What do you know about Scrabble Bingos…?
It’s no surprise to hear that a Scrabble Bingo happens when you find words that use up all the letters on your rack.
Bingos are the Scrabble equivalent of a home run or a touchdown.
A Bingo in Scrabble grants you a staggering 50 points, which is a tremendous boost in your score and near-guarantees a win in most games.
Here’s what they don’t want you to know, though: The lower point letters in Scrabble are the letters most frequently seen in Bingos.
Take as much time as you need to recover from having your mind blown.
There’s a level of strategy that takes most players years of competing to learn. That strategy is that you don’t exclusively need high-point tiles to win.
Learning to find Scrabble Bingos with lower-point tiles can be just as valuable.
When you’re just starting as a new Scrabble player, the prospect of playing Scrabble Bingos can seem daunting or even impossible.
You have to train your eyes and reflexes.
REDIANG JULMBED TXET
Have you ever seen this text on the internet?
Can you make sense of it?
Even if you can, you might not know why.
The human brain can read jumbled words as long as the first and last letters are correctly aligned.
Now, there’s more to unscrambling words for a Scrabble Bingo than just having the first and last letter in the right place. For example, most of the scrambled words in this image only have a couple of letters switching places.
People, however, can read jumbled words far more quickly when the first and last letters are in the correct positions from the beginning.
If you’re just now learning how to find Scrabble Bingos, you can use this information to your advantage.
Start with positioning different letters on your rack at the beginning and end and see if the rest of the letters fall into place.
Don’t worry–your brain is already primed and ready to succeed at this task.
BEGINNING AND ENDING: LETTERS & SUFFIXES
Now that you’ve made it this far, we can take it one step further: using prefixes and suffixes.
There are several suffixes in Scrabble Bingos that are frequently altered. In English, verb forms, nouns, and adjectives such as -ED and -ING for verbs, -S for nouns, and -IER for adjectives.
Let’s look at some common Scrabble Bingo endings:
You can see that the S is by far the most common ending letter mainly because it pluralizes both nouns and verbs.
But look at the other top letters on the list….
Thanks to the –ED suffix, the frequency of D is exceptionally high.
You’ll find the R gets a big boost with the -ER noun form and the -IER adjective form.
You’ll find that the G owes its spot on the list to the -ING verb form.
Additionally, the Y appears in suffixes like -LY.
If these combinations are present on your rack, set them in order, stand back, and look at what you find.
Honestly, you’ll be amazed.
And not just because you’ll be THAT much closer to a Scrabble Bingo.
One more example…
If you have ERS, then set the letters at the end of your rack.
Now you have to find a word with your other four tiles or a word with those tiles through a tile on the board.
If you find one, congratulations – you’ve found a bingo!
You can see that the starting letters are more uniform than the ending letters.
You’ll find that due to the way English words change, their first forms tend to stay the same.
WORD STUDY TOOLS
However, there are lots of Scrabble bingos out there that don’t have common suffixes or prefixes. Finding these can be much more difficult and takes time and practice.
After my first live Scrabble tournament, I was inspired to practice anagramming 7 and 8 letter words to improve my ability to play bingos. So I used a study tool called Zyzzyva to give myself short anagram quizzes every day.
Zyzzyva can search for words by how likely they are to appear on your rack. For example, the lower point tiles appear much more frequently in Scrabble than tiles like the J, Q, X, or Z. Therefore, learning to spot words composed primarily of low point tiles is the quickest way to improve your bingo ability.
PATTERN RECOGNITION
I still remember how difficult it was for me to anagram the word SCENARIO at first. With those letters, you would expect the S to come at the end of the word, and certainly not the O, which rarely appears at the end of words.
Words like SCENARIO often take time and practice to see for this reason. I had my study tool give me the jumbled word in alphabetical order, known as an alphagram, every day for weeks before I could spot the word immediately.
That means each day; I would be given the letters ACEINORS to unscramble. Over time, finding words like this becomes an exercise in pattern recognition instead of unscrambling the word from scratch.
It’s a very different process of finding words than using suffixes and prefixes, but many words with unique starting and ending letters are very difficult to find without practice.
GOING FURTHER
If you’ve never played a bingo in a game of Scrabble before, take heart. It took me years after my first game of Scrabble to play one myself. So first, start with common suffixes to help you form as much of your word as possible before you start unscrambling letters. Then, if you want to improve, even more, consider using a study tool to identify the most commonly seen bingo length words and spend a couple of minutes each day practicing those words. With time and practice, you’ll add that extra dimension of bingoing to your game.