Entry 40: Hardscrabbled

I recorded my highest ever Scrabble score a few days ago in an online game. I put up 640 points besting my previous high mark of 633. A big difference, however, is that the previous game was a regular game, whereas the recent game was a speed game. I only had 3 minutes total on my clock (plus one additional minute at a ten point penalty). I made 16 plays in 3 minutes and 34 seconds, so my average time per play was 13.4 seconds, and I averaged 49.2 points a play. That, my friends, is pretty damn good.

To prove it, I took a snapshot of the board.

[This board represents my finest achievement, Scrabble or otherwise, to date.]

You’ll notice in the upper right corner that I’ve labeled my user handle for the site and my score. It says shortymcsh, that’s me, 640 points. (My handle is short for Shorty McShortGame. I ran out of characters.) You’ll also notice in the upper left corner that my opponent scored 367 points. Poor twopine1! He/she never had a chance. The tiles I played are shown in red, the tiles twopine1 played are shown in blue.

The big plays came early. My opponent hit the bingo HANGERS (a bingo is when all seven tiles in your rack are played in one turn -- it’s a 50-point bonus) putting an H in the top row. I then counter-bingoed with REDHEADS, covering two triple word scores in the process, so not only did I get the 50-point bonus, but my point total was multiplied by nine (triple-triple) giving me a 158-point play.

On my very next play, I hit another bingo LIMNERS (a word you would only know from Scrabble) to give me 237 points after three plays. A couple plays later I put down another bingo AVERTING (76 points), then parlayed the X into a big score AX (47 points), and then found myself with DELIVER in my rack. The only place I could see to play it would have required me to make the words LOWED and SIZER in the process. I knew the latter was a valid play, but I wasn’t 100% confident about the former. It was too good to pass up though, so I made the play. In fact, LOWED is valid. It’s the past tense of low, which as a verb means, “to utter the sound characteristic of cattle”.

In retrospect, I now see that instead of DELIVER, I could have played either RELIVED or REVILED making LOWER and SIZED in the process, both of which are obviously valid, so I didn’t even need to take a risk. That’s the type of thing I almost certainly would’ve seen in a regular game, but didn’t have time to look for in a short game.

I also see now that I could have had an even higher score had I tried to play my last two tiles -- D and I -- optimally. I played DIT for 4 points just to end the game, put I could have first played QI for 11 points, and then after my opponent played (he/she had A and U so he/she couldn’t have ended the game) I could have played the D to make BED/DEF (spot L6) for 13 points. This sequence would have netted me 18 points, so I could’ve had 658 points (668 total since I had a 10-point clock penalty). Man, I should have done that. Oh well, I’ll remember it for the next time this exact same sequence of words is played.