Twos and Threes

Let's talk about some basics. The two- and three-letter words are absolutely fundamental to your Scrabble game. If you learn nothing else, learn these: a player who knows these short words well has a very significant advantage over a player who doesn't. This is because these words facilitate other plays - if you know twos and threes well, you can find plays, particularly overlaps or underlaps, that make multiple words with other tiles on the board, and those points can add up. Consider the twos and threes your basic equipment.

How to learn the twos and threes? Well, fortunately for you, you know a lot of them already: I'm sure "if", "and", "bag" and "at" are already in your arsenal. But there are more of these words than the typical English speaker realizes. Even in the smaller North American list, there are just over a hundred legal two-letter words and just over a thousand three-letter words. But again, many of them you already know from real life. Of the others, there are some that you might wonder whether they're valid words: RE, PA, HM, SH. They're things people say, but are they legal in Scrabble? And then there are oddities like KA, UT, or FE, new friends you just have to get to know. So your very first assignment, if you're brand new, is to make a list of the two-letter words you wouldn't be totally sure of if you saw them in a game. Here's the whole list of legal two-letter words for North American list (TWL) players:

AA AB AD AE AG AH AI AL AM AN AR AS AT AW AX AY
BA BE BI BO BY
DA DE DO
ED EF EH EL EM EN ER ES ET EX
FA FE
GI GO
HA HE HI HM HO
ID IF IN IS IT
JO
KA KI
LA LI LO
MA ME MI MM MO MU MY
NA NE NO NU
OD OE OF OH OI OM ON OP OR OS OW OX OY
PA PE PI PO
QI
RE
SH SI SO
TA TE TI TO
UH UM UN UP US UT
WE WO
XI XU
YA YE YO
ZA


For CSW (Collins) players, the list is all the above plus these (# means the word is valid in CSW but not in TWL):


CH# DI# EA# EE#
FY# GU# IO# JA#
KO# KY# NY#
OB# OO# OU#
ST# UG# UR# YU# ZO#

From the list of twos above, you'll end up with maybe 50-70 words that you'll need to get used to. Notice I've organized them by their starting letter above. When you go through your list, taking out the two-letter words you already know for sure, you can break it up similarly - maybe groups of between five and ten, associated with their first letters or some other way that works for you, so you have some nice small chunks you can absorb one at a time. Practice writing them out from memory until you have them down. I would advocate using the same approach for the threes, though there will be a lot more threes unfamiliar to you, so that'll take longer. But you'll get them, or at least most of them, in a reasonably short time, and then you'll be on your way. Even if you don't have all the threes perfect, if you have most of them within easy reach, your game will definitely show the benefits.

But more importantly (and this goes even more for the threes), play and examine games. Against humans, against the computer (more on this later), wherever you can find. This is because it's even better for your memory to see these short words on a board, in a live game, than as a simple list, and twos and threes get played ALL THE TIME. The idea is to get to where you aren't just able to recite a list from memory - you're able to think of playing these words in a real game, seeing where they fit on the board, what you can do with them. You're starting the process of rewiring your brain to think like a Scrabble player: it's one thing to know NOH is a valid word, but much better to see right away that you can put your H at the end of NO on the board to make a nice play. If you do it enough, you'll start to see those possibilities naturally without thinking too hard, and that's what you want to learn to do.