SCRABBLE - The Last Word Newsletter

H I S T O R I C M O M E N T SHistoric Moments: SCRABBLE® Through the YearsThe Luck of the Q--Good and BadBy Stu GoldmanNo letter bodes more for either good or ill in your favorite game than the Q. With a way to play itgreat scores can be achieved. Of course, the rub is when there is no way to rid it from your rack,and a 20-point loss at game's end looms. A recent ISC experience motivated me to explore thistopic.A few of us remember the bad old days when no words containing Q could be played that did notalso have a U. But as QAID, then QAT, and finally QI (plus a few other less frequently played words)became available, the threat of a Q-stick gradually lessened, but did not disappear completely. In1995, I missed qualifying for $50,000 SCRABBLE® Superstars Showdown by just one rating point. Iblame the Q. Earlier that year I had bingoed in a tournament game and drawn the Q among the lastfive tiles in the bag. QI had just become acceptable in SOWPODS (now Collins). So, with nothingelse to do while my opponent planned her winning endame, I searched the board to see if QI wasplayable. It was not.Two players I know have been so affected by unlucky Q experiences that they left the game for atime. One lost a tournament by being stuck with it and quit playing for over 2 years. The other quitfor nearly 15 years when, in the first U.S. national tournament, he picked QZ on his final rack twicein one day. Besides the example given above, I count as one of my worst racks of all time onepicked as a final rack that contained QU and no other vowels. My skilled opponent promptlyblocked all the open vowels, so that, while stuck with the Q, I barely won the game.Yet, Q can be a blessing at times. This eventuality has been made more frequent by the U-less Qwords. In one tournament I played QUIZ, making four 2-letter words--helped by ZA as well as QI.In a club game, the director was helping a reporter who wanted to write about the club and wascautioned to look for open A's and T's as the game wound down to its end, since QAT had justbecome acceptable, and I held the Q. Finding none of those that had to be blocked, he made aplay. I then played my Q onto AT, which had not been noticed.The incident that caused me to write this? I was playing a good friend on ISC. Off the R that I hadjust been played in the word RIOT, I could play QUIVERER, the Q being at A3. But my opponentstarted a word with G to make GRIOT, so I had to be content with QUIVER. The tiles I picked wereEIRSU, which, with the ER of my leave made the triple-triple REQUIRES. I realized that, had Iplayed QUIVERER, my chances of picking AC, EN, IN or ER, or one of those letters plus a blank, orthe even rarer 2 blanks, were extremely unlikely. So I thanked my friend for spoiling QUIVERER.Stu Goldman lives in California and has been playing tournament SCRABBLE® for 40 years.76