[imgabe]

I've been playing Words with Friends more or less constantly for the past 5 years or so and I've come to pretty much the same conclusion. It's far more important to deny your opponent the opportunity to get valuable triple/double letter or work scores than it is to always grab them yourself.

If you do extend to get a bonus tile, make sure the potential scoring opportunity is limited. Things like:

1. Don't leave a vowel next to a triple letter score in line with a triple word score - that leaves an opening for a valuable consonant to start a word and end on the triple word score.

2. If you pass parallel to a triple letter tile, beware of having a vowel adjacent to the tile and a consonant after it. Especially if the vowel is A, I, or O as these form two letter words with Z, Q, and J respectively. If they can get get for example JO going in two directions on a triple letter that's 60+ points.

3. Always be aware of whether the J, Q, Z, X have been played or not.

4. Sometimes it's better to play a less valuable word if it helps you get rid of difficult letters like too many vowels or consonants in hopes that the next draw will even out your hand and let you play a better word.

I think WWF is a little different because the tiles permit higher scoring possibilities than Scrabble, but I imagine the strategies are much the same.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

WWF forces you to focus more on the board strategy due to the mechanics of the game being different than Scrabble: the player doesn't have to actually know and/or memorize the words they are playing, they can just attempt as many high scoring combinations they want until they get a hit in the game's dictionary database.

[thoth]

I use this strategy when playing WWF as well, and have stumbled across words unknown to me.

I also play illegal words to check the validity of other words formed. For instance, if I wonder whether an existing word can take an -S or -D ending, I'll play a word I know is wrong. WWF helpfully comes back with a list of which words aren't valid. :)

Neither of these work against a live opponent so I play WWF a lot differently than Scrabble. Like you said, strategy is different when playing - in WWF, I can focus more on rack management and scoring spaces playing WWF; in Scrrabble, I am nudged towards playing words I know because I can't test them. Back when I played Scrabble I studied the 2 and 3 letter works plus the hooks and didn't find that aspect of the game all that fun.