I’m posting this to help out my friends who have tired of me destroying them at Scrabulous (based on Scrabble). So far in two-player games, Jen is the only person who’s beaten me. I’m 17-4 against her and 44-0 against everybody else. It’s kind of boring when nobody will play me. So if you’re interested, here’s a summary of how I approach the game. There’s nothing here that you can’t find in online or printed strategy guides. I score about 50 points less in my games versus Jen, so perhaps it will help you to know my strategies. (Jen already knows how to kick my butt, so I probably won’t be able to beat her after she reads this…)

Adjust to the game

The following tips are all useful in general, but depending on the actual game situation, you’ll find times to bend your usual strategies. Always be aware of what tiles have been played and the configuration of the board. Has an usually high number of E’s been played early in the game? If five N’s have already been played, are your I and G as valuable as if there were still four floating out there?

Know your opponent’s style of play. Do they leave the board open or closed? Do they use wise strategies or waste good tiles? 

Twenty points or more

A good rule of thumb is to try to score 20 points or more on each turn. If there’s just nothing out there but a 6 point play, you might consider swapping instead and coming out swinging next turn. Also, don’t hold out for that bingo if you can get 35 points some other way. That’s as good as half a bingo, and you might draw bingo tiles next turn anyway!

Look again

You found a great play! Wait. Before you play it, look some more. There might be a better play you hadn’t thought of. There is no time limit with Scrabulous, so use that to your advantage. Heck, go get a sandwich and play later!

Maybe you’ve been waiting for your opponent to play so you can lay down a beautiful bingo? Before you play, check to shee that they haven’t opened up a better place to play it. 

Leaves are golden

The tiles you leave on your rack are just as important as the ones you play on the board. Minimize the chances of getting stuck with all vowels or consonants by leaving an even mix of both after every play. Also, try to minimize leaving duplicate tiles on your rack.

Don’t be afraid to concede a few points on one play to leave better tiles on your rack. You might score 15 points instead of 22, but that’s better than leaving five vowels on your rack and scoring 6 points on the next turn. 

Use the magnifying glass

The authors of Scrabulous intended for this game to be an enjoyable learning experience. Therefore, they included a dictionary in the interface. Don’t be ashamed to use it! Finding words builds your vocabulary. Learn from words your opponents play. I’ve been playing since fourth grade, so I’ve got lots of conversationally useless words in my head!

Don’t like the dictionary? I can appreciate that. I’m down to play the old fashioned way. Fair warning: the last person to challenge me without the dictionary was down by 126 points after two turns. 

Two and three letter words

Familiarize yourself with the 2-letter and 3-letter words in the TWL dictionary. You can display the 2-letter words by clicking the ‘word list’ button in Scrabulous, though the more you play the less you need to.

Know which ones can be pluralized with an S or built upon in other ways. 

Find parallel plays

One of the main reasons for learning 2- and 3-letter words is to make it easy to see parallel scoring opportunities. You can score a lot with just a few tiles if you rack up points in both directions.

For example, if your opponent opens the game with BAKER for 22 points, you could play IRATE just beneath it for 25 points. BI, AR, KA, ET, and RE are all valid words. Hope your opponent doesn’t follow with STEAM below that for 46 points! BIS, ART, KAE, ETA, and REM, all nice 3-letter words. 

Look for hot spots

Hot spots are places on the board that will yield huge scores with the right tiles. These tend to be colored squares next to a vowel. Played on a triple letter score to the left of an A, the combination of ZA across and ZOO down is worth 63 points! There are similar opportunities with X, since XI, XU, EX, AX, and OX are all easy words to build in two directions. JO, KA, KI, and QI are also good.

Double word score hot spots can be great whenever you see a spot where you can double in both directions. 

Defensively, you want to be careful of opening up these spots unless you are sure you can capitalize on them first, or open up more than one hot spot. 

My favorite is the double-double hot spot. Early in the game, there’s often an opportunity to score across two double word scores. That scores as quadruple! 

