August 20, 2015

Scrabble Tutorial: Prefixes and Suffixes - Bingos

The easier way to create bingos is to save a prefix/suffix and wait until you could append/prepend it to a word. As you can see, blank tiles are immensely useful. Say you are currently saving ING. This makes it so that you only need to make a 4-letter word with the rest of your tiles instead of a 7 letter word. Common beginnings/endings that are easy to make words with are:

-ING
-ERS
-IER
DE-
RE-

The most common one that you would actually run into is -ERS. You can see why it is so useful: If you can't place it on the board, simply rearrange the ER to the RE-. There are, of course, times where you should save your letters, and times where it simply isn't worth your trouble. If you have a balanced rack, you should probably save them. If you have an imbalanced rack, well, just use up as many tiles as you can and don't try to save them.

Experts don't do just that - they sort their tiles in alphabetical order, then, they cross reference that with all 7-letter words (that were also sorted in alphabetical order). I honestly don't have that much time for memorizing them, so I do this instead.

Tags: tutorial scrabble