Scrabble tips

Tips from the Card/Board League:

The Scrabble tournament is coming soon (Sign up if you haven’t yet). Seasoned players Jessica, Krystal and Tara have a few tips to help you get ready:

- Learn a few Q words that don’t require U’s, like QI and QAT.

- SUQ (“an Arab marketplace”) and QAT (“an Arabian shrub”) are the most important words you can know to use up a Q. One doesn’t require a U and the other has the Q after the U.

- Each turn’s score is important, but so is making sure your rack stays balanced. If you have five vowels and two consonants, don’t play just your two consonants — you risk pulling even more vowels! It’s usually worth playing a lower scoring word if you need to ditch some tiles that are making your rack really hard to play.

- Remember the musical dealie, “do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.”

- Don’t overly focus on building the perfect word in your rack. Use the best premium squares (triple-letter score!) and build a word around that.

- You should never play an S for less than 30 points.

- If you score out possible plays on a turn, you’ll find that the long single words almost never score as many points as a shorter one that places a high-scoring letter on a premium tile.

- Simple words bring big points if they’re placed right! Look for more than one word per turn by watching both vertical and horizontal placements.

- Good Scrabblin’ takes PRACTICE.

- Good at memorizing? http://www.k5m.org/uhx/2letterwords.tiff

- Never, ever play something that opens up a triple word score tile for your opponent. They WILL use it, even if it’s with low scoring tiles, so you can’t. And if they can pull off even a moderately good word, you could be in the hole by 50+ points in a single turn.