I have android, but still, there's at least one other android guy itt, and now that there's 6 groups in the scramble league, there must be more.

Yeah I haven't talked much strat because there are almost no 'fish' - my regular opponents all read this thread and I don't want to give them any tips.

I was in Group 1 once and never again, but yeah, volume will never get you there, you have to study stems and letter combinations IMO. From her video it looks like she isn't totally systematic but she tries to find words that begin with a single letter, find all those that she can see, then keep moving.

i tried vision and it totally threw me off my rhythm. i'd give it a shot, but i didn't think it was better.

My humble thoughts:

I obviously can't compete with group 1 but I have several super competitive friends who I battle in this game constantly. They normally win unless I find a good block of words in rd2/3 they don't figure out.

Theres obviously a lot of strategies to consider in this game but here are some overall generalities I think are important to understand:

Once you play people with a brain your edges are going to come from knowing abnormal words that people do not think about. In a bubble a good opponent will get all the easy words so it's important to know going in that you're gonna have to find the easy ones and add some unusual ones to get a W vs a quality opponent.

I think there could be (and probably already is in this thread) a healthy debate between taking your time and finding the words vs mash-dragging your finger along the letters to just pick up words more quickly. Increasing WPS. The problem with dragging quickly is that as you increase your speed you may miss some easy words. Finding an optimal merge for yourself to get the highest score may be incorrect, as you're going to have to continue to improve on speed to beat better people.

IMO ideally a smart person is going to use the freeze along with the super OP vision powerup. The reason being they will optimally not run out of words to pick up on the board and don't need the help from inspiration. But a fast person may opt for inspiration + vision, as they may not need the extra frozen time to find all the words they can on the block. After they find all the 'easy' words, they can use inspiration to pick up 3 odd words and this can be the difference maker in a match.
I think the lower in ability you are, the more you should lean towards using inspiration + vision, as it will force you to increase your WPS to get a higher score.
Another problem with the freeze powerup is that, on some boards, the texture is so crappy that freeze doesn't help you AT ALL. So there is some added 'EV' from just picking inspiration all the time. Again, the better you are at this game the less this is true.

The overall combo which is going to get you better (assuming you are smart) is maintaining your vocab and detection while increasing your speed. Additional words will come in time as you play good people. Also checking out the master list of words possible on the board after a round can help you figure out some words to remember for the next match.

I am super lazy so I barely do half of my own recommendations but I believe these are some good points to consider if you haven't already in order to bust out of the lower brackets.

You're definitely a total fish if you're not using vision imo

First learn every word from 4-7 letters. A few exceptions are ok, but know most of them. Then know all the common word combos. Like know stare, and then know cold which words are made if you add one letter to that group, and etc etc. I think it's an unbelievable amount of work. She's been playing for years and I suspect it'd take about 2 years of hard study to potentially reach her level from where Group 1 is now, but that's just a random guess.

I'm sorry, what is this and how do I find it on the iphone?

Pretty sure by the mention of Cydia they are talking about jailbroken iPhones, and they are programs you can download off of Cydia, which is an app similar to the apple store but 90+% of everything is free.

i would learn the 3s too, for the later rounds, but yeah, this sounds about right.

tangential, but i've wondered if it's even worth it to look for words that end in -NESS, -LESS, or begin with ANTI-. if i see these present I will usually look briefly but it's often hard to see, so I usually waste 5-10 seconds looking. On the other hand, finding one of these words is usually at least 20 points and with a TW/TL can be 60+.

I just assume everyone in group 1 already knows all the 3's

I have this issue, except it frequently presents itself after only about 3 games. So many games it just lags out of control and ruins my score by forcing me to pause or restart or whatever. I feel like it didnt used to do this and my phone is just slowly becoming a piece of crap (it has other issues too).

The problem with vision is it throws off your rhythm and it doesn't give you very good words. Ideally you'll use it on a pretty dry board and find a new stem or two that you missed, then just crush the last 15+ seconds. But a lot of times if you're in a groove getting a bunch of words, all of a sudden you have to slow down to find the 3 words and you don't get much more out of it, other than the 15 seconds which is probably shorter than a second freeze. I'm not sure which is higher EV overall for faster players, but I almost always use freeze/freeze.

