Plus SAS tactics for pillow fights and the final word on Scrabble.

Christmas, the season of goodwill to all men. All men, that is, apart from your uncle who owns the profitable orange set of properties in Monopoly on which you have just landed. You’ve never liked him, and the gloating, ruddy-faced glee with which he accepts your money is further proof of his low character. Look at him with cheese cracker crumbs all down his sweater. You flip the board over and go and watch Bad Santa instead.

Well, this Christmas will be different. How To Win Games And Beat People by Mr Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, contains no homilies about the taking part being what counts. Instead, he will show you, with the aid of ridiculously over-qualified experts, how to smash the enemy on all the key fronts, including Monopoly, pillow fights and Scrabble.

As you survey your crushed opponents from across the kitchen table, pour yourself a glass of congratulatory claret and quietly thank MR PORTER. Victory has never tasted so sweet. You’re welcome.

The capitalist classic involves buying property and extracting rent from your competitors, and is a canny blend of judgement and luck. “The key to success in Monopoly comes down to one tip: buy orange,” says Mr Whipple, who interviewed game theorist Mr John Haigh for the ultimate strategic analysis of Monopoly. According to Mr Haigh’s computer model (yes, he really built one), for every 100 hits on purple or blue, you get 110 on green or yellow and 122 on orange or red. This is because the most landed upon square is jail. Further, the most common numbers to throw after emerging from prison are five, six, seven, eight and nine, which take you into the orange and red zone. On measuring the ratio of income to cost, the light blue property comes out best (at 1.59) and orange second (1.41).

“When I interviewed the former SAS commander and author of Bravo Two Zero Andy McNab about pillow fighting,” says Mr Whipple, “he took it so seriously, it was as though he was parodying himself.” A veteran of many covert operations around the world, Mr McNab believes the only difference between a deadly battle and a pillow fight is that feathers are involved instead of bullets.

“The principles are the same for any weapon,” he says. “Your position and hold must be firm enough to support it. The chances are you are going to have it in one hand, so you can have the other hand free to push the target away from you, or grab the target towards you and control it.”

Mr McNab believes the best strategy is to go in hard and go in fast. “The fact is once you commit, you commit… It’s that recognition that you’ve got to fight or you’re in the shit, so you get on and fight. If you’ve got the weapon and you’re there, you just get in straightaway.”

It’s not a case of anything goes, though. “You shouldn’t really bite, gouge their eyes or grab their bollocks,” says Mr McNab.

Mr Brett Smitheram, dubbed “the Sherlock of the Scrabble board”, believes the biggest impediment to victory in Scrabble is a love of words. “When you play Scrabble with linguists, they get caught up in the loveliness of the words,” he says.

In Scrabble, words are merely tools. The first thing to do is learn all the two-letter words. These enable parallel play, which means you can have a word going horizontally that also adjoins several letters vertically to make a whole series of words.

The next step is to learn how the board works. “Premium squares are generally four or five spaces apart,” says Mr Smitherman. “So make sure you are stronger in four- or five-letter words, then you can reach from a triple-letter score, say, to a double word.” He trains using computer programs that generate words in order of their probability of appearing in Scrabble ties and memorising them.

Also key is to learn the relative values of the tiles. The most valuable are S and blank. Both increase the probability of seven-letter words, even though S is only worth one point and blank is worth nothing. Whereas Q, which is worth 10 points, has the least probability of being played and so should be got rid of by playing it alongside an I, to spell QI, as soon as possible.

Statistically, the worst three-letter combination to get is V, U and W, although you can get rid of these with the word “vrouw”, which means Dutch woman. Check it in the Scrabble dictionary if you don’t believe us.