How good IS Megaword?

[MegaWord]

MegaWord, I noticed some time ago in the Hall of Fame you scored 1,858 pts in a 5x5 game to surpass by a good margin fasteddieb's high of 1,775. It seems you were in training mode May-June. Then last month you came back and set a personal high of 202 words/game in 4x4. (I thought I might get tendinitis scrolling through your trophy room to see the applicable section. ) So congrats on your achievements!! (I likely missed some.) Amazing as usual. You inspire me to continue to improve my much, much, wayyyyyyyyy slower long word game.

I don't go for extremely high averages often because it's so restrictive, but it's pretty cool seeing a legit average of 202 words on the leaderboard. The average score with that was a nice 1,050 pts.

Yeah, I saw fasteddieb's video for that 1,775 pt game and another close score, they were amazing to watch since his style is geared towards longer words. Perhaps he could share them, I'm sure you guys would love it.

And thank you for your congratulations lalatan. I am happy to be an inspiration to yourself and others of this fine game.

[crazykate]

I mean that it can take at least 1-2 seconds to type a word, plus the time it takes to spot them, plus mistakes that might be made - how can 128 words be typed in 120 seconds? That is less than one second per word, taking in account finding and typing the word. I don't believe it.

I can't type properly because I never learned how. I'm pretty good at typing with the four fingers of my right hand only, but I have to look down at the keyboard quite often while I type. This is fine for emails and messages and things, but not fast enough for the game, so I swipe. My personal best is 121 words in 120 seconds, so just under a second per word. However, it would probably be more accurate to say that I find clusters of words even faster than that, and spend several seconds searching for new combinations without swiping. If I find a well-known cluster of letters like A E T S in a square, maybe with an R and an L next to it, it will take me like 5 seconds to enter 10-12 words.

For me personally, swiping is the faster method, but I know that really good typists don't have to look at their fingers while typing, and they can keep looking at the board while typing quickly. I assume the more experienced players can rely on muscle memory for the most common combinations such as the one I cited, so they can type five or six words without thinking while looking for the next combination on the board, eliminating pauses and constantly typing.

It also really shouldn't take you two seconds to type a three letter word. If it does, you should either practise typing or try swiping instead to improve your score.

[bwt1213]

This is not bragging. It is fact. When I was a young lad, there was a class in school called "personal typing", and the modest goal was a rate of 25 words per minute at the end of a semester. Kids who were planning on going to college often took the class because typing was thought to be a valuable skill. 25 words per minute would earn you a grade of "A" in the class. I am a very competitive person and was FAR more so when I was young. (I will skip the many stories.) Of COURSE I tried to set records. In that class, I did timed typing tests of 54 words per minute with my left hand only, and my right hand behind my back; 37 words a minute with my right hand only; and 104 words per minute with both hands. At that time, I did not touch-type and had to look at the keyboard. If I were 17 years old again, I am certain I would be typing far more words than now. I would see more words, too. As I become older, I am confronted with the fact that my brain is not as fast or as flexible, my fingers not as supple or as accurate, and my memory not as reliable or as quick. But I can assure you all of one thing of which I am very certain: do not EVER say "no one can do that". If it is physically possible to do it, someone will. Don't take it personally. It's not an affront. It is a triumph. People are incredible. I salute Megaword, and fasteddieb, and RussDNails, and estive, and Scheffek, and all the rest of you incredible players. Once there was a day when I could have surpassed you all, or so I believe. Enjoy what you do while you can do it. And if I am wrong, I mean no insult. That is serious truth, and please believe it.

[Estive]

The more you play, the more words you learn. Especially words that are anagrams. You will tend to type them all upon seeing it and hence type >1 word per second just by intuition. It's really assuming you have a decent typing speed or swiping or mousing. Fasteddieb and Megaword are miles ahead because they recognise more and longer words in my opinion. I hit a standstill in terms of picking up from the board. Still takes me a while to sit back and see before I can really spot the big words.

