Been casually trying to increase my ELO on Wordfeud. When you know the dictionary by heart (Wordfeud has rather restricted dictionaries) and have the basics of bonus hunting and hooking down, Scrabble becomes a pure game of imperfect knowledge and strategy. The known information is the prior letter distribution, the played letters on the board and in your rack. The unknown information is your opponent's rack. However, you can compute exact letter probabilities for his rack and strategize accordingly.

Then the game comes down to managing your rack and your opponent's. Here's are some common techniques/strats:

- Q-pinning: blocking bonus squares or hooks by using difficult letters so your opponent can't lay down a high scoring turn.

- Q-burning: the inverse, taking a hit on current turn score just to get rid of difficult letters.

- E-burning: sometimes having all-low score letters in your rack is worse than having Q-letters as this will hamper your ability to get high scores on good board positions. A well-balanced rank is key to winning.

- Q-swapping: late-game strategy, maintain a difficult letter in your rack to swap in one of the last turns so your opponent draws the impossible letters forcibly. Remember unused rack letters will be deducted from final score. This dirty trick has won me many close games.