[This is an inofficial translation of the tournament rules of the Swedish Scrabble Association. Some examples in Swedish have been excluded.]

In tournaments we use slightly different rules than those supplied with the game. These tournament rules are valid as of January 14, 1999, with a few changes decided on May 21, 2004. Note that these rules apply for matches that form the basis of the official rating list.

Foundations for these rules

There are of course rules included in the game when you buy it, but those rules are not quite sufficient for tournament play. Some rules need to be clarified, especially the rules concerning playable words. It is also appropriate to introduce a few completely new rules for Scrabble tournaments. This has been done in English Scrabble which has long experience of tournament play. Much of these rules has been taken from the rules used by ABSP (Association of British Scrabble Players) in Great Britain, and NSA (National Scrabble Association) in North America.

[Note: The Swedish rules are less detailed than the US and British rules when it comes to play procedure, technique and etiquette.]

Playing whole words

The rules supplied with the game are clear on this point. However, since there have been other formulations in previous issues of the Swedish game, it is best to make the following very important point clear. It is allowed to play a whole word with new tiles, as long as other words are formed crosswise along the word.

Special tournament rules

The rules included in the game box are valid, unless the following rules say otherwise. (They mostly follow the ABSP rules. Comments are given for some interesting differences.)

• You only play matches with two players.
• A chess clock is used and each player has 30 minutes to finish his or her moves during the game. (In English-language tournaments the time is 25 minutes.)
• A player whose time has run out can keep on playing, with a deduction of ten points for each started minute of overtime.
• A player with more than 5 minutes of overtime loses the game. The difference in points between the players should be the actual spread (including extra deduction for overtime) but at least 150 points. [The limit for maximum overtime was 15 minutes before May 21, 2004.]
• The player who is first in the game chooses between two advantages: starting to play, or determining how to place the board. The board must be placed so that one of the players has the board turned the right way round. (Not crosswise.) The other player gets the other of these two advantages. (Ideally one would want to use boards that are easy to turn around, and if you use such a board the player next to play can turn the board around. When using a regular board, the board must remain as it was first placed.)
• The player who does not start the game has the right to start the clock as soon as the first player has seen one of his or her tiles.
• Both players must keep score of each turn as well as the cumulative sums of points. Before pressing the clock, you must have made your play and announced its score. After pressing the clock, you enter that score and the cumulative score in your score sheet. You cannot draw new tiles until the opponent has entered the score on his or her sheet, and you must enter the opponent's play before making a play of your own.
• By entering the opponent's play on your score sheet you accept that play. If you want to challenge it, you should instead stop the clock, call an adjudicator and state which of the newly formed words you want to challenge. The adjudicator must only say if all the words you challenged were valid, or if some of the words were invalid, but is not allowed to reveal which word or words were invalid, in case you challenged several words.

If the play was invalid, the player making that play must place the played tiles on the rack again and loses the turn.

If all the words were valid, the challenging player is punished with a score deduction of ten points. (This punishment differs from both the ABSP and NSA rules. ABSP applies no punishment at all in such cases, whereas the challenging player is punished by losing one turn according to the NSA rules.)

