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.