This is a simple demonstration of what makes the difference between a decent Scrabble player and a World champion. This position is taken from a game in this year's World Championships. It is the opening move, eventual winner, Nigel Richards is to go first, his rack is:

BCEOPSZ

Out of all the posible moves, the following is a list of the best:

BEZ
POZ
ZEP
COZ
BOP

How do we know they're the best? Well, serious scrabble players use a program to analyse their games that relies on simulation. Each position is played over a few hundred or a few thousand times by the computer and the top moves are evaluated depending on how many points they would expect to gain or lose over the next few moves. The difference between your actual move and what the computer says is best is known as equity loss. A high equity loss shows that you have played badly. Of course if you play the best move then your equity loss is zero. Sometimes spotting the best move is easy, sometimes, as in this situation it takes a genius's brain to work out all the options.

So why is BEZ best? Well on the downside, BEZ uses up a valuable E and it is generally useful to leave yourself with an E on your rack. Many players, me included would be tempted to play POZ or COZ for that reason.

However, Richards was clever enough to work out that playing BEZ and leaving CPOS on his rack gave him a better leave that the alternatives, (POZ leaves BCES, COZ leaves BEPS). Other factors also came into consideration such as playing COZ leaves a nice hook opening for COZE and ZEP and BOP also take -s hooks at the end.

Of course this one move didn't win the game but during the rest of that game Richards only dropped a total of 2 equity points and for the competition overall aveaged only 15 equity loss points per game. A standard that most of us can only dream about.

If you want to go through the rest of the game there is an analysis here
http://scrabblestats.blogspot.com/2007/12/wsc-finals-game-3-analysis.html

My first foray into international competitive* Scrabble comes in February when a couple of us are going over to Belfast to play in the first Belfast Scrabble open.

http://www.scrabbleni.org/

I've always wanted to visit Northern Ireland but never really had an excuse. It will be a slightly packed schedule but we will have most of Saturday evening off and I'm looking forward to having a few drinkies in Belfast city centre.

*I've played scrabble non competititively in the following countries: France, Spain, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, international waters between UK and Ireland, international waters between Spain and Morroco, on boat on the River Guadiana which forms part of the border between Spain and Portugal and on a train in the Channel Tunnel. I know that Belfast doesn't strictly count as a foreign country but some would say that it is occupied Irish territory.

The ultimate humiliations; being beaten by a fairly mediocre team from Newport to seal my team's relegation from the top division and at the same time relegating me to No2 in Gloucestershire.

Only winning the Gloucester Scrabble Club League Divison One on Thursday coming can cheer me up.

This year's Scrabble World Championships are to be held in Mumbai, India in November. Being approximately the 100th best player in the country, I am nowhere near qualifying for the 10 person English team. Except......

One place in the team has yet to be alloted. That goes to the winner of the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship to be held in Staffordshire in August. Lots of the country's top players will be taking part and many of them, like me, will be hoping to sneak into the Worlds that weekend.

It involves 18 games held over 3 days and to be honest, I'm probably a 100/1 shot at the moment but I've got 3 months to train and a man can dream can't he?

As you probably already know, the UK Scrabble playing community has been in turmoil for the last couple of years as the changeover from Chambers to Collins dictionaries did not go smoothly.

But now we have good news. The new authorised word list is availably and will be the standard reference for all serious english language scrabble the world over from May.

Seasoned Scrabble players are especialy excited at having the chance to play new words such as KI, ZA and JAXY.

If you'd like a copy of this splendid tome then its retail price is £10 though you may get it a bit cheaper here http://www.tilefish.co.uk/ although you might have to pretend you're a member of a Scrabble club. For a list of Scrabble clubs you can pretend to be a member of click here http://www.absp.org.uk/