Word Addict by Craig Beevers

Author:Craig Beevers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

Other Strategies

So far we’ve seen a lot of situations. Score and leave have dominated the discussion, but other considerations have come into play. I wanted to discuss further tactics that come up now and again. As you’ll have seen now and again, setups do occasionally come into the equation. These can be deliberate, blatant attempts to open something up. They can also be bluffs, of course, with the aim of thwarting our opponent by getting them to sacrifice equity. A lot of setups are accidental or incidental to the play, however: a case of making a move and then realizing that it happens to tick a few other boxes as well. It isn’t important how a player arrives at the fact that a particular move has extra strategical value, so long as it is considered. As well as setups, there are related situations where you can plan ahead. Lets for example imagine you have ADEFGMO on your rack. You might look at the board and decide you’d like to play FOG somewhere. Elsewhere there might be a decent spot for MEAD, which are the tiles you’re keeping. so you have that as a backup, whatever tiles you draw. It always helps to have a score guaranteed before you even dip your hand in the bag, or even if it hinges on picking a range of bountiful letters or your opponent not blocking the spot. Something like this helps to overwrite general rack leave evaluations with something that’s based on what you know you may actually score – which is much more relevant. Ultimately, leave values are just a guess of how a particular set of tiles is going to affect your average score for the next turn. If you know you’re going to get a high score next turn, or at worst a middling one, then that’s effectively a good leave.

Another strategy that comes up occasionally is known as a fork. This is when one word opens the board up in two places or lanes. A player may specifically look for this sort of play when trailing by a bonus and needing to create two openings at once, so the opposing player can’t easily block both. But it happens more often when a player has some scoring power and can’t cash in well enough on the current move, so they open up two high scoring spots, knowing they’ve got the tiles to likely score heavily next turn on whichever one is still open.

Here’s a real life example of a fork, played in the second game of the 2014 World Scrabble Championship final between myself and Chris Lipe.

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