|
Issue Date: December 5, 2004
Winning games
If you find one of the classics under the tree this season, you'll need these tips from champions.
By Linda Formichelli
This season, many families will find a board game or book of crossword puzzles in their pile of presents. So we asked for inside strategies from people who make real money playing games. Take Matt McNally of Irvine, Calif.: At last year's National Monopoly Championship, he won $15,140 -- the same as the total amount of play money that comes with the game. Here's advice from him and two other winners:
Go to top
The game: Monopoly
Our expert: Matt McNally
His advice:
Stay in jail. "Don't shell out the bucks to pay your way out. If you have properties, stay in jail and collect cash. You avoid landing on other people's properties."
Location, location, location. "The first rule of real estate applies. The orange monopoly -- St. James Place, Tennessee Avenue and New York Avenue -- can be better than Boardwalk and Park Place. It's cheaper to build houses there, and you get three spaces for opponents to land on. Also, they lie right beyond jail," one of the most commonly landed-on spaces.
No need to get Trumpedelic with the hotel thing. "Your goal isn't always to build hotels. There are only 32 houses, and you can create a 'housing shortage' so your opponents can't get them."
Go to top
The game: Scrabble
The player: David Gibson of Spartanburg, S.C., who has won more than $130,000 playing in Scrabble tournaments since 1993
His advice:
Go for the bonus. "The red squares -- triple word score -- are important. But it's more important to use all seven of your tiles. This gives you a 50-point bonus in addition to the point value of the word."
Q without his best pal, U. "You lose 10 points at the end if you don't play a Q. So you need to know some good words that use a Q without a U, such as 'qat,' a perennial herb, and 'qaid,' a Muslim leader."
Go to top
The game: Crossword puzzles
The expert: Jon Delfin of New York City, who won $2,000 as last year's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champ
His advice:
The need for speed. "You need to write fast. I'm partial to No. 1 lead pencils. They're softer, and they're easier to write with and to erase."
To the Letter, Strategy I. "Part of the foundation of crossword puzzles is that many letters occur in two words. I once saw a lady doing a crossword puzzle who first attempted all the 'across' clues in order, then all the 'down' clues, and then she went back to the 'across' again. That's just wrong! You need to use the letters in one word to figure out the words that intersect it."
To the Letter, Strategy II. "Learn to recognize letter patterns. If you have a consonant and then a space and then another consonant, in all likelihood the missing letter will be a vowel."
|
