Scrabble Enthusiasts of Greater Boston “Scrabble College 2015”Quinten Steenhuis, February 13, 2015

Who am I? I am a life-long word game lover who has played in just 3 Scrabble Tournaments, most recently in 2010. I have a peak NASPA rating of 1140 and my most recent rating was 990. Most likely it would drop a bit if I played another tourney since it has been almost 5 years since my last. Top players are typically rated between 1800-2000, beginners around 700-1000. That places me near the top of the lowest tier of Scrabble Tournament players in most tiered tournaments, or in other words, a decent beginner at the competitive sport.

So, why listen to me?

We are going to follow the guidance of a true expert, Joe Edley, a multiple-time national champion at the game. I am simply your docent.

I understand the strategies needed to get beyond “living room” play and start your path to becoming an expert, although I never went all the way.

I can relate to you! I started out as a “living room” player just like we all did. I read “Word Freak,” got excited that there was more to the game of Scrabble than I remembered, and loved diving in. Scrabble is the one game that I never get tired of playing.

The players in our club are not experts, but living room players like you who wanted a little more.

I’m here! You are ready to learn—take what I can share with you and use it to guide your own independent exploration.

The goal of our course: build a foundation for better playBy the end of our sessions I hope to take a typical “living room” or casual phone/Facebook player and improve your average Scrabble game score by 50 points and help you start regularly finding bingos, at least one per bi-monthly session.

For players who are already at that stage, the course should be a good forum for you to think through why you play the way that you do, help you tighten your strategy to improve your average scores, speed up your play, and come away with knowledge of how to improve your score even further.

The Rules: liberating, not constrictingWhy do we have a set of rules in Scrabble? Remember those games that you had as a child, with squabbles over which dictionary to use and disagreements about how to score? The rules mean everyone is on the same page, and instead of squabbling, we can just play.

Some complain that “Scrabble words” aren’t real words. The problem with this idea is that we all have different vocabularies. A medical term, or an obscure animal name, may be perfectly cromulent to one

1

person who uses it daily in their job, but positively eldritch to another. By choosing a single dictionary to use for play, we avoid this issue altogether. The price of avoiding a squabble over your favorite word that you know perfectly well is that you have to deal with words like Aa and Qanat. But how much nicer is it to KNOW that a word is good or bad just by looking in the book? It is worth all of the “weird” words just for that.

Topics for DiscussionFollowing the basic outline of Everything Scrabble, I hope to cover the following topics over the course of a few months:

1) Introduction to the 2/3 letter words, rules of Scrabble, and more (based on experience of group)2) Finding words on your rack3) Maximize your score by looking for “hot spots”4) Finding bingos5) Rack Management6) Exchanging tiles7) Word study, building your vocabulary, and computer analysis8) Use of the S and Blank9) Scoring points with the J, X, and Z10) Strategies for open/closed/end game play11) Introduction to tournaments: clocks, tracking, and more.

Tools for further explorationComputer SoftwareZyzzyva http://zyzzyva.net/ OR https://github.com/qsteenhuis/zyzzyva-pc/releases/tag/2.2.3-binary for the non-crippled version.

WHAT (Wolfberg’s Helpful Anagram Tool) http://www.wolfberg.net/what/

Elise http://www.codehappy.net/elise/

Quackle http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/

Android/iOS SoftwareZyzzyva (iOS only): will receive 2014 updates “soon”

Recommended Further Reading Everything Scrabble: Third Edition, Joe Edley and John D. Williams. Pocket Books

(2009). Available from Amazon.com for $5-$10. The Scrabble Player’s Handbook. Stewart Holden. Self-published (2012). Available

online at http://scrabbleplayershandbook.com (However, note that the examples given use the British/International dictionary! Many examples are not valid in the North American Tournament and Club Word List)

2