Play Better Scrabble: Master the Open Board Method and Score Higher

First published by Michael Goldman in 1983

This edition published in 2019 by Merlin Goldman and Liana Goldman

Text copyright © 1983, 2019, The Estate of Michael Goldman

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the publisher’s prior written consent.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Ingram Spark

Designed by James Pople

Edited by Malcolm Croft

Board Graphics by Richard Gibson

978-1-9160646-0-7

978-1-9160646-2-1 (e-book)

SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc.

DISCLAIMER: The author's estate has revised this book from its original edition. All efforts have been made to correct and update the original edition where necessary. Any gameplay or typogaphical errors, please contact the publishers at the website below and they will be corrected for all future editions. The SCRABBLE® brand game board and tiles have been replicated in this book for educational and gameplay use only.

For more information, visit www.playbetterscrabble.com

CONTENTS

Welcome to the New Edition

About the Author

Basic Principles of the Game

PART ONE: STRATEGY

The Start

The Middle Game

The End Game

The S and the Blank

General Play and Hints

PART TWO: SECRETS

Anagrams

Four & Five Letter Secrets

Eight-Letters Secrets

Seven-Letter Secrets

Seven-Letter Words Becoming Eight-Letter Words

Eight-Letter Words Becoming Nine-Letter Words

WELCOME TO THE NEW EDITION

We don’t know when or where our father developed his love for Scrabble. But he always loved words. He’d rejoice in telling us the longest word with no vowels or how one word could be an anagram for another. He was trained as a solicitor so words were his tools. Each morning, he began the day sitting in his green velvet armchair attacking the infamous Daily Telegraph crossword before heading to work. Occasionally, one of us would sit on an arm as he completed the clues, filling in each square with neat capitals in blue biro. He’d always take the paper with him. When he arrived home, the crossword would be finished.

Our father worked for himself in a small office opposite the Post Office Tower in London. He revelled in wordplay with other lawyers. In any spare moments, he’d read dictionaries as if they were novels, fascinated by the meaning of obscure words. He played postal Scrabble. My father entered the first national tournament in 1971 and a year later with Mike Lever launched the first league. During the evenings, we’d sometimes still be awake to meet the three other Scrabble players coming to the house for a league game. Our mother would keep them fed. Back then, 30 people competed in two divisions named Achilles and Boadicea. Now, thousands of people play regularly across many leagues, associations, clubs and competitions.

When our father won the National Scrabble Championship in 1977, we marvelled at the shining silver trophy.

Our father entered several annual tournaments and developed his strategies through his play. Occasionally, we’d accompany him, employed as ‘runners’. Should a player’s word be challenged, we’d run down an aisle to collect the scrap of paper it was scribbled on. It would be checked in the dictionary and we’d run back with the result. When our father won the national Scrabble championship in 1977, we marvelled at the shining silver trophy. He was invited on the radio a few days later, much to his excitement. Our mother woke us up at five in the morning and we sat in front of the large hi-fi, trying to stay awake. We remember the presenter was quite taken aback by my father’s insistence to call him ‘Sir’. Two years later, he would return from the tournament a runner-up.

In 1982, at the launch of Channel 4 and Countdown, my father, and members from the London Scrabble League, were approached to appear on the first show. Many contestants from the league have appeared since. Our father was the first winner of Countdown and appeared on another five episodes. As well as his skill with words, he was good with numbers, always shunning the use of a calculator. Countdown was filmed in Leeds so he’d stay in a hotel overnight. As they shot multiple episodes in a day, he’d have to change clothes between shows. He always wore a shirt and tie.

Our father was the first winner of Countdown and remained champion for another five episodes... He always wore a shirt and a tie.

My father began writing this book in the early 1980s. The large stack of papers with his elegant blue handwriting accompanied him to and from work. When discussing the title, Merlin would mention his favourite television program, Play Better Chess, and it stuck. When he didn’t receive any interest from publishers he self-published, printing 5,000 copies. They were printed small and dense in a paperback format to save money. They sat in cardboard boxes in his office, the bright orange-red cover hidden, until someone requested or bought a copy. He’d take a box with him to tournaments and set up a little stall during the lunch break. Orders also came in from overseas and we remember his delight at receiving an order from New Zealand. After ten years, he’d sold all the copies. He continued to play Scrabble and remained competitive up until 1996, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died the following year.

Throughout the years since, a copy of the book lived on Liana’s bookshelf. When Merlin joined a creative writing group and learnt about self-publishing, the idea emerged to get the book digitised and republished. Scrabble has changed a lot since the book was first sold in 1983: clocks are de riguer, words have been added and their meanings unimportant. Mathematics and game theory are now part of the expert player’s lexicon. We decided to leave the text and word lists largely unchanged along with the techniques our father developed. We believe they’re still effective for today’s club or tournament player. Or just to help beat your older brother at Christmas. However, the book has been redesigned to bring it into the 21st century and make it easier to read. In 2018, Scrabble celebrated its 80th birthday and one-third of all homes now own a set. In a world where we increasingly sit together but apart staring at screens, perhaps we should take time to face each other over the world’s leading word game.

We hope it will still achieve the aim stated on the original cover, You will play better Scrabble after reading this book.

And, by the way, the longest work with no vowels is syzygy.

Merlin and Liana Goldman, Bristol and London, 2019

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Goldman was brought up in London's east end, trained as a solicitor and worked in central London. In 1971, he co-founded the London Scrabble League, five months after the inaugural National Scrabble Championship. Six years later, he won it and was runner-up the following year.

Michael was the highest game scorer in 1981’s National Scrabble Championship. He won the Reg Lever Cup during the 1984–85 league season which included the highest word score (B R I Q U E T S, for 284 points). He championed an open, expansive style of play which encouraged high scores.