Know when to swap

I know it hurts, but sometimes you just have toss your letters and get some new ones. When I swap, it’s because the board is tight and I have all vowels and consonants. Perhaps I don’t foresee playing more than one or two tiles for the next three turns. It depends on the situation whether I dump all or some of my tiles. On the bright side, swapping seven tiles increases your chances of drawing a blank if they’re still out there.

Bingo stems

When you’re shooting for bingos, there are "good" letters and "bad" letters to have. Generally, the more low-scoring tiles you have, along with a balance of vowels and consonants, the greater your chance of finding a bingo. Low-scoring tiles are easier to play, and thus, easier to play en masse. You can do pretty well managing your rack with just this in mind.

If you’re really hard core, though, you’ll learn that certain 6-letter groups yield more bingos added one random letter than others. These are known as "bingo stems". Do a little research online or in the book store and you’ll find that it’s actually quite insane the lengths that people have gone to catalog all possible combinations. 

The richest bingo stem is SATINE. It yields a bingo with practically every other letter. SATINE + D = DETAINS. SATINE + P = PANTIES. 

Then there are the words built off of SATIRE, RETINA, ARSINE, IRONES… I haven’t bothered to fill my head with all that. A lot of the top bingo stems contain letters in the word RETAINS, which is easy to remember and also descriptive! 

A general study of bingo stems shows that O is the second least useful vowel next to U, and that if you need to double up a vowel, the most useful candidate is E. 

How should this affect your strategy? Well, you should try to RETAIN these tiles as you play, in the hopes of drawing likely bingo tiles. This is not always the case, though. Don’t be afraid to drop your lovely bingo letters in favor of drawing new tiles if the game calls for it (see No fishing allowed!) 

Beginnings and endings

The best way to shuffle through your tiles for possible bingos is to set aside a common prefix or suffix and shuffle only the remaining tiles. It’s a lot easier to search all the permutations of three tiles than seven! Don’t just sit and stare at your rack. Shuffle! A word will pop out at you.

Obvious suffixes include -ING, -ED, -ERS, -TION, -IER. Common prefixes include PRE-, RE-, UN-, NON-, ANTI-. There are tons of possible beginnings and endings, though. It’s usually pretty easy to spot them in your rack. Some of my favorites are -INE, -ATE, -ITE, -IEST, -ITY, -TLY, -EST, -IST. 

No fishing allowed!

It’s tempting to play only a few tiles while waiting to draw that magic tile to go with your bingo stem. Don’t do it. It rarely ever works. You’ll sit there for four turns playing seven points at a time and end up 100 points behind.

The only time I ever fish is when I know any number of tiles I draw will yield a high scoring result. You’ll need to keep an eye on the tiles out there in order to keep mental odds on what might work. 

In all other situations, it’s better to just let refresh the tiles on your rack by playing as many letters as you can. This increases your chances of drawing blanks or big point tiles before your opponent does. 

Wonderful S

There are only four S’s. Use them wisely. I see so many players "waste" S’s on silly plays. You should use them for bingos or anything over 50 points only. They are the next most useful tiles after blanks.

Money Tiles

The hot spots strategy above shows the importance of the "Money Tiles" Z, Q, X, J, and K. You shouldn’t play these tiles unless you score them on a colored square in at least one direction. It’s fun to get the "money" tiles. Make the most of them.

The high point represent the higher difficulty of playing these tiles. The game lost a little something with the inclusion of QI, KI, ZA, etc. You used to have to cling to U for dear life, or play QAID, QAT, QOPH, or other U-less words wherever possible. Now it’s almost trivial to dump a QI in two directions. 

End game

By the time there are fewer than seven tiles left in the "bag", you should have a pretty good idea what tiles your opponent probably has. The more you play, the easier it will be to know what letters are still out there without actually counting. What you play and where you play it becomes critical toward the end of the game, especially when a last minute bingo can make or break a big lead.

