Spanked -- Remembering Scrabble Odds

Well, it's got to happen sometimes, doesn't it? Despite the fact that my uncle and I are roughly equals in terms of general vocabulary and the fact that I vastly outrank him in terms of obscure Scrabble words (because I'm a fanatic and he's merely a fan) and the fact that I know a few more tricks of the trade than he does because of playing so often ...

... he absolutely walloped me tonight, 472 to 237.

He picked 3 of the 4 "S" tiles. He got on Y, all H and W tiles; he got X and J and Q and Z; and he got both blanks. He started the game by playing "PANACEA" (with a blank for the C).

I got both B and both C tiles, both V tiles, one Y and one M. Other than that, all 1-point tiles. AND ... never quite in combination for a BINGO until I got such combinations (when the G tiles finally showed up for ING words) at the end when there was nowhere to play them. In fact, most of the time I could only keep one vowel on my rack.

Oh, it was brutal. But the important lesson was to remember that odds can play out however they like to, and luckily I have a good enough opponent playing against me that he knew what to do with his tiles to score close to 500 points.

Yes, I think it was right of me to try holding some tiles in hopes of a BINGO because I was so far back from the beginning. But there's always a balance there, keeping in mind that you might not get those tiles you're hoping for. ...

Scrabble Words of the Day -- +IX+

Got an "X" and "I" on your Scrabble rack? You don't have to just play "XI" (although that's a great way of duplicating the value of X of course). Here are a number of words you can play with IX (in that order), including a number of hooks.

3-letter words ending in IX include:

FIX
MIX
NIX
PIX (and, by the way, you can also go with PYX)
SIX

Here are the hooks to those by adding letters at the end:

FIXT
MIXT
NIXE
NIXY
PIXY

4-letter words beginning with IX? There's just one:

IXIA

And for the craziest among you, here's a nutso word using X:

XYST