I have enough self-confidence to admit that I am an avid Scrabble player, and have even been known to play on a team. There is one member of our team who shall remain nameless (Jean) who seems to have figured out how to game the system.
She sits there quietly, the sweetest person on the team, and just smiles and waits. And then she cuts your throat. She would be the perfect recruit for the CIA. No one would suspect her. But she's ruthless.
Now I think I've discovered her secret. Besides the fact that she likes to construct little buildings of multi-layered words (drives us crazy), I bet she knows what the research guru at Google just figured out: Letter frequency and word frequency don't match the point system that Scrabble has used for 75 years.
According to Deadspin, the strategy you should use is to get rid of your J and Q as quickly as you can. They just don't pay off the way you think they will. As the article says, "God bless 'jo' and 'qi.'" That's practically a rallying cry for our team.
And the letters you should be thrilled to pull? That would be H, Y, and Z. Deadspin says, "The language contains more Z-words than (Scrabble founder) Alfred Butts apparently realized, and you can exploit this knowledge." Zouks, anyone?
The clever writers at Deadspin have also figured out my ruthless teammate's issue: "Once a fever catches you in Scrabble, it's hard to shake. You become misanthropic, savage."
Well played, Jean. Well played.
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