I’ve been watching YouTube videos of high-level Scrabble. It’s amazing the (valid) words they come up with. But I see a lot of foreign words (e.g. QUAI (French for QUAY)), and words such as C*NT. Would the N-word be acceptable? Other insults to minorities?
5 points seems like a very small penalty for calling out an opponent’s “phony” which turns out to be valid.
Memorize the 107 two-letter words - noting that none have the letter “C”, and the only ones with two consonants are “HM”, “MM”, and “SH”.
There is an official Scrabble dictionary, so as long as the word is there, it’s playable. I think the high-level players memorize as many of the words as possible. They may start with the shorter words. (And quai is in that dictionary.)
I remember GAMES magazine had a lengthy article about Scrabble. The article included an interview with the American champion. Said champion told the interviewer he considered the game to be more of a math game than a word game.
I can see that. A top player needs to know the tiles in the set with the point values for each letter, probabilities, and, of course, have a ready repertoire of high scoring words.
There used to be a great Scrabble program that let you use different dictionaries: Scrabble, SOWPODS, Chambers, etc. The two letter words vary a little by country and dictionary, and you must know these along with Q without a U words… they allow a few more words every time they revise the dictionary.
The official rules for the game don’t actually specify a dictionary, just that everyone in the game must agree on what dictionary to use. The Official Scrabble Dictionary is only official in the sense that it’s the dictionary that’s used in tournaments. A home game may of course choose to use that dictionary, or they could choose some other one.
And they don’t exactly decide which words to put in the Official Scrabble Dictionary, either. They have a list of about a half-dozen standard, reputable dictionaries, and base the Official Scrabble Dictionary on what words are in those. Those dictionaries, meanwhile, choose what to include based on usage, and there is some level of judgement call there.
In the events I was watching, if a word was challenged, it would be typed in on a keyboard, and the screen would light up either red or green, Perhaps the software merges in more than one dictionary.