Conclusion

If this seems like too much information, don’t worry. Just pick one or two items and incorporate new strategies gradually. You don’t have to be a word-list-studying tournament playing nerd to be good at this game. I certainly don’t have time for all that. Most of these tips are just common sense that become second nature as you play.

I didn’t even discuss blanks, offense vs. defense, my least favorite letters, and a slew of other tips! Oh well. Have fun!

Carmen Danenberg (c. 1999)

As some of you know, my paternal grandmother passed away Thursday, February 21st at the age of 92.  This was just days before a planned family get together, so my father and aunt were able to be at her side.  Her health had been failing for several years, so my father had moved her from Florida to a home in Cheshire a while back to take better care of her.  It was nice to be able to see her whenever I was in town for the weekend.  That’s something we didn’t really have growing up, with relatives scattered all over the world.

Except for a short while when we all lived in St. Thomas, visits to see my grandparents were infrequent trips to Florida.  In grade school, this meant a trip to Disney World every two years or so.  And while we were always excited about the Magic Kingdom, these are a few of the memories that are more important to me now:

• Their houses filled with vintage Chinese furniture and artwork, Peruvian pottery, and that giant clay lamp that looked like a meteorite.
• My grandmother’s Chinese cooking and coconut pudding with prune sauce that she made in her tiny kitchen with over 50 rooster and chicken decorations.
• Playing Rummikub and Mahjong with my grandparents.
• Their kind of pissy poodle.
• Listening to old Brazilian records in the bedroom
• The heat as soon as we got out of the airport in Tampa, and the soft chlorinated water that never seemed to get the soap off.
• Lots of old pictures, the kinds with the wavy edges, and letters from Hong Kong from the 30’s and 40’s.
• Lizards!
• Everybody speaking Portuguese in the room.
• My grandparents speaking Cantonese with each other so that nobody else would understand.
• The time they visited and my grandfather bit my grandmother’s thumb in his sleep.
• My grandfather cursing "Jackass!" in his Hong Kong British accent and waving his fist at other drivers from his blue Toyota Cressida.
• My grandmother’s sense of humor and my grandfather’s improvised war stories.

My Grandparents Roy and Carmen (c. 1941)

I flew down last Tuesday for Wednesday’s funeral.  One of her longtime friends hosted a fancy lunch.  Then we headed to the cemetary where she was laid to rest by my grandfather in a tiny service.

Some people I know grew up next door to their grandparents.  I kinda wish we had the same thing.

This is how I label my leftovers. I encourage you to do the same.

PS: This is not really vacuum-packed fried chicken.

I picked myself up a nice affordable laser printer today in the Lexmark E250dn.  It’s got the two features I wanted most: a network port and a built-in duplexing.  Since the printer can sit on the network, I can reclaim the PC I’ve been using as a print server and use it as a test platform for other projects.  Duplexing is a real nice paper saver when I need to print manuals and such.  I also appreciated that you can replace the toner and photoconductor separately, which is less wasteful.  And, unlike some others in the price range, it reportedly works "perfectly" with Linux.  (I’ll get around to testing that later…)

I haven’t printed much so far.  Installation was flawless.  There was a slight problem that the printer was faintly creasing the printed paper.  However, I was able to isolate the offending roller, and with a little "thumb maintenance", I corrected the defect.

Well, I hope it lasts a while!

Upon an enthusiastic recommendation, I attended Barry Harris‘ weekly jazz workshop last night.  Barry is a legendary jazz pianist and fervent jazz educator who, at the age of 78, hosts a workshop every Tuesday night for musicians of all levels.  That is to say, beginners are welcome, but he goes through stuff fast and it’s kind of funny when he snaps, "What’s so hard about that?  Play it right!"

Barry took us through the scales to play over "Whispering", the basis for the bebop standard "Groovin’ High".  Measure by measure, he drilled us in eighth-note scales counted off at around 160 bpm:

"Everybody play D7 up and down, one, two, three, four…  [play]   Again!  [play]  Down and up!  [play]  Up and down!  [play]  Now flat the second and the sixth, one, two, three, four…"

Then he’d stop and point out that we’d just changed our D7 scale into a G harmonic minor scale, and then sing some lines for us to play to connect the changes together.

