HUDSON - ALZQUTE.

Now make a word out of that jumble and try to use the Q. It scores big points.

That's the task for children and others tomorrow at the Hudson Public Library, where a Scrabble expert will play 12 games at once against teams of students, parents and teachers.

Ben Loiterstein, a Somerville resident who works with the National Scrabble Association on its School Scrabble Program, will be at the library at 2 p.m. teaching the finer points of the game.

At 3 p.m., he will challenge his students to a competition. Only they'll play one game against him, while he'll scramble to play 12.

"I wouldn't be able to play 12 games simultaneously against other tournament players. At least I don't think I'd be able to do that well," he said.

Loiterstein will play games against all the teams, made up of two or more people, even if there end up being more than 12 teams.

Scrabble is much more than just a game, Loiterstein said. Playing competitively and with students has dramatically increased his vocabulary, and he's seen children's curiosity in words perk up.

"Suddenly there's an interest in looking through the dictionary for an unusual fish name or bird name, whatever they're interested in," he said.

Loiterstein has brought Scrabble to Brookline elementary schools, where he used to teach fifth grade, and Solomon Schechter Day School in Newton,

He played his first 12 simultaneous games at the Jewish private school.

"I actually won all those games, so I actually decided it's not too hard," he said. "It's not hard to do, because I play under the pressure of the clock normally when I go to tournaments, so I'm used to making pretty quick moves."

Scrabble competitions involve timed games where each player is given 25 minutes to make all his or her moves.

Rule number one about the board game is forming anagrams. From the letters mentioned above - ALZQUTE - at, let and late are all available words.

Then again, quetzal - a rare tropical bird - will score 120 points on the game's first move. (It gets 50 points for using all seven letters).

Loiterstein used this word against a national Scrabble champion, but lost the match.

This kind of vocabulary brain-storming makes Scrabble not just a game but a useful educational tool, Loiterstein said. Plus, the strategy involved in the playing offers an intellectual, and fun, challenge.

"It's really a very strategic game even though a lot of people don't think about it that way," said Loiterstein, 39, who has been playing the board game competitively since 1996.

The popular Hasbro board game involves players taking seven letters, each awarded a point value, and putting the letter tiles on the game board to form words. After the first word is built, players build off of existing words.

St. Michael's Elementary School fifth-grade teacher Linda Coldrick plans on competing with a team of four students, and another boy from her school will play with another team.

"I think the biggest thing (about Scrabble) is the enthusiasm for the spelling. In any way, shape or form that gets them interested, I'm for it," she said.

A teacher from Joseph P. Mulready Elementary School is also playing with some students.

One good strategy Loiterstein described was placing letters parallel to a word to form a series of two-letter words, rather than building one new word off of an existing letter.

"If you learn all the two-letter words that are in the dictionary, there are a lot more than people think," he said.