This is not my blog.

I mentioned the Scrabble Grams book that I bought recently in my Columbus post the other day. I've been having a fun time with these puzzles and have been using them as a way of building my Scrabble play without resorting to memorizing word lists. As Martha pointed out in her comments to my last Scrabble post ... it's funny how your skills take jumps sometimes. When I was playing in Ohio I would tend to play the "granny game" where your words are played defensively up and down a diagonal with few opportunities to build big words (sort of like this one). In fact, I really only could work with 3 and 4 letter words and when I read Word Freak I was incredulous that anyone could think in terms of 7 and 8 letter word plays or play "bingo lanes" (places where you could hook long words onto the existing board). However, now that I've been playing in the WV Scrabble Club for a month I'm seeing my skills take a big jump. I play against people now who open the board up (sort of like this one) and aren't so worried about the triple word score spaces because they are looking for the 50 bonus points that come from getting a bingo (like these).

That is where these puzzles come into play. Now I'm starting to look at my Scrabble racks and rearrange the letters looking for potential bingos. From reading the experts talk about racks that are "bingo prone" I know what letters are more likely to lead to bingo plays and I have started to find them ... I don't get to play them on the board as often as I have them in my hand ... but that will come with time. The increase in my skill is the ability to see them in my rack and because I don't see myself ever memorizing word lists I think that is the best that I can hope for. These exercises are set up to give you four racks of letters and to give you a "par score" of what you should able to get from arranging the letters and taking advantage of special score spaces. As you can see from this first one ... I didn't do so well scoring only 32pts. out of a possible 211pts. (according to the answer in the back of the book). Check it out for yourself before clicking on the answer. See if you can get a higher score than I did ... then brag about it to me. Go ahead.

Then there is this puzzle that I totally kicked ass on. I managed to get the highest score without having to look it up. The second row was the one that took the longest time while the first and fourth came pretty quickly. I kept wondering if the third row was the best that I could do and it apparently was. The total possible score on this one (again according to the answer in the back of the book) was 219. I would say see how you do ... but my answers are here for you to see. Maybe you should go back to the first one where I didn't get any of the right answers and see how you do. Maybe I'll post another one of these sometime that is blank (like this one that I haven't hit par on yet). Time to go back to less interesting non-Scrabble related topics. Later all.

Check out all of my Scrabble posts here or from my blog's sidebar.

Labels: scrabble