awesome game of Scrabble

I am not a Scrabble player. It's not a game I grew up with and I've always had a belief that I'm really not good at it. I don't know the tricks and all the two-letter words possible, etc. I honestly played only the second real game of my adult life tonight and I had crazy luck!

My first set of game tiles were H, H, E, E, U, U, T so my first word down was "teeth" off of "teen." During the course of the game, I managed to draw the Q (triple letter score), X (double word score off two words), Z and both blanks. I also happened to land two triple word scores. My opponents were being nice and letting me look through the dictionary since I'm a new player but I didn't end up using any of the words I found. The long and short of this story though is how I managed to win with an amazing final hand. My last set of tiles included the Z and two blanks along with M, B, O and S. I didn't see it at first but realized I had the potential to put down "zombies" and use all my tiles for an extra 50 points. I also saw a place on the board where I could lay it down with the "s" ending on top of the vertical word "pew" for a second word score with "spew."

As luck would have, when my turn came back around, that spot was still open and I put down my word for a score of 29 points on "zomb[i][e]s" and "spew" then add on the 50 bonus points for using all seven tiles for a round total of 79, the highest of our game! It was amazingly lucky; and I also found out that when you go out first with all your tiles (and no more tiles remaining in the draw bag), you get to add to your score all the points on the other players' remaining tiles (in this case 34) and they have to subtract the number of points on their remaining tiles from their scores. My final score was 253 with the next highest being 181. I'm guessing they won't be letting me read the dictionary the next time we play.