I always do freeze+vision. No idea which is better obv, but I feel really good about the vision. Good to see there are at least a few schools of thought. Also sometimes I do inspiraiton, but only when behind hoping it';ll give me some magic words in rd 3. I did it against you recently Tim (used 2 inspirations as a test), in that one game where I forgot to use powerups in round 2 .

Oh, and since I use freeze/freeze 90% of the time, I completely forget to use the vision half of the 10% of the time I select it.

I definitely think freeze/freeze is best in round 1, it's closer in later rounds.

How is the amount of time freeze lasts calculated? I am sure this has been discussed before.. Sorry. This thread is humongous! If it was over 15s I understand where you're coming from, but I feel like it's not that long sometimes.

I think if you are ahead it's likely to be a shorter freeze.

That sounds about right to me. I wish it was just a set amount of time that you knew it would freeze for...

just watched a lindsey browning youtube video of her playing on an ipad. 90% of the time if i move my finger that fast on my phone it wont register all the letters. comes up a lot when im going through common 3/4 letter combos. im using the htc one, gonna try out a few games on my asus tablet today.

I tried freeze/vision for a while but I'm back to good old freeze freeze now. I like not having to worry about when to use powerups or anything, just gogo make words.

So sad when I'm done with all my league games, they're so much fun and I'm about out of them until nedt season. I'm probably demoting back to 2, and group 2 next season is probably going to be harder than group 1 season 1. But I love the challenge and the grind, so I'm optimistic I'll be back in 1.

Why do you think that would be the case? Also what if you're going first? Does it freeze for a more consistent period of time if you use the freeze in the beginning rather than the end, or does that not matter? I've tried both ways and can't really discern any patterns to it.

I never used power-ups until I joined the league; I didn't think they'd make a difference (and I also usually don't care if I beat someone or what score I get, unless it's for the tournament - my main goal is finding cool words) but the extra time definitely gives you an edge. I started with vision/freeze but now just doing freeze/freeze despite the variability in the amount of time it freezes because vision is a bit of extra effort.

I don't like inspiration because the few times I've used it I've usually gotten some crappy 4lw's. One time it gave me a really awesome word (in a non league game) and I was just mad I didn't find that word myself. :P

Curtains I'm interested in sprucing up the spreadsheet before next season since this is getting so big. Some things will be strictly aesthetic, but two things I'd like to discuss with you and get feedback from others.

1) I'm afraid of changing the results entries since people are used to it but I have an idea that might be easier. Instead of two matrices side by side, one for each game played, we could fit everything into one matrix so all info can be seen without scrolling over. And it would require half as much data entry.

Every game results in 5 points total. One player's score is 5 - the other's. It follows that we only need one cell to contain both scores.

We could have 1 cell for each game. Game 1 is entered in the bottom left half of the matrix. Game 2 is entered in the upper right. We follow the long-standing convention that a player enters his/her own score in their row and their opponent's column.

So let's say player A beats Player B 3-2 and then A loses 1-4. Here's how it would look.

	A	B
A	x	1
B	2	x

The spreadsheet can figure this out with a simple tweak that I could handle.

I think it's cleaner and a little easier BUT it might confuse people. So I'm just throwing it out there to see if people think its worth it.

2) Less controversial, but personally I'd like to see the standings sort by points instead of %. I think early in the season it's more meaningful than having someone with 0 or 1 games at the top of the standing, and I think ultimately points is what players should be ranked by. It's all the same when everyone in a group plays their game, but on the rare instances where a few games are missing I think it's fairer to rank by points. The people with games missing shouldn't rank above players who've played all their games solely based on %.

what about just having one matrix where you just write '3-2' or '1-4' etc. can you use left and right statements in google docs?

Possible but a bit harder to implement. Would need a lot of if statements basically. You can just think of it as you're entering only the first part of the score in my proposal above.

Although I could do this if people preferred.

Ty for the feedback.

i'm a believer in the trailing player/longer freeze theory. definitely think, assuming this is true, with curtains' scoring system it might even make sense to throw round 1 against a much stronger player in the hopes of pulling 2 points out of a match.

I consider myself to be an above average WWF player but I am pretty terrible at this game. Only time I seem to make any ground if ever is in the 3rd round.

Just played a game where my 3 scores were

188
220
1415

name: imjoshs