The dark art of playing world-class Scrabble

When the top players gathered in Torquay last year for the World Scrabble Tournament (this year’s contest should have been this week, but has been cancelled thanks to you-know-what), it was to use ‘words’ like these in their games: dzo, ch, foyned, ghi…

Yep, that’s right; a whole lot of words that, let’s be frank about this, are not words. That’s why my spell-checker underlines them in red. The top players, you see, don’t win tournaments by being cleverer than the rest of us. They do it by memorising a long list of non-words so they can avoid the problems ordinary players encounter.

With O I I I I U U on the rack, most of us would forfeit our turn while muttering something rude. But the top player finds a convenient H on the board in easy reach of a red triple-word square and plays hioi.

Raise an eyebrow at ybet and the top player raps the cover of their dictionary and declares that it’s a word.