Bingo (Scrabble)

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Bingo is a term used in North American Scrabble for a play in which a player puts seven tiles on the board in a single turn. Mattel, the game's manufacturer outside North America, uses the term bonus to describe such a word. In French, it is called a scrabble . A player who does this receives a 50-point bonus, which is applied after the rest of the play is scored.

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Bingos are an important part of achieving high scores in Scrabble. While many beginners rarely play even one during a game, experts frequently score three or more. Much advanced strategy revolves around maximizing one's chance of playing of a bingo: blank tiles are kept, poor letter combinations such as BVW, LLNNN, or IIIUU are broken up, and flexible letter combinations such as AEINST (a six-letter "stem" that anagrams with 24 letters—all but Q and Y—to form nearly 70 bingos) are aimed for until a bingo is formed. This strategy is often at direct odds with that of placing high-value letters on premium squares.

The highest-scoring bingo ever played in an official Scrabble tournament was by Karl Khoshnaw, who got 392 points for CAZIQUES in a 1982 game in Manchester. [1]

Bingo examples

These facts are according to the SOWPODS lexicon as amended in 2006.

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References

  1. Burkeman, Oliver (2008-06-27). "Spell bound". The Guardian. Retrieved 2023-07-09.
  2. "NASPA Official Tournament Rules" (PDF). scrabbleplayers.org. Retrieved 10 April 2024.
  3. "Record for the Highest Scoring Scrabble Move" . Retrieved 2008-06-02.