Welcome to our latest installment of Scrabble tips.
In previous articles we talked about scoring big with 7-letter bingos. This time, we’re looking at 8-letter bingos, which are formed when you use all 7 of your tiles in one play and combine them with another tile that’s already on the board.
Send your Scrabble scores to the stratosphere with 8-letter bingos!
You might ask: “What’s the big deal? Don’t you get the same 50-point premium with either a 7-letter or an 8-letter bingo? What makes that 8th letter so special?”
It’s true that either bingo type gets the same 50-point premium. It’s also true that the 8th letter might only add a few extra points to your score, or maybe just one extra point depending on its tile-value. But here’s what 8-letter bingos can do that 7-letter bingos cannot…
8-letter bingos can form triple-triples and rocket your Scrabble-score to the stratosphere!
What is a triple-triple?
There are eight “Triple Word Score” squares around the perimeter of a Scrabble board. If a word is played so that it lands on two of them at the same time, it is scored as a triple-triple. That means the value of the word is multiplied by a factor of 9.
It takes at least 8 tiles to span the distance of two “Triple Word Score” squares and earn you that triple-triple. You just can’t do it with a 7-letter bingo. While it’s possible to do it with a non-bingo play, it takes a bingo to score the additional 50-point premium.
If played across two “Triple Word Score” squares, the 8-letter bingo will both increase your score by a factor of 9 and give you the 50-point premium. That means lots of points!
In fact, with a triple-triple, 8-letter bingo combo, in just one turn you’ll top 100 points. And with higher value tiles, you could potentially reach, and even top, 200 points.
How to find an 8-letter bingo
It can be tricky, but it’s doable. Here are 3 critical components to wrangling the elusive 8-letter bingo.
Start with rack management.
Start with the same thoughtful management of your Scrabble-rack as outlined in our previous article for 7-letter bingos. Having a rack of flexible, high-probability letters will go a long way to helping you mine those 8-letter gems.
Use alpha order to cut through the chaos.
There’s a reason why bingo lists (including ours) present words in alpha-anagram form, followed by the actual spelling of the corresponding bingos. It’s all about efficiency.
There are 40,320 ways to arrange 8 tiles with 8 different letters.
For example, in any respectable bingo list, AEEIRSTT would be presented right before its list of corresponding bingos:
- AEEIRSTT
- ARIETTES
- ITERATES
- TEARIEST
- TREATIES
- TREATISE
Depending on how the 7 tiles on your scrabble rack are situated, along with what’s available on the board, you might not immediately recognize if there’s an 8-letter bingo to be had. In fact, even if there are several bingo possibilities, unless you’re great at anagrams, you might not spot any of them.
To the uninitiated, AEEIRSTT might not look like anything special, but to a Scrabble aficionado, that combination of letters means there’s a good chance you can lay down an 8-letter bingo, and maybe even a chance for a triple-triple.
Now back to efficiency, if you train yourself to recognize the hot bingo combos in alpha-anagram form, and you always rack your scrabble tiles in alpha-order during play, you’re much more likely to spot all your bingo opportunities.
Study bingo lists! And ours is the best.
But if you’re really after bingo-glory, you’ll want to study bingo lists. And today’s your lucky day.
We’re making it easy for you by serving up the hottest collection of 8-letter bingos you’ll ever come across.
That’s right, we’ve done the probability calculations and have curated 500 of the most likely 8-letter bingos you’ll encounter when using a factory packed set of Scrabble tiles.
What dictionary should you use when playing Scrabble?
To reliably use our lists at game time, you’ll need a dictionary with a comprehensive list of Scrabble bingos. While there are plenty of good choices out there, the online Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) is always a good bet.
As noted in our previous Scrabble articles, “it was designed for Scrabble-play, it’s free, and it works well for the casual to semi-serious player who needs a resource for solving game-time disputes.”
It’s basically a cleaned-up version of the tournament dictionary; offensive words have been scrubbed. It’s the perfect dictionary to use when hustling friends and family at the Scrabble table.
Here’s our list of the Top 500 8-letter Bingos.
Start studying now and you’ll be all set to dominate friends and family at the Scrabble board over the holidays.
