Video:Using S in Scrabble

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Transcript:Using S in Scrabble

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.

S and Blank Tiles

You see before you the two most valuable tiles in a Scrabble bag - the S and the Blank. The reason being that if you get these tiles and you parlay them with the other five tiles you know you will eventually be able to make a seven letter word because these two tiles are so flexible.

How to Use an S

The rule of thumb with the S is not to use it unless you are going to score another 12 or so points. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would say so. Anywhere from 8 to 12 points more merits the use of an S. Unless you have two Ses. In that case, if you have more than one S, that could be hurting the tiles you have. That means you might not be able to play as many good words. So if you have two or more Ses, do not hesitate to play off of them.

When to Use S

Let us say you have these tiles and you are debating whether to use the S or not. You could play WORD, which would score you 16 points, but if you play the S on there and form WRODS, you could score 26 points, that is 10 more points. So in this case you would be better of playing the S because even though it is very useful to keep you will score 10 extra points, so that is very beneficial.

If WORD was as originally played, and we put the S onto here, so we get the points for SWORD plus points for PUNTS. That is by adding the S front hook. That is why the S is so valuable. You can almost, 85 percent of words take an S. And it is also very useful, because because you hooked the S onto the word WORD, you can now reach the double word score. The S is very useful because you can stretch your words out to the premium letter scores - the double word score, the triple letter score.

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.