Want to become great at Scrabble? This Long Islander can help

Ever since he was a kid, Samuel Kaplan has been a whiz at unscrambling letters.

And as soon as he learned to play Scrabble at age 10, he was hooked.

“When I was young, I would do the Jumble in the newspaper and my dad would give me a dollar if I solved it correctly,” said Kaplan, 31, who has won 13 Scrabble competitions and is now ranked in North American Scrabble Players Association’s top 50.

For those who want to get better at Scrabble, Kaplan teaches the game when he is not working at a medical lab.

Through the years, he’s developed numerous insights, such as the fact that Q and Z are each worth 10 points but have very different intrinsic values.

“The Q is actually the worst tile in the game,” he said. “The Z is one of the best tiles in the game when you’re looking to score.”

When he’s considering a move, Kaplan said he looks at what tiles are left on his rack, which are still left to draw, where tiles are positioned on the board and numerous other factors.

He also recommends first learning all the two- and three- letter words (ar and es, the phonetic spellings of the letters R and S, are among those that count).

One great thing about the game?

“You don’t need to know the meaning of a word, you just have to know it’s a word,” Kaplan said.

Isabel Fersh, who played Scrabble for years with her mom, attended Kaplan’s recent Scrabble class at The Bryant Library in Roslyn.

“He went through letter by letter, the pluses and the minuses, the combinations: which letters go well with other letters, strategies,” said Fersh, a retired hospital administrator, who lives in Syosset and is in her mid-70s. “I thought it was phenomenal.”

After his PowerPoint presentation, Kaplan handed out Scrabble sets for the class to play games and walked around the room offering advice. On two separate occasions, he instantly saw how Fersh could use all of her tiles — creating the words further and entrance — for a 50-point bonus.

“It was uncanny,” she said.