Hooked on Scrabble!

So you are hooked with Scrabble, fantastic. Well it’s great to learn some new words to bamboozle your opponents and gain a small advantage in Scrabble so now that you are hooked, let’s learn some hooks.

I’ve already blogged about the 2 letter words here, next learn a few handy hooks. Firstly, what is a hook? No, it’s not what you use to catch a fish, in Scrabble it’s adding a letter to an existing word on the board to play your new word. In the example below, move 1 was DOG and move 2 was SHARD.  The S is the hook making DOGS.  There are 3 advantages about this type of move;

1. You do not have to create a word using a letter already on the board (either D, O or G)

2. You score more (DOGS=6 SHARD=19 TOTAL=25).  You could play SHARD using the D of DOG but you get a much smaller score.

3. You open the board nicely (although this can be a disadvantage too)

A great advantage of knowing an unusual (UNUSUAL – lovely 7 letter word with 3 U’s) hook is that you can keep building hooks like the example below...

                                                                                                             

WEX = 26                                           

WEXE = 14 
BEER = 12
TOTAL = 26                               

WEXES = 15

RE = 2

SEXY = 28

TOTAL = 45

My Awesome Hooks List

The word like JAMBOKS is fantastic.  Learn that one word and you have actually learnt 6 words.  It’s called a word pyramid, if you look closer you will find you can remove a letter from the end and it’s still an allowed word all the way to JA.

What other word pyramids can you find? Please comment them below.

Enjoy learning and let me know how you get on.

John the Captain Ryan.