Good pointers, Master Lemon, when it comes to finding the best 12-letter words. If anyone here has any other insider knowledge about the Winning Streak bonus, I'd love to hear it. It could have been that some of the most popular letters were put up on the board with no repeats and that during testing, Bob may have discovered people rarely went over 5 tries to make words. If you are a sharp player, the odds are with you. Like with Beat The Odds. It seems unlikely that the letters were chosen at random. It would not make sense to throw up letters that would make creating a word impossible, or you wind up being a loser in a game of chance, not skill. The only potential problem with the 12-letter word concept is, as you pointed out, after you have picked your fifth letter and realize the only way to stay alive is to come up with the 12-letter base word (especially if you have duplicate letters), where do you go? Unless you can come up with a legal variation of that word, perhaps with a prefix or suffix, you might get lucky. Otherwise, you'd be smarter to quit - or you are forced to quit - once you hit the base word. So I'm still trying to think of the best concept. I'm open to suggestions and other member input. And, of course, anyone with inside knowledge of the show. Paging Mr. Stewart.....
Maybe a giant jackpot for discovering the 12-letter base word?
