If you've played Scrabble before, you know the excruciating feeling of being just one letter short of an amazing word.
Maybe you've looked at a rack like CELNORU and thought, "If only that O were an A, I'd have NUCLEAR!"
As tempting as it may sound, it's almost never the right strategy to simply play your O and hope you draw an A out of the bag. Scrabble players call that "fishing," and it usually doesn't work out.
For one thing, the odds are against you — even the most plentiful letter in the bag, the E, makes up just 12 of the 100 tiles in Scrabble, and no consonant appears more than six times.
But more importantly, you're unlikely to score enough points to justify fishing. Playing one letter at a time usually means you're scoring very few points. Even if you magically draw the A for NUCLEAR and score 70 points, it may not be enough to make up for all the low-scoring plays you made on the previous turns.