[Estive]

I can usually memorise the 4x4 board and type without looking at it. It's really just putting the letters together that's the hard part. I am sure you will get better in time Freebird, but nothing's really impossible or rather the current top-tiered players, what they are doing is not impossible. The cheaters on the other hand are always rather obvious.

[freebird]

This is not bragging. It is fact. When I was a young lad, there was a class in school called "personal typing", and the modest goal was a rate of 25 words per minute at the end of a semester. Kids who were planning on going to college often took the class because typing was thought to be a valuable skill. 25 words per minute would earn you a grade of "A" in the class. I am a very competitive person and was FAR more so when I was young. (I will skip the many stories.) Of COURSE I tried to set records. In that class, I did timed typing tests of 54 words per minute with my left hand only, and my right hand behind my back; 37 words a minute with my right hand only; and 104 words per minute with both hands. At that time, I did not touch-type and had to look at the keyboard. If I were 17 years old again, I am certain I would be typing far more words than now. I would see more words, too. As I become older, I am confronted with the fact that my brain is not as fast or as flexible, my fingers not as supple or as accurate, and my memory not as reliable or as quick. But I can assure you all of one thing of which I am very certain: do not EVER say "no one can do that". If it is physically possible to do it, someone will. Don't take it personally. It's not an affront. It is a triumph. People are incredible. I salute Megaword, and fasteddieb, and RussDNails, and estive, and Scheffek, and all the rest of you incredible players. Once there was a day when I could have surpassed you all, or so I believe. Enjoy what you do while you can do it. And if I am wrong, I mean no insult. That is serious truth, and please believe it.

BTW - I also took a typing class in high school - it was called "keyboarding." To me it sounded like a music class! Anyhow, I don't doubt that people can type very quickly - I actually can type pretty fast without looking at the keyboard. It is easy when you are simply typing text that is laid out in front of you. However, when you add the difficulty of searching for words, typing them in correctly, maybe making a mistake, and also the added time for typing longer words, I am amazed that I see people on here with over 100 words in the 2 minute time frame. Maybe the ones with the high numbers are swiping instead of typing? Is swiping faster than typing? I'm new at this online game, although I used to play a lot of Boggle and did pretty well.

[freebird]

I can't type properly because I never learned how. I'm pretty good at typing with the four fingers of my right hand only, but I have to look down at the keyboard quite often while I type. This is fine for emails and messages and things, but not fast enough for the game, so I swipe. My personal best is 121 words in 120 seconds, so just under a second per word. However, it would probably be more accurate to say that I find clusters of words even faster than that, and spend several seconds searching for new combinations without swiping. If I find a well-known cluster of letters like A E T S in a square, maybe with an R and an L next to it, it will take me like 5 seconds to enter 10-12 words.

For me personally, swiping is the faster method, but I know that really good typists don't have to look at their fingers while typing, and they can keep looking at the board while typing quickly. I assume the more experienced players can rely on muscle memory for the most common combinations such as the one I cited, so they can type five or six words without thinking while looking for the next combination on the board, eliminating pauses and constantly typing.

It also really shouldn't take you two seconds to type a three letter word. If it does, you should either practise typing or try swiping instead to improve your score.

Thank you for your tip - maybe I'll put the game on my phone and see if swiping helps. I'm pretty good at finding many words in a cluster of letters.

I can type quickly without looking at the keyboard. It doesn't take me 2 seconds to type a 3 letter word - I didn't time myself so I was guessing how long it takes to type words in general. I was just throwing out a number -words with more letters will take longer to type than a shorter word.

