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 |