For most people the issue isn't a lack of knowing words. It's speed, pattern recognition, and general boggle skills.

Maybe you mean specifically at the top, but at my level, practice is certainly way more efficient than studying words.

There are a lot of words and I have 25 years of study in that department already, but I have under 50 hours of actual playtime.

If there were a list of 200 great boggle words, it would be different. Studying the 2 letter words in WWF is huge for example. Is there anything equivalent to that in SWF? If so please share.

I have some ideas. I suspect I could tell anyone here 10 little tricks (just some simple letter combos) that would increase their skill by 2-10% immediately, assuming they don't already know this stuff. One very simple one is the letters AORT....every combination of consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel is a word. ie RATO, ROTA, TARO, TORA. These come up all the time and immediately add like 4-8 instant words to your score (if there's an S). Maybe you and everyone else already knows this, who knows? I know that when I won the league last season I didn't (I knew TARO and TORA only I think), and so this is an extremely obvious increase to my skill for an unbelievably small amount of work, and when those letters come up it's an automatic reflex to grab every word. It's pretty clear to me from this that there is no chance to achieve my full potential quickly without some type of systematic study system.

Some of the words I learn are not extremely valuable because they don't come up very often and they only form one word (such as APRU = PRAU). You can probably get away without knowing that. However I figure it can't hurt for Scrabble related purposes to just know everything.

In any case I don't want to share all of the most useful tricks because it's not a negligible amount of work studying all this crap and I don't want to do all the work on my own and have everyone reap the benefits of the most important stuff.

That's the beauty of a strategy forum. You share something. Someone else share's something. A newb like me asks a question about powerups, and it leads to discussion that's educational for all!

Speaking of which, is this "trick", A) common knowledge, B) unethical, neither, or both?

At the end of a round, if you have your finger on a letter and time runs out, you have all the time in the world to sit and stare at the board until you find an 8 letter word to use as your final word.

It's common knowledge and ethical. Everyone does it (at least everyone who knows about it!).

Also you aren't a newb

ahaha curtains i didn't know that AORT trick, i am so bad at fours. tapping the glass imo, if i were you i would share almost nothing. poker strat (and scrabble and chess) works because the question is 'what should i have done in this spot?' but scramble doesn't have that element. it's words and reflexes and little else.

Should no one fall below me in group 2 I'll set the record for best % for the worst player in a group.

goodluck

No reason not to ever share anything, I mean it's not like we are playing for huge amounts of money I have a few more little things that give me an auto 4-10 words whenever they come up, that I'd never have gotten otherwise.

It's common knowledge, and its completely ethical.

Now getting the paid app, for free through jailbroken iphones on cydia by using installous, who knows if that's ethical or not.

So.. what are those few other things?

How about I reveal one fun trick before every new season Just remind me.

I typed out some strategy tips earlier and then I deleted it. Everyone is getting better so fast I don't wanna make it faster.

Ash,

Pls pm me tips, thx!

Instead of playing tonight I'm just gonna read the possible words for a while.. I suck

did not know this!

I'm thinking I could probably write a program that creates boards by choosing letters using the distribution in WWF, then finds words using the WWF dictionary. Then it can report the most common words, the most valuable words to know, etc...

Then I can possibly crush group 1 and maybe, just maybe, take a round off lyndsey.

Wwf and swf distribution much different. To show what a sicko I am I looked at like 100 boards or so from my games and charted the letter distribution.

yeah this doesn't surprise me at all. feels like letters like V, W, and Y are really underrepresented, whereas E and S are much more common. i mean, in scrabble at least, there's twice as many S's as V, W, or Y, but i bet in SWF it's 4x

W overrepped in SWF I'm pretty sure. S obviously super overrepped.

Okay I get that the prevalence of certain words is higher but what about the arrangement of words? Does "e" come next to "d" and "r" too much for the letters to be randomly placed? I feel like this has to be the case.

Also I feel like there are too many "ing" boards.

Wow that's awesome. Do you know what the distribution is? I tried looking online and couldn't find anything, just assumed it'd be similar to WWF (I know that you never see double Qs, Js, Xs, Zs, just like in WWF).

It seems to me like the distribution is fairly random. I don't think I've seen that many ing boards.

Just algorithmically speaking, it's much simpler and easier to choose letters from a bag and make a board than it is to structure boards to favor certain arrangements. If you have enough S', E's, R's, D's etc.. you'll get the arrangements you're talking about a lot naturally.

SWF needs to have a sense of humor and put some board out with just consonants sometime to mess with people

I'm pretty sure it's random. Just today I've seen plenty of boards with e's and an r with no contact between them, it's very frustrating.

Remember that in a 4x4 board, if you randomly place two r's and one "e" somewhere on the board, it's likely that the "e" is touching an "r" (more than half the time I assume, I'm not going to bother calculating the probability).

Ok screw it I will calculate the probability:
If the "e" is in the center (25% chance): then 4/5th chance it's touching at least one of two r's.
If the "e" is on the edge (50% chance): then 4/7th chance it's touching at least one of two r's.
If the "e" is on the corner (25% chance): then 13/35th chance it's touching at least one of two r's.

Overall weighted probability is 58% that if you randomly place one "e" and two r's on a 4x4 board, there will be an "re" stem.

So yeah wet boards just naturally happen by chance, is really what I want to say. Especially considering the number of useless clumps of consonants we've all seen, I don't think SWF is doing much more than a random alignment of weighted probabilities of letters, probably re-randomizing if the resulting board has too few possible words.

There is definitely a minimum number of vowels possible, otherwise we would have seen screenshots of absurd boards with only 1-2 vowels by now.