Scrabble resources
By John Fultz
Last modified on Thursday, July 12, 2007
Here are some of my favorite online Scrabble resources with some of my own yammering about each.
NSA and tournament links
Upcoming tournaments
OWL1 to OWL2 dictionary changes:
Player information
- Rating
- Complete play history (via cross-tables.com)
- Player pages on the NSA site
- All Illinois rated players
Cross tables
Online play and study
Internet Scrabble Club
Popularly known as ISC, this site is the most popular hangout for online play among tournament players. Many of the club members are on ISC. Check the sidebar for a list of their logins which you might want to add to your buddies list.
JumbleTime
This is a great site for word study and a lot of fun. Use it to help you study anything from 4's to 8's. Requires only a Java-capable web browser.
Word lookup and study tools
These are the essentials.
- Lexpert is the most prevalent, and certainly one of the most flexible, tools out there. I use it for building all of my word lists. It also has quizzing and flash-carding features which I personally find less useful, but some people find it helpful. It's available for PC and many PDA's, although not for those running PalmOS. There's a lot of power built into here for creating highly customized word lists, but it can be a bit difficult to figure out how to do so. Feel free to ask me questions about how to do advanced queries. Also, if you're willing to get your hands dirty, I have customized my Lexpert to use Mike Baron's high probability lists. I'll post instructions soon.
- LAMPWords isn't as powerful as Lexpert, but it runs on Palm and is very suited to the scaled-down hardware. I use this daily, and the only real disappointment I find is that the * wildcard isn't useful in anagramming searches or when placed at the beginning of a word in a pattern because it requires so much computation to find the results (it does work, but can take minutes in the worst-case scenarios to produce a list).
- Mike Baron's WordBook is a great tool for organizing your word study. It's filled with stem lists, anamonics, and other sorts of useful word lists. OWL2 updates for the WordBook are available here.
- Brow-Raisers is a book which focuses on the words you probably don't know. It has lots of useful lists, organized in ways you'll rarely find elsewhere, and with uncommon words or uncommon hooks to common words emphasized. If you use systems and patterns as memory aids rather than just consuming raw word or alphagram lists, you should strongly consider this book. It's updated for OWL2, but you should make sure you have the errata.
Other resources
I've read Everything Scrabble from cover to cover, solved the puzzles, and memorized the word lists. I like word lists, but what I really like is strategy and inside tips. Most of what I see on the web is stuff I already knew from Everything Scrabble. Here are a few links I have been able to find which added something genuinely interesting to that body of knowledge (experts already know this stuff, but we're not all experts yet!).
- Steve Pellinen's Journey from Novice to Expert. I never successfully tracked tiles until I read this, and it was Steve who first showed me that there was something just beyond the high fives that I was missing.
- G.I. Joel's Newbie's** First Scrabble(tm) Lesson. The principle lesson here is that Scrabble is a math game, which you must understand to be really good. I have an engineering background, so I picked up on this naturally, but many people don't.
- Can-Am 2002, the book. I've only gone through a few games here, cause this book is meaty! This has wonderful expert commentary on some of the finest game play you're likely to see until your rating exceeds 1800.