1.  Learn the two letter words.

The two letter words are the foundation of Scrabble, as they allow you to place words on the board. Simply put, you cannot play Scrabble without knowing all of these essential words: learning the two letter words is like learning how the knight moves in chess or that a flush beats a straight in poker.

Luckily, there are just over 100 two-letter words, allowing you to learn all the two letter words in no time. Many of these words you already know, either from everyday English or through your experiences playing Scrabble! A list of two letter words is available here.

            2.  Learn the three letter words.

While the three letter words are not as important as the 2s, they still serve a vital purpose in allowing you to place words and score. Three letter words are especially important for making parallel plays: plays alongside an existing word and form several short words simultaneously. These words are vital to your success in Scrabble, especially with mid-high point tiles such as the F, H, and X: as such, three letter words that use at least one high point tile are much more useful than shorter three letter words.

While there are many more two letter words, learning all the three letter words is still doable. There are just over 1000 three letter words: approximately 1/4 of them are common words, while you’ve likely already encountered many other threes through your experiences playing Scrabble. A list of the uncommon three letter words is available here.

            3.  Learn the short vowel dumps.

            4.  Learn the short JXQZ words.

            5.  Learn some single-anagram bingos.

As you continue to improve, you’ll soon realize that to win at Scrabble, you’re going to need to learn and find bingos: plays that use all seven tiles in your rack and yield a 50 point bonus. These plays are essential to winning in the long run, and many top Scrabble players will often play multiple bingos in a game.

Bingos are so important that much of basic level strategy is centered around bingos: keeping good, balanced, bingo letters such as ACDEILNRST and getting rid of higher scoring letters in hopes of playing a bingo within a few turns. This is the way to win Scrabble games.

Because of this, it’s important to learn bingos: particularly the bingos that tend to show up the most. Therefore, you should learn bingos with common, low point tiles that don’t have anagrams to have the biggest bang for your buck. Words like ERASION are more likely to show up than JUMBUCK because there are simply more AEINORS tiles to draw as opposed to BCJKMUU, while also being more useful than a word like ACTINON since even if you don’t find it, you can always find and play the word CONTAIN instead.