this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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How to play Scrabble competitively.
Once you know, you can't play against normal people anymore, they'll hate it and, if it happens often enough, you. You can only play against other Scrabble bastards, and you'll hate that and, very quickly, them.
This is why Scrabble is not a good game.
Lies
Similar to monopoly
Monopoly isn’t an awful game if you actually play by the rules. It’s not great, but it’s not awful either. But most people don’t know all the rules, make up a bunch of stupid house rules, etc… And as a result, the game drags on for hours even after it’s clear who the winner will be. In reality, playing by the rules has each game lasting like 20-45 minutes.
For example, most people know that when a player lands on an unowned square, they get the option to buy it. Straightforward, right? But most people don’t realize that if that original player turns it down, it goes to auction. The players can submit bids to purchase the square, and they can start far below market value. Meaning that all of the squares should get bought relatively quickly, instead of taking like ten rounds. There is actually a strategy to refuse to buy a square, to intentionally send the property to bid, just so you can then potentially buy the properly below market value. Basically, Player A lands on a square. Player A refuses to buy the square at the market price of $1000. Player A then wins the bid at $800. Player A effectively got a $200 discount, simply by sending the property to auction.
Also, the bank can’t go bankrupt.
You can run out of houses to build. Know how you can upgrade four houses to a hotel? And the game only has 32 houses? The hotel increases the square’s rent, but returns the houses to the available pot. It’s actually a perfectly valid strategy to upgrade all of your properties to four houses, and then refuse to upgrade any of them to hotels. Since the game only has 32 houses, you can use ~7 properties to effectively lock out any hotels from being built. And since nobody can build any hotels while you’re sitting on all of the houses, your 4-house properties are effectively the most expensive in the game simply because nobody can upgrade their properties while you’re hoarding all the building materials.
I learned how to play a perfect game of Monopoly just so I could beat my family and friends so that they stopped asking me to play Monopoly. Even before learning the trick I hated that game
In Practice: "Actually, the rules state the property goes to auction if you don't buy it. Also, money doesn't go in the middle for Free Parking. And if there aren't enough houses then no one can build more."
In Reality: "Well we've never played like that before, so we're not going to change it. Stop being mean to your brother and just use something else for the extra houses."
If you play by only the official rules it's not supposed to be fun. It's supposed to teach how much monopolies under capatalism are horrible for everyone else.
This was my thought reading the description of "how to play it right so people won't hate the game for taking too long." They'll just hate it for what it is instead.