Bingo is a term used in North American Scrabble for a play in which a player puts seven tiles on the board in a single turn. Mattel, the game's manufacturer outside North America, uses the term bonus to describe such a word. In French, it is called a scrabble. A player who does this receives 50-point bonus.
Playing all seven tiles from your rack in a single turn is called a BINGO and awards you an extra 50 points!
A Bingo in Scrabble grants you a staggering 50 points, which is a tremendous boost in your score and near-guarantees a win in most games. Here's what they don't want you to know, though: The lower point letters in Scrabble are the letters most frequently seen in Bingos.
Classic Words gameplay is classical to crosswords board games: create and place words on the board and boost your score by placing letters on the high scoring Double Letter, Double Word, Triple Letter and Triple Word squares. Use all 7 letters from your rack to play a Bingo and get a 50 points bonus.
In that case, the probability that the first player can play a bingo from their first rack can be computed exactly using the known distribution of letters in a standard tile bag, along with the known list of allowable words. It turns out to be about 15%. (That surprises many lounge-room players!)
Probability Bingo is not your typical bingo game. You aren't looking for five in a row. Instead, the winner is the first person to fill up their ENTIRE bingo card.
oxyphenbutazone, 1778 points
Oxyphenbutazone is an anti-inflammatory drug and a recognized word in the Scrabble dictionary. It is theorized to be the highest scoring legal word that would actually fit on a Scrabble board.
The adult calls out words one at a time, and each time the child hears a word that is on their card, they cover the word with a marker. When the markers line up to make a complete row (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal), the child yells “Bingo!” and they are declared the winner of that round.
About the Word:
Although it's most commonly spelled CHI in standard usage, the variant form QI is the single most-played word in SCRABBLE tournaments, according to game records of the North American SCRABBLE Players Association (NASPA).
Common letters, such as vowels, are worth 1 point, while rare letters such as "Q", "X", and "Z" are worth 8-10 points. Blank tiles are worth zero points. The score of a play is equal to the sum of the scores of all new words formed (including extensions or hook words, see examples below).
Rod Nivison (USA) won a game at the July 1990 Midwest Invitational in the USA by a score of –8 to –10. This bizarre result was achieved after he and his opponent repeatedly passed turns or changed tiles, and the only word to be placed on the board (DORMINE) was challenged off!
Hi there Nancy. An opening bingo will score double the value of the word played, plus an additional 50 point bonus. The bonus 50 is not doubled. So suppose your opening move is the word RETAINS (with no blanks).
All Scrabble players know that Q and Z are the highest scoring tiles. You can get 10 points for each, in the English language version of the game.
Though it's annoying that you cannot play such a clever word as IQ in Scrabble, there are plenty of uses for that pair of letters.
Quixotry (365) a visionary idea or scheme. Stretching the word between two triple word squares, Michael Cresta made Scrabble history in 2006 during a game in a church basement between a carpenter and a deli worker. Cresta's final score of 830 remains the greatest number of points held in a game by a single player.
There is an adage in Scrabble that says “the player going first will win 54% of the time - all other things being equal”. Going first allows you to control the board - you determine whether your move will be horizontal or vertical , expose a premium square or a double word file, close or open the board.
The letter 'X' provides the highest scoring two-letter words, with at least 9 points awarded for the Greek letter names 'Ax', 'Ex', 'Ox', 'Xi' and the Vietnamese coin 'Xu'; whilst with 'Zax' (a hatchet-like tool) attaining a minimum of 19 points, it also gives you the highest scoring three-letter word.
The word must not be doubled or tripled, and no one-point tile may be doubled or tripled. A 55-point bingo is theoretically possible in tournament play, by making a two-blank play on an empty board that misses the center star.
Mark your cards quickly! The winner is the first person to cover five spaces in a row — vertical, horizontal or diagonal — in basic Bingo. Shout “BINGO” when you get five marks in a row. Your card will be checked and if correct, you win the jackpot!
If you're lucky enough to win - either the 5-square row, or the whole bingo card - you need to shout 'bingo'. The caller (or app, program or otherwise, if you're playing online or remotely) will stop the game and then double-check if you've really won. If you have, a new game will then start.
That's worth nine times the value of the word, plus the 50-point bonus for using all seven letters. Triple-triples are rare in Scrabble—I've played no more than a dozen in a thousand or more games—because they require a confluence of mathematically improbable events.