Playing Scrabble with Nine Letters

Most people that play Scrabble play the game with seven letters and that's perfectly fine, but did you know you could actually play the game with nine or 11 letters? Are there advantages to playing with nine letters? Sure there are! Let me explain why you might want to play the next game of Scrabble with nine letters instead of seven.

1. More chances at seven-letter words

The same rules apply with seven letters as with nine letters in Scrabble as far as how to achieve 50-point words. You still need to use seven (or more) letters on your tile to get the bingo. Now if you want, you might want to make it such that with nine tiles you need to use all nine letters on your tile in order to get the fifty point bingo. I'm sure that would make playing with seven letters more enjoyable.

2. Better opportunities at high-scoring words

I find this to be an advantage in one of two ways. If I don't have a great tile of letters, I can keep a few and trade in a few and lose a turn, or what I usually do is cough up the whole tile and get a new rack of letters and just take the zero. More often than not it's beneficial for me because I come up with a much better word the next time; 2) with nine letters you have two extra chances to come up with a great word, big or small.

3. Makes the game go a little bit faster

If you need to use the timer that comes with your Scrabble game then you'll find that playing with nine letters goes a lot faster. I can't say it'll be exponentially faster, but with more letters come more opportunities at bigger words so that should help speed the game up a bit.

There is one distinct disadvantage to playing Scrabble with nine letters, that being if you're not the winner, you may have more points to give up at the end of the game. You're aware that at the end of every game, the winner collects the letter totals of the remaining players and add]s it to their final score while the loser subtracts those points from their score, and then a winner is determined.

As far as other disadvantages, most of the things that are advantages for you can be disadvantages for you also because they're also advantages for your opponent(s). So it's up to you whether you prefer to stick to the traditional seven letters, or venture out and experiment with the nine-letter option. I've never played with eleven before so I'm not sure how much better it is. From what I find, a playing tile can only hold nine letters comfortably so that would be the maximum that I would use.