QAT, QIS, OXO, ZAG, AHI, JOW.

If you don't know these words, you will probably be killed during a tournament Scrabble game.

I tell people that if you learn all the three letter words that are in the official tournament word list (there's only 1015 of them), you will increase your average score by fifty points per game. That's average score.

It took me three months to learn them. But that was the first scrabble studying I did.

I used to play an online word game called Word Yacht. It was hosted at flipside and was a Hoyle game.

It was very well done. I miss it. When your turn came, you had about a minute or two to make as many words as you could with the letters. You could play against one, two or three other players, and you'd sit at a table.

A cute thing about that game is that if you had Hoyle's software on your computer, you could customize your avatar by adding hair, clothes (or removing it!)

Do you suppose scramblelovers.com could create a clone of it some day?

I had tried to find wordox online before, and I heard of a french site that supposedly hosted it, but, I think it was down at the time.

Today I tried again while searching for wordsteal too. It turns out that I found a forum somewhere that had a recent entry that indicated both sites were up, but just recently up.

I went to them.