Let us spend some time discussing stacking and hooks. Stacking can yield high points with a lower amount of tiles being played and can help prevent opening the board up for your opponent. The term stacking is where you form multiple words by placing letters parallel to another word. This is why it is important to know the 2 letter words fairly well. Stacking can also come in handy placing words to get to a 2w or 3w, or placing a bingo in your rack. If the first player places FACT in the center, and you have BRITTLE, you could play the word above FACT with the E at the end forming EF, this is just a simple example. It can be useful with single point tiles, if you only play 4 single point letters under another word, with no bonus squares, you would still be rewarded with a 12 point word in the end. But where it really comes into its own is with higher point tiles and bonus squares. If you are fortunate enough to have an X this can be very useful if a word is played with a vowel landing next to a triple letter bonus square. By looking at the acceptable 2 letter words you can see that the following are viable words, AX, EX, OX, XI, and XU. By playing any of these words parallel to the original word, you are looking at 30+ points for simply playing 2 letters. When discussing strategy, one has to realize that the goal of any play is to score as many points for yourself while not giving your opponent a play that could score higher. To often beginning players will see a word they want to play and are happy getting 20 points out of it but at the same time opening up the 3w for their opponent. A good way to play is beginning to guess how much your opponent can get on their play and deciding whether or not your play will outweigh giving them theirs.

Hooks are a very simple concept but often overlooked beyond playing an S at the end of one word and forming another word off of it. By knowing a variety of uncommon hooks one can often play up to a bonus square with his or her opponent unaware of the ability to play off of it. Even the easy ones can simply be overlooked, such as playing a T in front of WIT or ERROR. For now lets start a bit more simply, the following link is a list of 2 Letter words that by adding one letter in front or back (hooked) can form another word. http://www.albany.net/~hegeman/twoword.html Notice the more uncommon ones. Such as (E)ME or (A)MI. A good example would be something like this, a player is given the following rack ZRIBPEM, and plays the followingonly the two words of importance are shown, with the first word played in white, and the second in yellow. While only scoring 2 points by playing ME on the first word, the player is able to score 60 for Prize 3x(2+1+1+(3x5)+1) and 3 for EME, 1+1+1. So a total of 63 points.

 

P

R

I

B

Z

E

E

M

E

R

3W

2W

3L

2L

While only scoring 2 points by playing ME on the first word, the player is able to score 60 for PRIZE 3x(2+1+1+(3x5)+1) and 3 for EME, 1+1+1. So a total of 63 points.

I'm getting tired so I'll get into these topics some more later. Practice with these concepts and above all else have fun.

Today has been another unproductive day. Had some interesting discussions and watched TV mainly. The Musical episode of Buffy was on today and I was rather impressed with it. Unfortunately I've missed it every other time it was on. The show was well written, as usual, with the addition of some wonderfly integrated songs. I don't know if each of the actors sung their parts. I do know James Marsters (Spike, William The Bloody) and Anthony Stewart Head (Rupert Giles, Ripper) are musicians in addition to their thespian ventures.

The previous lines were actually from yesterday, I simply didn't finish the post. Many of you reading this know me from Yahoo Literati which is very similar to Hasbro's Scrabble with a few differences in board design and points distribution. The board has a different layout but has the familiar 2 and 3x Letter and Word bonus squares. It is in the same 15x15 square format. Letter distribution and points are also different. Since you aren't limited to a bag of letters in Literati, Yahoo has designed a completely random drawing of letters, which means a match can have no Q's or 3. In Scrabble the players draw from a stock bag of 100 tiles, in Literati the players are given their first rack of 7 tiles, each starting with at least one blank. Then an additional 99 tiles are placed in a virtual bag to be drawn from. Point values of the letters are different in that the maximum value of a tile is 5 unlike 10 in Scrabble. Consequentially the games are generally lower scoring then in your higher Scrabble matches. Ina high end Scrabble game you will often find 400-500 points scored where in Literati it will often be 300-400.

I plan to post tips and training on my blog periodically for players looking to better themselves. To start I'd like people to look into two things, one is a list of two letter words. I will be starting with training on stacking and hooks and reviewing these will help you better understand it. The other thing I would like you to look into is a program I use and am a big fan of, LeXpert. It is an incredible training tool. In further tutorials and tips I will be using this for examples and think it would be easiest for people to get a feel for the program first. It can be a bit confusing at first, since its designed for higher end Scrabble training it takes a bit more work to use and understand it then the easily available cheat programs designed for dimwhitted literati players.

AA	AB	AD	AE	AG	AH	AI	AL	AM	AN	AR	AS
AT	AW	AX	AY	BA	BE	BI	BO	BY	DE	DO	ED
EF	EH	EL	EM	EN	ER	ES	ET	EX	FA	GO	HA
HE	HI	HM	HO	ID	IF	IN	IS	IT	JO	KA	LA
LI	LO	MA	ME	MI	MM	MO	MU	MY	NA	NE	NO
NU	OD	OE	OF	OH	OM	ON	OP	OR	OS	OW	OX
OY	PA	PE	PI	RE	SH	SI	SO	TA	TI	TO	UH
UM	UN	UP	US	UT	WE	WO	XI	XU	YA	YE	YO

This list was taken from http://www.yak.net/kablooey/scrabble/2letterwords.html which includes definitions for each word. Below is a table work up for training I'll be using, if you ask, why not use a scan of the board? I'm trying to do this without using any graphics, this is just a simple 15x15 table with cel bg coloring.

3W

2W

3L

2L