Cheat at Scrabble – Cheat O Matic

By Chris Perrin

While it is never good to cheat, it is so very tempting to cheat at Scrabble. Of course, there really should be no condoning cheating, but there is just something about the word game, especially when played online far away from the prying eyes of your opponent, that makes it so very temping to try to cheat at Scrabble. So what do you do when you are holding “QuZPDUXR” and need to make a word? Try the Cheat O Matic.

Cheat at Scrabble?

What is the Cheat O Matic? The Cheat O Matic is the one of the oldest, if not the oldest, website designed specifically to help you cheat at Scrabble. The software is pretty simple in terms of its interface, but what it does is very powerful. All you have to do is tell it what letters you are currently holding (as well as letters on the board) and it will search its dictionaries for words you can play. All you have to do is lay down the tiles, count up your score, and imagine the look of disgust on your opponents’ faces when you lay down “Xu”, “Urd”, and “Pur” as viable Scrabble words.

Like a lot of software tools, because Cheat O Matic was one of the first programs to help you cheat at Scrabble, it is going to have its share of shortcomings and bugs. Perhaps the most obvious of these bugs is that it will not account for more than one blank tile. This means if you happen to have both blank tiles (rare, but it does happen), you are not going to be able to search with two wildcards. Still, that’s a relatively minor shortcoming.

The larger problem with the original Cheat O Matic software is that it does not support “locking” tiles in place. In Scrabble, every play after the first has to build off letters in a previous word. However, Cheat O Matic does not allow you to explicitly say what the first letter or second letter or last letter has to be. This can be a serious impediment to finding a word to play, especially as the Scrabble board gets more and more crowded towards the end of a game. It’s also a problem if a word has to be on a certain row or column in order to get those all important score multiplier squares.

Despite these shortcomings, Cheat O Matic performs some pretty intensive searches and returns them with Google-like speed and accuracy that is nothing to sneeze at. This, along with its impressive name recognition amongst Scrabble players and Scrabble cheats means that it may very well be around longer than other sites which may offer more features. Besides, if you can win with the Cheat O Matic, you can win with any Scrabble word builder/cheat tool.

The key to winning with the Cheat O Matic is knowing how to use it. It’s not a complex piece of software, but getting the most from it requires a little finesse. The following are two tips you can use in the heat of Scrabble game to get the best word worth the most points possible.

Tip 1- Be Prepared to Run Multiple Searches

As the game progresses, when you go to the Cheat O Matic, you should be ready to search for multiple combinations of letters for two reasons. The first is because unless you are the very first player to go, you are always building on other words. In a given turn, you normally have more than one word you can build off of which should mean that you may have a number of different letters to start your word.

The thing is, the instructions on the Cheat O Matic read: “Add any additional letters of places on the board that look promising to get a list of all the possible words that you can play.” So in other words, if you are holding “ABCDEFG” and can play on squares that contain the letters “LPIMH”, the instructions would have you enter the full string “ABCDEFGLPIMH.” On the surface, that may not sound like a bad idea because it will return every word you can make with “ABCDEFG” and any one of the letters in “LPIMH.” The problem is, it will also return words like “FLIP”, “PHLEGM” and “LIMP” none of which you can make because you don’t have the proper tiles.

The better strategy would be to perform five different searches each with your letters “ABCDEFG” and then one of the letters from “LPIMH.” This will take longer, but in the end, it will keep you from trying to play a word for which you do not have the proper letter. Now, if you are a hardcore Scrabble cheat, open up five Cheat O Matic windows and perform a search in each window. It will lower the amount of time you take searching for the right word.

You can also run the same search, but using multiple dictionaries: TWL98, TLW06 and SOWPODS. Cheat O Matic offers three different dictionaries (use by different leagues) which have small differences, but those differences might net you another word.

Tip 2 – Use the Built-In Lists of Two and Three Letter Words

It may not sound like much, but the Cheat O Matic site has lists of two and three letter words for all three dictionaries. For the most part, these smaller words are not going to net you huge points unless you are lucky enough to make the word “ZAX” since it has both an Z and an X in it. However, the rules of Scrabble say that if you cannot play a word, you forfeit your turn and score no points. So when you do not think you have a play, consult the Cheat O Matic’s lists, you may be surprised that “ZEK” is word and it might keep you in the game.

As an added benefit, in the later stages of the game you might just have the opportunity to lay down the word “TWA.” If you do, make sure you act just a little bit nervous (if that’s possible online) in the hopes that someone will rise to the occasion and challenge you, thinking you just entered an abbreviation. A quick check of the dictionary will prove “TWA” is a word and you can laugh all the way to the winner’s circle.

Good luck and good Scrabbling!