What To Do With a Homeless Bonus

In the comments of the previous post, Rick asked:

What do you do if you have a bonus word but no where to place it? (assuming no eights or nines etc.) - Do you just play off the tiles as you would if they were not bingo-forming, including playing an S if you have it for say 20 pts - or would you play or change one letter and with a good chance of a new word and hope you can play that? Or would you do something different?

That's a good question. There is nothing as frustrating as a having discovered a bingo on your rack and having nowhere to put it (sometimes called a "nongo" or a homeless bingo/bonus).

The first thing to do is to double check and make sure that you have nowhere to play it. Have you checked all the possible parallel plays? Are there hooks you haven't thought of?

Also, check to make sure that there aren't other bingos lurking on your rack. Often good bingo racks create more than one bingo. Move your letters around. You might have seen RESTING right away and not have a place for it, but what about STINGER? Changing the position of hook letters (like the S) will help you find a home for that bingo.

After you are sure that your bingo has no home, then you must accept the fact that you can't play a bingo. This can be an emotional obstacle. You must learn to "let go". So to answer one of your questions, you have to forget the fact that there is a bingo on your rack. You cannot be afraid to play away some of your letters, if they score enought points.

You must do what is the goal of every play in Scrabble, and that is to find the best play. The best play may use 6 letters or may involve exchanging, or even passing. (Often the best play is not what scores the most points in your turn, but what scores the most points in this turn and the next). The best play varies for every rack and every situation, so it is hard to say in general what you should do. But here are some good questions to ask yourself if you find that you have a homeless bonus on your rack.

Do you have a good rack? Just because you have a bingo doesn't necessarily mean that you have a good rack. For an extreme example, OUGUIYA is a bingo but is an ugly rack, so ugly that you could consider exchanging. But if you have AEINRST, then you've got bingo gold, and you might be more likely to play a single letter. (But if you got AEINRST and nowhere to bingo, then you may have other problems).

Is the board bingo-friendly? Commonly, as the game progresses and more letters get on the board, the harder it is to bingo. There just is not enough room. I get nongos on my final rack so much that it hardly bothers me anymore. Where were you when I needed you, in the beginning of the game?

After that it is a matter of evaluating your best play versus your leave, which should be true for every turn. If you can score 18 points and still have ?EINSR as opposed to scoring 30 and leaving UW then you might consider taking the fewer points.

The more you play, the more you will find that bingos are more common than you previously believed. (I probably average a little less than two a game now.) Knowing that, it's harder for homeless bonuses to frustrate you.