HowTo:Cheat at Scrabble

HowTo:Cheat At Scrabble

“Z...Y....G...O...T....E....Zygote, with both Z and G on triple letter squares....”

~ Noel Coward on Cheating at Scrabble

“There! I spelt "zygomorphic" on a triple word square.”

~ Hobbes on Cheating at Scrabble

Are you always losing at Scrabble? Getting beaten by your 4-year-old cousin? Sucks, doesn't it? I have been in the same position as you, but I decided to do something about it. I came up with a quick simple way to win at Scrabble.

In the past, many people have tried to come up with a way of cheating to win strategically at this game, but their ideas have failed horribly.

However, using the new technologies out today, there are endless opportunities to cheat at Scrabble. This HowTo will just show you some of them.

You, however will need some resources, and possibly work for/be the owner of, Oxford Dictionaries. Other things that would come in handy are: a friend that will back you up, lack of internet, lack of "real" resources, time, having no social life (but, when you come to play the game, you will need some kind of social life.)

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Cheat Resources

These resources that you will prepare yourself, will take a small time to prepare, but produce great results when playing with intellectual friends from work.

Online Word Finder

You can use an online Scrabble word finder such as wordfinder.mobi and even save it as a bookmark on your phone for word descrambling on the go.

Fake Dictionary

Make sure you check spelling before printing out one of these 10,000 page masterpieces.

To cheat at Scrabble, you need to manufacture a fake dictionary, or a fake dictionary website. If you happen to be the owner of Oxford Dictionaries, you could just go to work tomorrow and order your enthusiastic employees to do it for you.

Doing this will take up a lot of your time, but trust me, it will be worth it when you finally win at Scrabble. After all, Scrabble is one of the coolest games out on the market today, and everyone plays it.

Writing your fake dictionary should be easy, you've got to get every combination of letters that you can get in Scrabble, and write a definition for them (make sure they are believable). As there are 26 letters in the alphabet, and the maximum amount of letters you can start with on Scrabble is 7, there a literally millions of different "mumbo jumbo" words you can have. So get writing those definitions.

I recommend printing the book on premium quality paper, if it is just printed out on any random piece of A4 (cut in half) then it is going to look tacky, and will be less believable.

Once this is done, just leave it by the side.

This step is vital; make sure you remove any real dictionaries, and your internet connection. If you fail to do this step, they could find you out in a second.

Now phone up your hip friends to come round and have a game. If Once they arrive, just start the game and play as usual, but if you have trouble with not being able to put a word down, just slam down the letters you have, and hope no one notices. However, because you have provided an authentic fake dictionary, you will be able to get away with it.

Nevertheless, in my experience this plan sometimes fails. In most cases, this is because they have an average IQ. When they question you about the UUUUU you just put down, exclaim the following "Ok, well let's look it up on the internet!"

Fake Web Dictionary

Setting this up will be just as easy as writing the book dictionary, you just transfer all of these definitions onto your computer, and run it as an off-line web site. If this is way far out of your reach, a good illogical source is Wikipedia, where there are 100,000+ articles in the main Scrabble languages of Русский, Polski, 日本語, 中文, and Deutsch. In this site, there are many words that when playing Scrabble, you thought you had made up.

Then when the people at your house do not believe that "UUUUUUU" is a word, you can type it in and sure enough, "A place to describe a sailor's nasal hair root." will appear, letting you get on with the game, while taking maximum points.

If however, you are part of a wireless system and cannot unplug your internet connection for whatever reason, try using this on-line dictionary. This can even be used as an alternative web dictionary if you want to back up your strange definitions. For example if you have A,A,A,U,U,U,U, by looking at the undictionary you can see that using the 3 A's would make a name of a language.

Changing the scores

This one is simple, all you have to do is change the scores of the other players when they are not looking. With skill and lots of practice, you can change Gregory's score from 28 to 2.8. Do not worry, there is a way to get this score, but because he is concentrating on the game and trying to make some word out of T, A, W, T, he will not notice.

Rigging the bag of letters

A bad letter, amongst good ones. This π, along with other tiles from the Greek language edition, are not valid in English play.

A very good tile; despite its low point value, it can be used to create almost any fake word you can come up with.

One of the most genius ideas I thought of is probably the bag switch, this allows you to rig the bag so that you have "good" letters in the bag you choose out of, and your opponents have "bad" letters. This must be done carefully as you may end up with the "bad" letters while your opponents have the "good" ones.

Good Letters A E I O U Sometimes Y

Bad Letters Q Z V @ π 體

Using these two lists above, you can set up your bag with the good letters. However, switching the good bag and the bad bag will be a problem, but, lucky for you I have customized a mechanism at home, that will allow you to swap the bags with little/no noise.

