Most Common Scrabble Mistakes

Scrabble is not a game of luck. Finding a word and plying it without a second thought will lose games. Practice finding more than one word to play on each turn. The board has to be considered when making plays. Players can go for maximum points for themselves or hinder possible future moves of opponents. Rushing often opens up golden scoring opportunities for others.

Premium squares are double letter score, triple letter score, double word score and triple word score.

The best players heavily rely on premium squares to gain high word scores. New players will often only think about finding words and forget about the board. Each word played on the board can give or take away access to bonus squares. Giving opponents access to premium word squares is a strategic mistake. Before making a new move focus on scoring or blocking premium squares.

Rack management consists of two actions: 1) ordering tiles by prefix or suffix, 2) deciding what letters to keep or get rid of.

Players who are new to the game will often place tiles randomly in their rack. Doing this adds an extra level of difficulty for finding new words on the board. Ordering letters into the most common prefixes or suffixes (which ever makes more sense given your letters) makes it easier to create new words. Alphabetizing all tiles in a rack is an advanced technique. Players who study alphagrams(words in alphabetic order) will find anagramming easier.

Decisions about what tiles to keep, play or exchange need to be strategic. Playing the first word that comes to mind is a good way to lose the game. Creating bingo words needs preparation and saving of tiles. Having too many vowels or consonants can also become a hindrance. Playing duplicate letters is generally a good idea. A rack should always be well balanced ideally with most commonly used letters like A, E, I, T, N, R and S.

The most valuable tiles are also the rarest ones. Rare letters have to be used strategically to score big. Only use the S tile on opponents words by making them plural. Save a 'S' or the blank tile for bingos.

Waiting to get missing letters for the perfect play is not a winning Scrabble strategy. A better strategy is to constantly earn points(even from short words). In addition to scoring points played words also reward players with new tiles. Gaining new tiles creates new opportunities. Scrabble is dynamic. Your opponent will try to disrupt or block your moves. Good players never wait to play a specific word.

Novices fear to exchange tiles because they can not score points during that turn. This way of thinking is short sighted. Having hard to use tiles in a rack will be a hindrance for the whole game. Experienced players think strategically ahead and exchange useless tiles. The perfect rack should only contain letters that enable bingo plays.

The letter 'Q' can be one of the worst tiles. Even though it is worth 10 points it can be quite hard to play. The longer a player holds on to a letter that can not be used the bigger the disadvantage grows as the game progresses. The 'Q' tile can only be used effectively if the players knows some or all of the Q words without U. Short unique 'Q' words like 'Qi' are the most useful.

Scrabble ends once all tiles have been drawn and either one player uses all of their letters or all possible plays have been made on the board. When the game is over each players score is reduced by the sum of the unplayed letters. If you used all of the tiles then the sum of the other players tiles will be added to your score.

Knowing the Scrabble rules for unused tiles makes it abundantly clear that winning is more likely if at the end of the game there are no tiles left on your rack. Once the end of the game draws closer it is wise to start planning. If your opponents have a similar score this rule can become the difference between winning and losing. Never finish last!