Video:Scrabble Hot Spots

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Transcript:Scrabble Hot Spots

Hello, I am John Williams. I am the executive director of the National Scrabble Association. I am Matt Silver. I am two time national school Scrabble champion. And we are going to show you some moves to get a lot better in Scrabble, so if you are wiling to follow us for a few minutes we guarantee you will become a much better player.

Bonus Squares (or Hot Spots)

We are aging to talk to you now about bonus squares, or what we like to call hot spots. If you want to score a lot more in a scrabble game utilizing the hot spots, as we like to call these colored squares, will get you a lot more points.

Hot Spot Play

Say I wanted to play the word WIG. I could play it right here, and I am using the triple word score with a pretty high scoring tile, so I score 15 just for WIG and then for forming DOG it is 20 points. Matthew just showed you how you could do it here, playing WIG for a certain number of points and the using this rack I will show you another example. So we play to these two hot spots, again the triple, so this is 46 points.

Defensive Scrabble Play

We get asked a lot about how defensively to play. Matt and I may not agree completely on this, but I was taught not to worry too muc habotu what the other person might do, but just scoring myself until I get deeper in the game when it gets a lot headier. That said, one of the bonuses of this play I just made right here with HANDY, is I have now shut down this lane. No one can really make a triple for a seven letter word, because there is nothing you can put on the Y.

Thanks for joining us today. To learn more you can go to About.com, or ScrabbleAssociaton.com. We hope these tips help you become a better Scrabble player.