I kept up with about 90% of it.  There was one long line he sung leading into the second half turnaround that was just too many notes for me to process at once, and breaking it apart became a lost cause once the whole room started noodling trying to figure it out.

Working through the song led us on a few tangents, one of them being what David Baker refers to as "bebop scales", but Barry refers to as making the scale "right".  I happened to start working on these heavily within the last month or so, and it’s really improving the flow of my phrases.  I’m not crazy about all the "rules" that go into where to put half steps and when, but I realize that I’m learning bebop and these are merely conventions to get that idiomatic sound.  But what really got me excited was that Barry said they didn’t need to be half steps…they could be "any random note"!  And he had us play G7 descending from the root, first with a half step between the root and seventh, then jumping up to the third between the root and seventh.  Awesome!

To further illustrate this, he had us play C major scales, inserting a half step between every tone.  Where there wasn’t room for a half step, he had us approach the note from a whole step above.  He went around the room making us play ascending from different scale tones.  I got to play from the sixth:

Then he had three of us play from different steps simultaneously.  The harmony sounded pretty cool.  There’s some potential in jazz arranging here, I think…

I learned a lot in two hours.  Even the stuff that I already knew, like G harmonic minor over D7, was worth learning again.  I always approached this as playing the harmonic minor of the target key.  Barry showed us that flatting the second and the sixth yields the related harmonic minor.  I always tell people, the more ways you learn to think of the same concept, the better you will be able to incorporate it into your playing.  So that’s a concept that just sunk in a little deeper.

For $15 a workshop?  Yeah, this is a good deal!  I’ll be going back for more.

Life imitating art…  I unearthed a copy of The Goonies that was languishing in the bargain DVD bin.  We watched this 80’s film treasure the other day.  I hadn’t seen this movie in its entirety since it’s theatrical release in 1985, so it was quite a treat to relive this crude and fantastic adventure.  Kids searching for buried treasure…awesome!

A few days later, I was Googling my former address in Brooklyn and found this bizarre parallel tale.  This November 10, 1910 article, courtesy of The New York Times Archives, details how two boys ransacked the building I lived in searching for BURIED GOLD!

There were a lot of stories about that old place, but I’d never heard this one before!  "…visions of oceans of ice cream sodas and mountains of candy…"  Haha, how much more Goonies can you get?  Fantastic!  I love this story!  So weird to think that I lived in this building.  I used to spend a lot of time in the basement of that building…repairing the furnace…myself…with rubber bands…

Was there really gold there?  Well, we may never know.  In July 2000, I pointed out a number of cracks and bulges in the east wall of the building to the new owner.  I told him that without repairs, the building would come down.  He shrugged it off saying that he had engineers tell him the building was fine.  Three years later on July 11, 2003, my prediction came true.  Actually, the building was evacuated, condemned, and demolished, but same difference only less messy.

Fortunately, I wasn’t living there any more.  That would have sucked.  In hind sight, I’ve never been so glad to move because my rent was tripled!

And if there was any gold, surely it would have been discovered during demolition.  Right?

For anyone who isn’t already saving 79% off the cover price by subscribing to Cosmopolitan, sidle up to your local newsstand and take a peek at the February 2008 issue, page 149. There’s a lovely interview with Jen, thoughtfully translated into Paris Hilton-ish to save space and reader effort.

I also get my first two photographs in a national magazine. Alas, they neglected my photo credit.

Oh, and something I didn’t need to see… Page 38, top right.

When you’re a kid with wheels, one of your favorite things is a very steep hill.   From ages 4 through 8, that’s what I had just steps from my front door in a tiny Connecticut town.  Our street was connected to its parallel neighbor by a sheer asphalt drop we called "Bat Hill".  I never saw that many bats there, but it needed a terrifying name nonetheless.

