Words with friends: An idiot’s guide, Part 3 – Strategery

If you read the first two installments of this series, Words with friends, An idiot’s guide, and Words with friends, An idiot’s guide, Part 2, you know by now that one can still enjoy this friendly word game even if you’re pretty much horrible at it. It’s all about attitude! And hey, I’ve even managed to win a few games lately.

I attribute these few victories to learning from my defeats (of which there are many), and a little something I call Strategery.

In my first WWF post, I introduced 1357bob, who goes by the name of Arthur on the Twitter and Ricky on his blog. I’m not sure if he’s one of those fancy people who have several names followed by a Roman numeral or if he’s in the Federal Witness Protection Program, so for purposes of this discussion, I will simply refer to him as Ricky Bobby.

image courtesy of photobucket.com

Ricky Bobby has been extremely helpful in educating me about the game. If you recall from the first post, he tried to teach me about strategery. He even left double and triple word scores open for me, to no avail.

Still, Ricky Bobby and others have continued to play against me, even though I’m not exactly fierce competition, and like I said, I am getting better. When I first started playing, I played with random opponents. I’ve since rethought this because people who don’t know anything about me don’t seem to get the fact that I really do play this game for fun. One person thought he would begin with some small talk and then try to intimidate me:

Funny, he didn’t challenge me to another game…oh, well.

When playing WWF, it has been my experience that most of us tend to use words we are familiar with. CandySteele uses horrible and disgusting medical terms, KelyBreez uses big lawyer words, PPBottle and 77Eric…well, quite honestly, I have no idea where they get the words they use except maybe their Giant Book of Scrabble Words. I have a 9 and 13 year old living with me. This may or may not have something to do with many of my word choices.

And speaking of common nouns, I still take issue with the WWF powers that be that decide some nouns which should be proper (LAURA, for example), are accepted while others are not:

Yeah, that’s right. I just insulted the entire State of Iowa. But I was totally kidding. In related news, you should probably not insult the state where your opponent lives.

In conclusion, I would like to thank all of you who have played and continue to play WWF with me. You’ve all made me a better player, a better person, and more importantly, a better procrastinator of tackling giant piles of laundry. It is my sincere hope that while I may not teach you anything about WWF, perhaps you can glean some inspiration from me in other ways: