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Scrabble

I play Scrabble® quite often occasionally, but rarely on a real board any more. Some of my highest-scoring turns are BUNG[L]ERs (140), QInTARS (111), QUESTiON (104), ABILITY (101), and the inspired triple N dump CINNa[MO]N (99).

Eq's Word Finder is a word study program I created.

I am qazplm on Internet Scrabble Club, where I mostly play rated Sowpods games of 10 to 15 minutes. I prefer double challenge. I disagree with single challenge on theoretical grounds (since if there's no penalty you might as well challenge every turn), and I think void challenge encourages laziness. Also, you can't beat turning around a losing game with a convincing phony :)

My next target is to learn the three-letter words as thoroughly as possible, but I haven't been very enthusiastic about it yet. I should also study the high-frequency bingos in the new Collins word list.

Some good three-letter words new to Collins: aua, aue, caa, caz, iwi(+s), jol(+s,ing,ed), pav(+s), sav(+s), sik, tex, umu, vag(+s,ging,ged), wai(+s), yag(+s), wof(+s), zep(+s), zol(+s).

Valid but unplayable words

There are a few English dictionary words that can never be played in Scrabble because of the tile distribution, even when the two blanks are taken into account.

This (probably incomplete) list is a combination of my own observations (from the Chambers Dictionary) and those of Mike Thelen (from the former OWL2 word list).

classlessnesses, knickknack(+s), pazzazz(+es), pizzazz(+es,y), possessednesses, razzmatazz(+es), razzamatazz(+es), stresslessness, senselessnesses.

Anamonics

Although I'm not at the level of play where I'd make significant use of anamonics, they're fun to create. Here are my anamonics (also included in John Chew's canonical list).