I call it the "Good bag swapper with the bad bag swapper, and back again if you need to... Machine." With a flick of a switch this baby will turn out the lights, grab the bag from the person's hand, pull it up, and drops the other bag onto the floor. While this is happening, it gives you enough time to claim that a power cut has happened, and you had disappeared to sort it out.

This method is almost always effective because it gives you the opportunity to play such great words as AOIEUIO and OUUUIUA while your opponent stares dumbfounded and then dies of cancer.

She is obviously palming some letters; look at the deceit on her face.

Palming letters

This final method can give you any word you want, if you can palm enough letters. This method however does leave all the other methods useless. There would be no reason to set up the genius contraption, or to create the fake dictionary, if you would have just come here. Nevertheless, those ideas are good to lean back on if it all goes wrong.

Palming letters is easy to do, hard to master; it just requires you to keep one of every letter in your hand, without revealing that you have them there. It can be helpful if you have large hands, making it easier to conceal every one. However, the downside on having exceptionally large hands is people will be drawn to them, and it will make it very hard for you to gain some friends to play Scrabble with, as you will be the "big hand freak" around school.

On the other hand, if you are found out, it can be very embarrassing for you. So make sure you practice in front of a mirror regularly. I would recommend about 2 hours a day just learning to conceal these letters, for the rest of the time, you need to get out there and make some friends.

Alternative Ways

Still having trouble? Can't seem to create the baby mechanism? For those of you that might be having trouble with the above methods shown, there are other, easier, ways to cheat at Scrabble.

Desirable effect for your Scrabble opponents

Undesirable effect for you.

The Octopus Method

Often lauded as the best yet least used method, The Octopus Method is regarded as the most effective method by far, easily trumping The Fake Dictionary. The process can be summarized by two easy-to-memorize notes:

1. Obtain an octopus of any variety.
2. Repeat Step 1 until desired result has been achieved.

Trust us, eventually you will reach such a high number of your cephalopod buddies that those people you're playing Scrabble with will have to give up! This option never fails, though good luck finding enough octopi without using the extremely pricey Japanese sea food black market. Although it is the best way of defeating your opponent, it may have an undesirable side effect.

This method was famously used against Joel Sherman in the 2002 US Scrabble open, but backfired when massive amounts of octopi suffocated everyone in the room except Joel, whose Gastrointestinal Reflux Syndrome renders him invulnerable.

The Boob Method

This method is banned from official Scrabble cheating tournaments so it should only be used on friends and family.There are three steps to this method:

1. Lean over the board while pretending to look at a word.
2. Quickly snatch tiles from the bag and insert between your boobs.
3. Return to normal posture and use letters when needed.

The nice thing with this method is that even if you are suspected of cheating, no one will be able to check to find out. If you are playing naked or with an octopus this method will not work.

Tips

These hints below, are not necessary, but will help you deceive your opponents.

Drawing letter from the bag can enhance your awareness skills in the game.

• Time-machines are always handy. Simply going back in time and stopping the birth of your opponent is an excellent way to ensure victory.

• Have a friend in on the cheating as well. He can help you avoid the pressure to find a definition for the total nonsense you have just put down. Just get them to agree with you.
• Simply convincing your opponent that he is a miserable failure at life and should promptly commit suicide is a quick path to a "win by default".
• Having no social life, will also help you at this game, because of your lack of social skills your "friends" will not know how to act around you, just in case they offend you. By doing this they will just go along with whatever you say.
• Dress entirely in black while playing in an entirely black room and force all other players to wear sunglasses. This will enable you to move "invisibly" around the room and view/steal other players' letters.
• Make up the rules as you go along, it helps if you have people playing the game that haven't played before. When they put down EMERALD, you can say, "no you can't do that, the words in succession have to be related to each other, EMERALD is in no way related to RING."
• Linking to the one above, if your opponent comes up with a particularly clever word, simply change the rules to make it illegal. "Emperor? Can't use that. It's latinate."
• Offer them the Presidency of Gibraltar to let you win.
• If you have any bad letters left at the end of the game, you could always try eating them so points are not lost.
• CRAZIEST. Yes, the greatest word you will ever reach.
• Do not forget that if by some strange occurrence, you find yourself losing, shout out at the top of your voice "Jesus Christ! It's a lion! Get in the car!"
• If you have an idea that your opponent is cheating, then simply punch him hard in the face.
• If you have a letter that you do not want, rotate it so that is appears to be a different letter. This only works with Z, N, M, W, C, and U.

Footnotes

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