTARKA and SHEQALIM, and

QWERTY can have the plural QWERTIES or

QWERTYS.

The big one is, paradoxically, the smallest one – QI. With an I on your rack, or usable on the board, the Q should no longer be a major problem to get rid of.

36 Don’t Forget the Americans

Scrabble has always allowed American spellings – more than ever since we incorporated their word list into ours a few years ago. So have no fear about playing COLOR or TRAVELED (as against the British TRAVELLED). Americans are also keen on prefixes like ANTI-, giving words like ANTICOLD, ANTIMAN and ANTIRIOT, and CO-, whence we get COWRITE, CODRIVE and COMANAGE.

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