Scrabble (game show) wild card contestants competed in semifinal matches on Monday through Thursday. The four winners advanced to the final matches that Friday, with a grand prize of $100,000 for the winner. With slight adjusting, this tournament format became the new permanent "Scrabble" format on December 29, 1986. As noted above, each episode now featured four contestants and two Crossword games worth $500 each. The champion played in the first Crossword, whose winner set a Sprint time for the second winner to beat, and the Sprint winner received $1,000 and took or retained the championship. With this format change, "Scrabble" became a
Tile tracking the tiles are played is a standard feature of tournament play. Tracking sheets come in many varieties, and are often customized by players in an attempt to make the manual process of recording, tracking and counting tiles easier, more intuitive, and less prone to error. Accurate tile-tracking depends upon knowing the total letter distribution and letter frequency of the game and then reproducing each tile in its correct frequency to facilitate the "accounting" of each letter as tiles are played. Pre-printed forms are popular for Scrabble games because they eliminate the need to continuously create such a list for each