In 1982, Michael was the first winning contestant on Channel 4’s Countdown and remained champion for another five episodes.

The first edition of this book was published in 1983 and sold out. Michael passed away in 1997 and is survived by two children, Merlin and Liana. The pair republished the book in 2019 to allow others to emulate their father's style of play.

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE GAME

So, you know how to play Scrabble! Well, now let’s proceed to examine those techniques which will improve your game to the level of a master or grandmaster. Firstly, you must abandon what is probably your usual aim – trying to trample your opponent into the ground – because this aggressive style leads to a mental block which channels your thoughts away from an open constructive method of play.

You must think of yourself as an architect designing groups of letters intended to interlock in the most fruitful way. These groups of letters will not usually be precast on your rack of letters but must be arranged on the board to make the most openings for a letter to be played before and/or after them. For example, suppose you have the letters R Y A W; you could make W A R Y but you could also make A W R Y, so you should play W R Y, retaining the A for placement on the next move; T R A P becomes R A P T so you play R A P, keeping the T to place after or before it; G R A I N E D is also R E A D I N G, which accepts the letters A or B or D or T before it and an S after it; M A N G I E R can become R E A M I N G, thus allowing a C or a D to be placed before it, or M E A R I N G, taking an S before it.

Think of yourself as an architect designing groups of letters intended to interlock in the most fruitful way.

It doesn’t matter that these openings will also be available to your opponent – experience will show you that often he or she will block some, or use them unfruitfully, or even not see that some letters will especially fit some openings.

You must make as many openings as possible on the board, because you will need them for the seven-or eight-letter words that you must try to create in order to score more highly. It is obviously more sensible to have two or three openings than to have only one which may quickly be rendered unusable by your opponent.

Some people will comment, That’s not Scrabble! Well, it all depends what you understand Scrabble to be. In my opinion it is a game of word-chess, but unlike chess it gives the players the power to develop possibilities of letters and words in ways that give more pleasure and excitement to the creator than the sole stimulus of beating an opponent. If winning is everything for you, as it is with some players I know, then this book is not for you – and yet, in a way, it is for you, because if you master my style, you will also win most of your games. The change won’t happen overnight, and it won’t be painless; it hurts, initially, to explore the various ways of using letters in a new fashion, as I know from experience. While you are learning you will find yourself losing lots of games and sometimes suffering ridicule from uninformed and unteachable exponents of the old-fashioned methods. But persevere – it will be worth it in the end!

Let us proceed to map out the procedures by which a new magic may enter your game. It is necessary to use both Chambers and the Shorter Oxford Dictionaries for fairness and comfort. This is something not yet practised in Scrabble competitions because of lack of judges, time, two-letter words, etc., but here we are not so unduly circumscribed.

We will start with the most useful two-letter words. I am not trying to slight your intelligence by using two-letter words, because they are what I term open-ended words as opposed to dead-end words. Each one is capable of accepting a letter before or after it, so that each will have a double opening for a seven-letter word to be placed above or below, or to the left or right of it, whichever the case may be.

The following two-letter words just revel in the art of constructive Scrabble and they also, except for Y E, have the facility of being contained in innumerable nine-letter words:-

Let us take an A N and see what I mean. You can make an A N with two letters from the seven on your rack or you can create it by using an A or an N on the board and merely adding an N or an A respectively from your rack. You will thus retain either five or six letters on your rack. With these five or six letters you have varying chances of obtaining a seven letter word with the replacement letters you get. Obviously, it would be preferable to use only one letter from your rack to create A N if the remaining six letters have a reasonable chance of making a seven-letter word with the replacement letter you will receive. Should you have P X I T Y I N, it is no use executing the above ploy, but if you have R E T I N A A then by using an A to make A N on the board you are doing yourself an excellent favour!

Believe me, please, it is far cleverer to score only a few points and obtain one or two letters from the bag to juggle with those remaining on your rack than to score perhaps 6-20 points by using four letters from your rack. You may disagree with this philosophy but have you considered the rapidity with which the good vowels and consonants frequently get used up? And think of the number of occasions on which you mutter, If only I had an E! Advanced players know only too well the foolishness of four- or five-letter words scoring only 7-20 points because they often see their opponents making them and bemoan the futility of wasting such good letters. I am not suggesting that you confine your play to making two-letter words all over the board. No! Merely intersperse the two-letter words into your normal game. When in doubt, make a two-letter word!

Perhaps you knew that already, but maybe did not appreciate how much more valuable it is to score 2-10 points and create a dual opening than to score 15-20 points by using three or four letters. You may also question the validity of conducting this operation frequently instead of scoring more highly on occasions. Here you are absolutely correct, but you will discover that this problem rarely occurs as the letters on your rack and the state of the board will lead you, quite rightly, to play three to five-letter words for higher scores. Let me make it perfectly clear that I am not advocating continual use of two-letter words whilst trying to make a seven-letter word on your rack. This is a style of play affected by some players who know no better and their games usually end by their making either very high or very low totals, most often the latter. I am emphasising the creative value of using only one or two letters at a time instead of wasting three to five letters, and then only when your remaining five or six letters have the makings of various seven-letter words if you pick up one or two popular letters.

To show you what I mean, let us return to the example given above; I said that if you have R E T I N A A on your rack you will be doing yourself an excellent favour if you use just the A (preferably to make an opening). A little thought will show why – the letters B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U or W when added to R E T I N A will make A T E B R I N or R A B I N E T, C E R T A I N or C R I N A T E or C I T R E A N or N A C R I T E , T R A I N E