Once upon a time I thought I was a decent Scrabble player. I knew I wasn't competition good, but I could usually hold my own in an informal game with friends or family.

Then a friend introduced me to Facebook and its most entertaining application: Scrabulous.

Scrabulous, for all intents and purposes, is Scrabble without the famous trademark. The beauty of it is that it doesn't need to be played in real time, and therefore doesn't require a lot of social coordination.

For months, some farflung friends and I have kept up by making comments in the game, while we play our turns in isolation because of different time zones and busy schedules. It's a fun way to keep in touch, but it's also a lesson in humility as I lose game after game.

I realize that there are a number of online anagram programs that could, um, assist me in figuring out better word possibilities, but what's the fun in that? Anyway, it would be too embarrassing to cheat and lose anyway.

The only consolation I have is that I'm not alone in my defeat.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that one online program — the Scrabble Cheat-O-Matic — has seen its page views jump from 4,000 to 120,000 since Facebook added Scrabulous in June.

Hmm ... Could that be why I keep losing?

One of the problems with Scrabulous is that the mode we use doesn't allow invalid words and doesn't penalize you for moving tiles on and off the board to find the highest score.

In a recent game, for instance, I learned that I could play "P-E-R-V" for 18 points, but not "P-E-R-V-Y" for 24, since apparently only "perv" has made it into the dictionary. Go figure. I wouldn't have had confidence in either slang term in a board game.

At least I know what pervy means. I want one friend friend to define "fiz" and another to tell me how often he hears "gie," as in, "Gie me that haggis!"

And ilex? I now know that it's a genus of trees and shrubs that includes holly, but was that really part of my friend's vocabulary when he played it? Does he hang ilex wreaths on his door at Christmas time? I doubt it.

I'm guilty, too. I've played Q-I and Q-A-T when I haven't had a U, and when I have, used it to score 62 points with XU. I have no idea what any of those words mean, even though I've played them all.

If things go my way in a game currently under way, I'll be able to play "aa" (lava with a rough surface) along with a word for a distinctly female anatomical part.

I'll still lose, but hopefully it will make my three male opponents cringe.

Reach Treena Shapiro at tshapiro@honoluluadvertiser.com. Read her daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.