by alexdrazen
What's the deep end? I get in trouble for knowing some weird words... I think I took the most heat from people for playing WAQF, VAV, and QINDAR, but if you know that Q, X, Z, J, and double-V are harder to play... isn't the smartest thing you could possibly do be to learn more words you can play with those tiles??My solution vs. my girlfriend is to play her iPhone pass and play Scrabble, and she gets to hunt and peck until she finds a valid combination of letters when she has a bad rack. Her best play to date was probably EQUIDS, with the Q on the triple letter score and the S on the double letter score.
Our games are usually a battle between her hoarding large-point tiles and trying to put them on the bonus squares vs. my serial bingo-hunting and tactical blocking of her best scoring opportunities.
You don't have to be super-competitive and know a ton of weird words to be a decent Scrabble player. You just need to know the 2 letter word list and a few "bail out" words to help manage difficult racks. AURAE and AIOLI are nice vowel dumps, for example, and they're not even terribly obscure.
I score over 300 all the time, with a goal of 400 a game, but I'm sure even Scrabble club players would clean my clock regularly.
Anyway, I think when people complain about "not knowing words," they often (not always) just have a weaker vocabulary. IBEX might be a good example of a word like this. QWERTY is another handy trick that people are familiar with, but don't always know is an actual word. The letters in the Hebrew and Greek alphabets are words; why complain about QOPH looking odd, when the more familiar PI, PSI, and PHI are all legit?
My favorite Scrabble word? XEBEC. Favorite extension? Turning a lackadaisical QI into QIVIUT(s). :)