This was the late 70’s, and despite the advent of the Atari 2600, playing outside reigned supreme.  Before my brother and I graduated to yellow banana seat bikes, we cruised the neighborhood on bright yellow Big Wheels.  (I don’t know why our parents got us yellow rides…I suppose they wanted to maximize our visibility, but they sure attracted lots of bees…)

Bat Hill was a formidable incline.  It took us quite some time to gather the courage to descend from the very top.  One day, I went out to join the neighborhood kids and found they had set up a ramp at the base of Bat Hill.  They were jumping a line of Big Wheels Evel Knievel style, using speed gained from the very top of Bat Hill.  I climbed to the top, heart racing, and began a fierce descent.  Big Wheels, like tricylces, pedal the front wheel directly, so when you’re rolling fast, you just have to lift your feet and let it fly.  Well, my first attempt was a record distance.  Apparently, everyone else just rolled from the top, but I had pedaled from the get go until I had to lift my feet!

Infamous Bat Hill

Well, I was thinking about this the other day when I realized I could visit Bat Hill using wonderful Google Earth!  One cool feature of Google Earth is that you can measure distances and elevations.  This means you can calculate the grade of a hill, which expresses the distance dropped divided by the length of the drop as a percentage.  (You’ll see the percent grade on those steep grade truck signs intended to keep trucks out of furniture stores…)  As best I can measure, Bat Hill drops 44 feet in 438 feet, a robust 10% grade.  There are steeper hills out there, but still that’s a good ride for a Big Wheel!  (In comparison, the Derby Downs Soap Box Derby track in Akron, Ohio is twice as long, but carries a 6% drop for most of its length.)

We got pretty nuts on that hill.  One of our favorite things to do was to pull the red sides off our wooden wagon and ride it down Bat Hill, steering by it’s narrow black handle.  As kids, we were pretty indestructible.  If I were to try that today, it would be grounds for a Darwin Award!

On Monday night, my friend Josh Irving played at a fairly new Brazilian jazz club in New York called Cachaça.  Josh is a saxophonist I’ve known for nearly nine years now (has it been that long already?).  His quartet featured long time collaborator George Dulin on piano, Danny Zanker on bass, and special guest Francisco Mela on drums.  Josh kindly gave me an opportunity to sit in on his song "9 Goes To 10".  I didn’t know it at the time, but Jen took this video on her digital camera:

It was really dark in there!  This is the first video of me playing since high school (I dare anyone to try to dig that recording up!), so I thought I’d post it here.  This is actually my least favorite of Josh’s compositions to play on…it just has this way of kicking my ass and is very difficult for me to find anything melodic to play over the chord changes.  Last time I saw Josh perform this tune, he had Dan Pratt  playing tenor.  Dan made it sound like a piece of cake!  Not surprisingly, as everything he plays is supremely lyrical.  That’s one of the beautiful things about New York…there are always brilliant musicians to inspire you!

Incidently, Josh and I recorded a more relaxed version of this tune in the studio in 2000.  It’s totally different in this setting…

Anyway, this really has me excited to play more jazz.  I have a very busy next three months, but I’m managing to get some tenor time in there.

This is something my brother and I learned from a book many years ago.  We used to do this in my grandmother’s yard.  Today, I showed Jen how to make rockets from matchsticks for her In The New blog.  I thought the video was so cool I’d cross post it here.

These are wooden matches, which don’t work as well as paper matches because they are heavier.  Some warmer and less blustery day, I’ll try this again and shoot for better results.

If you want to learn more, check out this Matchstick Rockets site for information and safety tips.  They claim launches up to 12 feet distance.  As I recall, 6 to 8 feet was about average when my brother and I tried this.

DISCLAIMER: This is playing with fire! Kids get adult supervision. Protect your eyes, and be careful not to burn yourself or other people. Don’t do this inside, or in the presence of flammable materials or vegetation.