PUSHED AROUND
I was always taught that to ‘push others around’ or to ‘be pushed around’ was wrong. That is 100% true when we’re talking about people.
But, when it comes to playing scrabble, in order to find the words that are hiding in plain sight on your rack, you’d do best if you kept up pushing the tiles around.
We all develop our own method of looking for and identifying words from the tiles on our racks. There is not one ‘right way’ of doing this. There are even some players who insist that they can do best by simply arranging the tiles alphabetically and then giving them a long hard stare. (That method is called alphagramming.) The system that works best for you, is always the ‘right’ system.
I’ve watched many a player move the tiles around on their racks frantically. I always wonder what they are thinking. Is there a method to the way that they shift the tiles back and forth?
When I move my tiles I begin by identifying prefixes and suffixes: ing; ed; re; un. I look for extensions: out; over; dom; non. My eyes flit back and forth from my rack to the board, looking for places to fit the words that I notice.
What baffles me are the players who spends too much time finding a word, only to learn that the word doesn’t play on the board. That’s insane.
In club and tournament scrabble, players are limited to 25 minutes for their portion of the game, before they are penalized points for overtime. Some players display no sense of time awareness. Yesterday, I watched my opponent squander 12 minutes looking for a bingo, and then she never found it. Even if she had found a bingo and scored 80+ points, she would have won the battle but lost the war.
When teaching others how to become more effective scrabble players, I encourage ‘fast thinking.’ You know best how you go through your life. You know best about what your relationship is with ‘time’. To be an effective scrabble player you have to quicken your pace.
You don’t have to play faster; you do have to get more thinking done in every minute.
Here’s an exercise to build your speed.
Take the word ‘accomplishment’ (or any word of your choice). Set a timer for 10 minutes. Get a pen and paper. Start the timer. Now write as long a list as you can, of all the words (2 letters long or longer) made from only the letters in the word ‘accomplishment’. When 10 minutes have passed, STOP! How many words did you find and write down?
How many possible words do you think there were?
Would you believe three thousand thirty-three?
What was the longest word that you found? Did you see chemicals or technical?
The skills that I build and encourage in wannabe scrabble champions are wrapped around seeing words and the scrabble board differently, thinking faster, and developing new perspectives beginning with: Pushing Around.