Game of the Week: Scrabble

Scrabble is one of the board games in my house...and I also played it way down yonder in Hollywood when I was growing up.  My mother, sister, and I would sit there with our letter tiles, trying to figure words that would optimize the points scored, with strategies such as creating two words at once and/or placing the tiles on special squares on the board that doubles or triples the letter, or squares doubling or tripling the entire word's value.  I believe that I've grown pretty good at Scrabble, but I do have one pet peeve about the game.  My mom had a penchant for coming up with words that neither Anita nor I had ever heard of, and for the most part they were indeed credible words after consulting the dictionary.  I remember back in the 1990s here in Gainesville the Books-a-Million store would hold Scrabble games once a week, with the winners' names published in the Gainesville Sun...but that would involve interfering either with my sleep or working hours, so I never participated.  There is to me an adequate mixture of luck and skill in this game, for players cannot tell in advance which letters they are picking up from the table top...but sometimes making the best of what appears to be an impossible situation is more enjoyable than making a long word...