Barking Space

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I’m competitive in a weird way.

I’m not really afraid to lose, but at the same time, I don’t really like it. Who does?

When I lose at something, it’s more about improving my general skills than beating a specific person (except when it comes to the Spiderman: City Raid game that Dave, Beth and I are addicted to).

One of my favourite games is Scrabble. I wrote an article recently about how much I love playing Scrabble on Facebook. I’ve completed about 87 games and won 67 of them.

I suspect that a lot of my opponents think I am some kind of Scrabble Wizard, which is really not the case.

Considering that most of these people are my friends, I would like to offer up some of the cheap tricks that I use to usually score big points.

To Be or Not to Be

I have made a lot of Bingos. A Bingo (in Scrabble) occurs when you use all seven of your tiles at once, as a new word, or part of an existing word. On top of the normal score for the word, one gets a 50 point bonus for using all of their tiles.

A really good trick to spelling large words is to use an underrated prefix. The BE combo, as I like to call it. Here are some examples of random tile draws and what you can make out of them using this strategy…

• LDEOCUB – You could spell the word CLOUD, but it would be better to spell the word BECLOUD
• MEBASCL – You could spell the word CALMS, but it would be better to spell the word BECALMS
• CEKSBED – You could spell the word DECKS, but it would be better to spell the word BEDECKS
• GMOOLBE – You could spell the word GLOOM, but it would be better to spell the word BEGLOOM

See? A great cheap trick that nets you an extra 50. That could mean the difference between losing and winning. Or the difference between winning and kicking major ass.

🙂

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