I knew a guy once who loved the game, but called it Scramble® instead. He wasn't very good at it, and I beat him repeatedly, but he loved the game he called Scramble.
I've been playing Lexulous lately, and it's totally fascinating me, because I'm finally playing enough of this type of game to develop some serious skills. Either that, or because Lexulous has the F* word and all variations in it, so I could finally recreate that scene from Foul Play in real life. You can add about fifty points per game to your game in either Scrabble or Lexulous if you memorize two words, QI and ZA. Qi is an alternate spelling of Chi, probably only used in China, and I have no idea what Za means. The significant thing is QI and ZA are the only two-letter words with Q and Z in them, and those are the highest value letters. And one piece of basic beginning word puzzling advice is to memorize all of the two-letter words, and to start memorizing the three-letter words..
You can add another 50 points to your game if you remember that you can make a two-letter word with
X and any vowel. Those words are AX, EX, XI, OX, and XU.
There's a problem though. Qi, Za, and Xu don't appear in regular dictionaries. I'm sure they're in super-unabridged dictionaries, and they're in the Official Scrabble Dictionary. But, they're not in normal people dictionaries.
I realized this was a problem, because I used to hate the Scrabble dictionary. I'm not sure why, it might be because someone pulled on me what I'm about to try on my friends.
I realized it was a problem, because I decided that I need to buy a copy of the Scrabble dictionary, because I wanted to beat my friends by 50+50 more points than I already beat them. Because if someone challenges me on Za in a regular dictionary, I will lose.
But, nobody will play Scrabble against me in real life anyway, so I haven't figured out why I feel this compulsion to buy a Scrabble dictionary.
I recently watched the movie Word Wars, a movie mostly about unemployed people who are trying to be professional Scrabble players.
But the problem is that the winner of Scrabble tournaments only make ten thousand bucks and there are only about two tournaments per year, so a pro Scrabble player only make twenty thousand bucks per year and so there could only theoretically be one of them, one pro Scrabble player in the world. While watching the movie, I could only think about two things. 1) I could be a word freak, I could be a serious Scrabble competitor, and 2) I could pay for and host one of these Scrabble tournaments in Utah, and make about fifty Scrabble freaks super happy.
So if I go further down that path of thinking, I'll probably need an Official Scrabble Dictionary.
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