QINDAR Duplicate Game

Okay, I decide to skip the club tonight, but I'll definitely go next week. I'm thinking we should all order some ZA.

But I did read some of my Scrabble email. In it I found that Jim Blackler has designed a great study tool for Scrabble. And he just updated it with the OWL2. It's called QINDAR Duplicate Game. Best of all, it's free!

It's just for one player and what you do is simply try to find the highest scoring play given the rack and position that you're given. After you submit your play, then it tells you what the true highest scoring play was, and then resets the board using that play. I try to do the same thing when I play solitaire Scrabble with a real board, but the software is best because gives you instant feedback.

I just played it for an hour or two. It's great.

The trick is to totally forget about rack management. It true that sometimes the highest scoring play is not the best play, in fact, often time it is not the best play. Say you get EINOQRS. In the real world, you'd dump the Q rather than play SENIOR because you'd be pretty sure about getting a bingo the next turn. But if you think of it as a study tool rather than an actual game, you'll get something out of it. And the idea of playing defense is out the window as well, because you'll be playing the next turn as well.

Because you can't manage your rack, you're forced to play with a lot of crappy racks. And that is its strongest feature as a study tool. Because we all get crappy racks, no matter what.

Even in a real game, I think anytime you play a turn, you should always strive to find the highest scoring play, whether it's the "best" play or not. If you know it, then you can at least evaluate it with regards to the other factors such as leave and defense.

Jim says it only works for those with Windows XP, which luckily I have. It took a long time to download, particularly the Windows .NET Framework part of it, and I have a fast connection.

But I think it's worth it.