…with Gary Moss

There’s always one more thing.

You’re a scrabble player and you finally mastered all the 2-Letter-Words in the year 2002. Along comes the NSA word committee and Merriam Webster who wanted to add a few sheqels to their coffers and POOF, another 5 2-Letter-Words were added to the OWL, along with some 4,000+ other words. To make things even more interesting . . . they deleted some words from the old list too.

Life is an ever changing drama. There is always one more thing to do. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it gets in the way of vegging out in an easy chair.

Casual players don’t really seem to care much about the official word list, except when they have a word challenged off the board by some scrabble purist. Then some of them become very huffy and ask why this is a word and that is not a word.

All games have rules. Without rules, there is only chaos. The rules define the game and how it is to be played. The rules of playing scrabble include a list of acceptable words (OWL2). Home players often make up ‘house rules’ and use any old dictionary that is handy as the word source. ‘House Rules’ and ‘Any Old Dictionary’ won’t fly at sanctioned clubs and tournaments.

There is just one more thing to do . . . . . LEARN THE WORDS IN THE OWL2. There are only a little more than 155,000 words in the OWL2. The average person on the street know about 5% of the words in the dictionary. Persons who play regularly at scrabble clubs will amass greater word power simply by playing and being exposed to what other opponents are playing. But even playing regularly is not enough to get you to the ranks of the scrabble mavins. The champions devise study regimens that they adhere to religiously. It is not uncommon for a scrabble champion to devote 20 – 40 hours a week to study (not just playing). But that is true about anything that you want to master.

What’s the ‘One More Thing’ that you have to do today? What are you putting off doing?

If learning more words is your ‘One Thing’ a great tool for learning high-probability bingos is my BOOKMARKS. Buy one or buy the ‘Starter Set of 10′. CLICK HERE.