Where should you place your tiles? Scrabble often doesn’t boil down to which words you play, but where you play them. A key point is to try to avoid placing vowels next to premium squares.
If you put an I next to a triple-letter square, your opponent may have the Q ready to slot in for QI for thirty-one points. If they can make a word at right angles to QI at the same time – even just QI again – they can score over sixty.
Sometimes it’s unavoidable. If you have a bonus word which puts a vowel next to a premium square, you should still play it. But if you have the choice of
making, say, GIRT or GRIT, or DELATOR or LEOTARD, you should play the one which doesn’t put vowels next to premium squares.
By Barry Grossman
Barry is a leading UK Scrabble player and winner of several tournaments. He is the author of Scrabble for Beginners (Chambers), Need to Know Scrabble, Scrabble – Play to Win and The Little Book of Scrabble Trickster. He has also contributed to numerous other books on the subject of words and word-games, has been a series champion of Channel 4’s Countdown, and has written four comedy series for BBC Radio 4. He lives in Hertford.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
