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Using Q without a U

For most casual players, the letter that fills them with more dread than any other is the Q. Needing a U to be able to use it with any ‘normal’ word, it can leave you effectively playing with six tiles (removing any chance of a bonus, of course) or force… Read More

Seven-letter stems

Just as you can use six-letter stems to help you remember lots of useful seven-letter words, you can take seven-letter stems and use them to find eight- letter words. About half of all bonus words played are eight-letter words – you can’t afford to neglect them. Let’s take a rack… Read More

Using the letter F

Not a favourite tile for most players, the best use of the F is often just to hunt for a handy vowel or Y which has a premium square beside it, and use that to play a two-letter word, preferably going both ways to double the value. So if, say,… Read More

Six-letter stems

The secret to playing the big bonus-scoring words is … you’ve got to know them! Obvious really, but you won’t always get a nice simple word like RETAINS or ENTAILS popping onto your rack. You might end up with a rack like… Read More

Adding Es to the end of words

A more unexpected use of the E is that it goes after a lot of other words to form new words, or, in Scrabble jargon, it is a versatile ‘hook’ (because it hooks onto the word). The large number of these E hooks means you might be able to fit… Read More

Ode to the letter E

Ah, the E, lovely E. The best of the vowels, ranking perhaps equally with the S as the best letter of all. One of the most frustrating things for the Scrabble player is to go rack after rack without an E. Especially as the Scrabble set contains twelve of them,… Read More

Keep scoring

It can be useful to hold on to the one-point tiles AEIOU and LNRST as these are the commonest letters and therefore the ones which are most likely to form a bonus word. But you must resist just blindly putting any of those letters to one side of your rack… Read More

Six letters, all vowels!

We’ve seen two-vowel two-letter words (like AE and OU), three-vowel threes (like AIA and EAU), three-vowel fours (like JIAO and QUAI), and that amazing four- vowel… Read More

Should you change your letters?

Nobody likes having to change letters, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. In most circumstances, if you can score at least twenty, maybe even fifteen, I would say make the move. The rack might just sort itself out – even IJUY might transform into JUICILY or… Read More