…with Gary Moss

Without a brush, without a drop of paint, players at Club #350 paint masterpieces with their words at every club session.
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Player #1 opened by playing ‘COLD’ on the board, placing the ‘D’ on the center square.
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Player #2 sat staring at a rack containing ‘AAABCTW’.
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Some players would have moaned and traded some tiles. Some players may have played ‘CAW’ or ‘WAB’ or ‘CACA’, hoping for a better tile combination on the next rack.
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But player #2 had been doing homework by studying word lists. A lot like me, he/she always hits a mental wall with two or three of ‘A’ on a rack. So that’s one of the lists that he/she had studied. Instead of moaning,
he/she moved the tiles around and discovered ‘CATAWBA’.
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Most players who could find ‘CATAWBA’ might moan even louder, they may believe that ‘catawba’ couldn’t play on the board. But Player #2 had also studied ‘HOOKS’. A hook is a single letter that can be added to the front or the end of a word, creating a new legal word. The most common hook is ‘S’ which hooks to the end of countless words. But ‘S’ is not the only hook.
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Player #2 knew that ‘A’ is a front hook for ‘COLD’, creating the word ‘ACOLD’.
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Now to me, that’s as beautiful as a Rembrandt.
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This week’s DEAL OF THE WEEK are the lists of words containing more than one ‘A’.
CLICK HERE.