…with Gary Moss

Step outside the box. Most novice scrabble players play everyday/common words. There’s nothing wrong with that. At times, those words may achieve the most points for a turn. But one of the pieces of the game, the challenge, provides an opportunity for one player to stump the opponent and win an extra turn. This always occurs when the opponent thinks that you have misspelled a word or played a ‘phoney’, and challenges the play. If your word is adjudicated to be correct, you earn the points for the play and you get an immediate extra turn.
You will rarely be challenged when you play words like ‘where’ or ‘family’ or ‘quarter’. But what would you do if your opponent played ‘grosz’? Would you challenge? What would I do, you ask? First I would consider who played it. If my opponent always played common words then I might say challenge. But first, I would see how many points were scored. If the play earned 20 – 25 points, I might not challenge and play my own word to the ‘z’ or the ‘s’.
If I knew the word (grosz: a Polish coin), I might also know that other forms of that word are ‘grosze’ and ‘groszy’. I could hook it with my own comeback play.
Who would ever know a word like ‘grosz’? Well, a few years ago when I wanted to gain an edge in the game, I allowed my curiosity to take over and steer for a while. At one point I searched the dictionary for words that relate to monetary units. Penny, nickel, and dime would never be challenged. But how about ‘ngultrum’ or ‘ekpwele’ or ‘ngwee’?
Once my opponents saw that knew more than the average bear, they were less likely to challenge my plays. I even got away with some phoneys because others were afraid to challenge me.
What are you interested in? animals? herbs? fish? chemical compounds? Take a peek at all the words in the dictionary and see how much you never noticed before.
Did you know that the average person only knows about 5% of the words in the dictionary. Build yourself an arsenal of words from the other 95% and you’ll be way ahead of the pack.

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