• A play is not made until you have pressed the clock, so it is all right to change your mind before that. This is also the case if the opponent (prematurely) indicates that he or she wants to challenge a word. If you forgot to press the clock after making a play, it is still too late to change your mind after putting your hand in the bag for new tiles (and the opponent can then stop you from doing so by challenging one or several words).
• If you exchange tiles instead of making a play, you should place them face-down next to your rack, say how many tiles you change, and then press the clock. After that you pick new tiles and finally put the old tiles in the bag.
• When there are fewer than seven tiles left in the bag, exchanges are no longer permitted. However, in that case you are allowed to pass, as always.
• If six turns in a row are made without any new tiles being placed on the board, the game is over and both players get score reductions for the remaining tiles on their racks. (The ways in which such turns can happen are passes, exchanges and removing invalid plays. (In this case we follow the NSA rules. In the ABSP rules, exchanges are not included in the six turns.)
• The player making the last move presses the clock as usual, since the opponent might want to challenge a word. An opponent accepting the last play, stops the clock after entering the score in his or her sheet.
• It is permitted to make any kinds of notes during play. Especially you are allowed to track the tiles being played, and you can prepare a tracking sheet for that purpose.
• If a player draws too many tiles from the bag but has not seen more than the number supposed to be drawn, the remaining tiles should be returned to the bag.
• If a player has drawn too many tiles and seen them, the opponent can choose tiles among the other player's tiles, equal to the surplus number plus an extra tile, and look at them. The opponent then chooses which tile(s) to return to the bag. (If the player draws one surplus tile the opponent can thus draw two tiles, and choose which of these two to put back.) The opponent can either choose from the new tiles just picked (if these are still identifyable) or choose from all the player's tiles. If there were fewer than seven tiles left in the bag before the player picked the wrong number of tiles, the opponent can add yet another tile to those to choose from.

Valid words

• The dictionary used is Svenska Akademiens ordlista över svenska språket (The Swedish Academy's word list of the Swedish language, SAOL for short), but together with a supplement list and a list of changes. The thirteenth edition (from 2006) is used, SAOL13. For adjudication at rating-sanctioned tournaments, an established electronic word list should be used in the first place, however adapted according to the current supplement list and list of changes issued by the Swedish Scrabble Association (SSA). Tournament directors must be able to verify that the correct electronic word list is used. If a printed version of SAOL13 is used at a tournament it must be used in conjunction with printouts of the supplement list and the supplement list (if any). The supplement lists consists of the main words in the CD version of SAOL13 that are not printed in boldface in the book version of SAOL13. [This paragraph was changed at the Annual General Meeting of SSA on May 21, 2004 and May 7, 2006.]

• Only boldface words in SAOL are permitted. The rules supplied with the game states that just primary forms are allowed. (This differs from English-language Scrabble where inflected forms are accepted.) To avoid difficult borderline cases all main entries in boldface in SAOL are valid, even when they are in fact inflected forms. (Examples of tile plays are here written with uppercase letters. An asterisk (*) in front of a word shows that it is not a valid word.)

  Even words which have no main entries of their own, just stated under other entries, are valid as long as they are rendered in boldface.

  When variant forms or endings are placed between parentheses both spellings are valid.

• Words containing characters that are not letters cannot be played, such as "c/o", "abc-bok" and "super-8". (Not even with the help of blank tiles.)
• Letters with accents can be played. For example, "allé" can be played as ALLE. This E will be treated as any E, so you can use it as a regular E in a perpendicular word or extend this ALLE to ALLENA, no matter that this E previously stood for an é with an acute accent. This also holds for grave accent in "pietà", circumflex as in "crêpe", tilde as in "jalapeño" and cedilla as in "moçambikisk". The German letter ü is regarded as a separate letter, however. [This paragraph was extended at the Annual General Meeting of SSA on May 7, 2006.]
• Words with the letters q, w, ü or æ can be played, but only with the help of a blank tile. Ü is only found in "müsli" and must not be replaced with U or Y. Æ is in "læstadian", among others, and must not be replaced with an Ä or AE, just as little as W can be replaced with a V.
• An entry in SAOL which is a phrase with several words does not define any valid words. For example, the entry

  silk screen [sil'k skri'n] s.
  metod för tryckning

  make neither *SILK nor *SCREEN accepted words. By the same reason, *KRETI is invalid since the entry in SAOL is "kreti och pleti". However, PLETI is a valid word due to the entry

  pleti se kreti och pleti.

• Under some entries it is obvious in other ways that the word has other variants. These words are not accepted only because of this, since there might arise borderline cases. Instead all such words have been put together in a special supplement list by the SSA and all the words in the supplement are also valid.