Using Online Tools to Improve your Scrabble Skill

Everyone knows that you can use scrabble word finders to help you win games of Scrabble and Words with Friends online.  But did you know that you can also use those tools to help you improve your game long term?

If your goal is not just to win but to improve your game, online word finders can help! Learning to unscramble the letters into valid words (these valid words are called anagrams) is the most important skill to your Scrabble success. This method has been used successfully by winners of National and International Scrabble competitions, and even by World Scrabble Champions.  Follow these steps to help improve your skill at finding words:

1.  Look for the words yourself, without any help.  Take a minute and look for the possibilities available, and identify the best scoring spots, open hotspot possibilities, open letters, hooks, and parallel play options, and try to find at least three reasonable candidate plays: ideally in different areas of the board.
2. Once you’ve found some viable options, head over to your favorite scrabble word finder and input your tiles.  Feel free to also input other open tiles that may be available to play through, and look for some of the words that you might have missed.
3. If you don’t know some of these valid words, learn them!  There are many techniques that Scrabble players use to learn words: experiential learners close their eyes and try to visualize playing the word, while auditory learners recite the new word to themselves a few times in an attempt to “hear” the word, and visual learners simply stare at the new word for a few seconds until the word “looks familiar” to them.

If it helps you learn, feel free to write down some of these words, as writing them down (or typing them) helps reinforce these words into your memory.  One trick that people like to do is write or type these words out in alphabetical order as you recite the word to yourself, as this helps create a mental link between the word and your tiles.  If you choose to do this, peruse this list again in a few days to reinforce your word learning before discarding.

Using this technique, you can gradually learn thousands of useful words that can be used over and over again in your Words with Friends or Scrabble play!  If you’d prefer to learn words by studying, take a look at some of our useful wordlists section <link> here </link> for some quick words that will immediately improve your score!