Video:Scrabble Strategy: Hook Plays

Transcript:Scrabble Strategy: Hook Plays

Hello! I'm John Williams - I am the executive director of the National Scrabble Association. I'm Matt Silver, 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 willing to follow us for a few minutes we guarantee you will become a much better player.

What Are Scrabble Hook Plays?

Now we are going to talk about hook plays. Hook plays are about seeing opportunities, keeping th board open. This is our current rack, and we want to look for ways to really expand this. So one thing that we noticed is we happen to have an A and we see that MAZE is on there, so just by doing this little hook play - putting the A on MAZE - we get points for AMAZE and FRANK going down. So, classic example of the hook play.

Hook Plays Strategies

Not only the S can be used for hooks, but any letter can be used. So here is another example of an extension. On the board we have ZIT, and I will play the word EVIL, extending ZIT to ZITI, with the I hooking on the end. I could have played this word in a few different places, maybe played LIVE here, but not scored quite as much. But by hooking onto ZIT I was able to reach to double word score and score a lot more points.

Defensive Scrabble Hook Play Strategy

Speaking on the defensive side more, the case could be made for playing VEIL instead. What happens is, this shuts this down. There is no two letter word beginning with V, so there is not a play here. EVIL there is a chance that someone could do a play like that and score, so it is just another way of thinking about it. Be more defensive and play VEIL, that will shut it down, Of course, it depends on the situation in the game.

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