Begin Each Day With 5 New Words
You’ve got to start somewhere. Agreed? If you don’t like the number 5, choose 4 or 9 or 3 instead. You get the point. Nothing different will happen until you decide to begin to do something.
Now, if you decide to take my advice, which 5 words are you going to choose to commit to memory? Would the first 5 words in the dictionary be the best place to begin? How about the last 5 words in the dictionary?
How about 5 new words at random? ( Close your eyes; open the dictionary without looking; put your finger on the page; and that is one of the words you will learn.)
Are you kidding? What would the value be to learn a word like kvass? Sure it is good. But there is a very low probability that you would have the k, v, a, s, s on the same rack, and it is not even a bingo (a 7 letter word). That process is extremely inefficient.
The most productive words to learn are those that have letters with a high probability of showing up together on your rack. The mathematicians who love scrabble figured it out for us years ago. They call the letter clusters, ’stems’. A stem is a given set of letters, that, when one additional letter is added, creates a set of real words. . . . or not.
The 6 letter ’stem’ with the highest probability is ‘S’ ‘A’ ‘T’ ‘I’ ‘N’ ‘E’. (Satine is not a word.) The exciting thing about ’s-a-t-i-n-e’ is that when you add another ‘a’ and shuffle the letters around, you can find two ‘legal words’: entasia and taenias.
It doesn’t matter that you don’t know what they mean. If you are that curious, pause at this point and go look them up.
The point being that they are words and now you know them. Hopefully, when you play them against an opponent, your opponent won’t know them and will challenge you. Guess who will win that challenge?
s-a-t-i-n-e + b = banties and basinet
s-a-t-i-n-e + c = acetins and cineast
etc., etc., etc
s-a-t-i-n-e does not make a 7 letter word with ‘j’, ‘q’, or ‘y’
all other letters in the alphabet can create one or more 7 letter words with s-a-t-i-n-e.
s-a-t-i-n-e + n = (9 different words; how many do you know?)
This is the kind of thing that I will teach you if/when you take my online scrabble class, SCRABBLE 101.
You don’t want to spend money to take a Scrabble 101 class? You think you can do it all on your own? Okay, you still may want to invest a little cash to obtain some of the stems, on laminated bookmarks.
BOOKMARKS
With me or without me, to be a highly competitive player, you need to build your word power.