Various Resources For Improving Your Mad Scrabble Skills

It seems that most people who have run this game are in the same position. We like Scrabble, but have very little experience trying to seriously improve at it, and the prospect of improving seems daunting. When you're new at this game, it can be hard to see a path to improvement beyond the obvious, "just memorize the dictionary lol."

So I'd like to present some very beginner friendly resources that I think have helped me improve a lot.

I'll try to update this list every once in a while as I learn more about good resources!




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(1) Will Anderson

2017 North American Scrabble Champion, Will Anderson, has an excellent YouTube channel with many informative videos that are easily digestible. https://www.youtube.com/c/wranderson11

In particular, his video on how to improve at finding bingos is one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICpCyxqcdeU

He also has a video on good approaches to learning words that directly mentions a few of the resources I mention in this guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSh-6GWxqws

His "Better Know a Letter" series is a great way to learn about tile synergy, and if you're interested in hearing about a bunch of stats about how letters are used in Scrabble, these videos have a lot of fun visualizations for those too: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm9WVrRb2Lz11DKX3x-sYI3t3iO-tQpmp

Will also occasionally streams on twitch! Obviously people come and go on twitch, so it's hard to say how long this link will be helpful, but his word game streams are good fun to watch https://www.twitch.tv/wanderer15

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(2) Zyzzyva

Zyzzyva is a word study program that I've personally been using to learn common bingo words. Will Anderson talks about this more in his video on learning words, but one nice thing about Zyzzyva is that you can specifically train with bingo words that will commonly be drawn based on the tile distribution. Check out that video to learn more about this tool: http://www.scrabbleplayers.org/w/NASPA_Zyzzyva_Download

The file PS1NTSC.txt in the Dictionary upload in the Resources tab can be uploaded as a custom lexicon in Zyzzyva. The dictionary for this game has 103508 words, whereas the NWL2020 dictionary that is in Zyzzyva by default has 191477 words (nearly twice as many!!!) If you want to improve at scrabble in general, NWL2020 is the better choice to learn from, but if you specifically want to improve at PS1 scrabble, the dictionary is there for your study.

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(3) Aerolith

Aerolith is an online tool for practicing anagramming. They also have lists you can practice with. I've found this site useful for memorizing all the two letter words. https://www.aerolith.org/

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(4) axcertypo

axcertypo, aka Josh Sokol, has another great YouTube channel, mostly reviewing tournament games. I don't learn a lot of individual words through these videos, but I found it helped me a lot just to immerse myself in Scrabble language and discussion. At the beginner level, so much of Scrabble can feel like just finding the highest scoring word to play, but at the top level, you can assume that all the players know all the words at their disposal, and on this channel you can hear about the reasoning behind certain plays. https://www.youtube.com/c/axcertypo

axcertypo is also on Twitch! https://www.twitch.tv/axcertypo

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(5) https://www.twitch.tv/scrabble

The twitch Scrabble account isn't just some corporate account. Some very good scrabble players will stream on this account, including Will and Josh. Again, hard to say how long a twitch channel will be active, but worth a follow for good scrabble content.

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(6) http://www.scrabbleplayers.org/w/Scrabble_Streaming

This link shows a lot of other good Scrabble streamers and content creators. I assume that page will be updated more frequently than this guide.

XandoToaster

Scrabble (PS)

PlayStation 2

JacoboTheChocobo

Novice

Intermediate

Champion

Grand Master

Beginner

Advanced

Expert

Master

1 AI

2 AI

3 AI

Difficulty

Opponent Count

The scrabble speedrun mods have created a discord server for word game speedruns! We would also like to open this server to any other word game communities that require similar skills as scrabble speedruns, such as a large vocabulary, good anagramming skills, etc. We don't expect it to be super acti