Turns out that a large vocabulary is not necessarily what wins you games of Scrabble. Instead it has more to do with probabilities and statistics of values assigned to letters. Five Thirty Eight has a nice piece that charts the high scores of Scrabble games.
![Scrabble scores of the 2013 championship](https://coffeespoons.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/scrabbleScores.png)
Credit for the piece goes to Oliver Roeder.