[lalatan]

Can somebody explain how someone can get 128 words in 120 seconds? Nobody can type that quickly.

freebird, you are one of a long line of skeptics who posted on this forum that there's cheating going on when people achieve big scores etc. (I think everyone was skeptical to some degree when we first started playing here.) The person who started this thread was the one before you. He even created a username just for the occasion. I encourage you to read through the thread and watch the videos to be better informed about the game play happening on this website.

https://forum.puzzlebaron.com/forum/...me?view=thread

My bad, I thought MegaWord's videos had a link there but it was in another thread where davidlamb12 was kind enough to post it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf9H...B5rK9F-eIJwQTY

[freebird]

freebird, you are one of a long line of skeptics who posted on this forum that there's cheating going on when people achieve big scores etc. (I think everyone was skeptical to some degree when we first started playing here.) The person who started this thread was the one before you. He even created a username just for the occasion. I encourage you to read through the thread and watch the videos to be better informed about the game play happening on this website.

https://forum.puzzlebaron.com/forum/...me?view=thread

My bad, I thought MegaWord's videos had a link there but it was in another thread where davidlamb12 was kind enough to post it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf9H...B5rK9F-eIJwQTY

No, not saying there is cheating. I was wondering how people can get so many words so quickly. I guess I need more practice.

[Estive]

No, not saying there is cheating. I was wondering how people can get so many words so quickly. I guess I need more practice.

Well saying typing 128 words in 120 seconds is not possible kind of implies that. Typing is probably the best method for words per minute compared to swiping or mousing. But yes practice will help improve your scores

[Naboka]

No, not saying there is cheating. I was wondering how people can get so many words so quickly. I guess I need more practice.

Practice is only part of the equation. Crazykate alluded to one of the easiest ways to increase your speed and score. It's called chunking. If you see s, e, r, you automatically know to type ser, res, era. S, a, r provide sar, ras, ars. You don't have to think about these chunked words, you just quickly type them. E, a, s provide sea, eas, sae. If you found all four letters s, e, a, r you'd add ear, ears, are, ares, era, eras, sera, sear, arse, rase (and maybe more I'm not aware of) which provide 17 words instantly that can be typed in seconds.

Other combos follow these. Like finding l, i or c to add to sera to make seral, serai and serac. Boysmom taught me that one and I've found them a lot.

If you had an extra e you could make seare. There are bunches of ear words that adding an e give you about 8 points a word. You'll find steare frequently. Deare, heare, feare and others. I'm not certain which are valid, but the pattern will give you quick words and points.

You want to learn anagrams such as wake, weka and weak. Add an s and you've doubled your words and gotten tons of points.

Since I'm mediocre, I'm still puzzling through the 3 and 4 letter anagrams, but the really good players will have chunked 5, 6 letters and more with all the possible word combinations. They don't have to "find the words" because they already know those words exist in those letter combinations.

Seeing a, k, e automatically leads to ake, kae, kea and all the bake, cake, make, makes, mak, maks, tak, taks, take, takes, bakes, baked, baking, baker, bakers possibilities.

You want to study word elements. Roots, prefixes, suffixes. If you add re to words you can pile up points. See becomes resee, resees, reseeing, and so on. Lots of points.

There are certain letter patterns that can provide a lot of words: ele can give you sele, tele, pele, dele, hele, vele, stele, doubled by adding an s. You'll find ene, eme and ere help form several worlds.

The more patterns you find and chunk, the quicker you become.

My wife, who's a far better typist and far faster reader can't approach my scores because she says I use, "fake words." Getting up to mid-range decent at word twist requires learning a lot of "fake words" and how they pattern and chunk.

[Giovanni6]

I just played a board where I got 565 and I thought I'd done pretty well. Megaword got 1355 on the same board. But it was more than 1/3 this time, at least.

[DonGuy47]

Typing 50 words per minute is not fast at all! Brief internet search says that lots of jobs require 60, and some require 100 wpm. And I'll bet those numbers were much higher back when typing was considered a critical skill for everyone. The world records, in various categories, are all over 200 wpm. There must be millions of people who can manage 100!

Back when I practiced typing specifically to improve my Boggle scores, I got up to around 80 wpm, and there were still plenty of people CRUSHING me at online Boggle.

[MegaWord]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOU-91V2G7M

This good, some games this month on 5x5.

[RussDNails]

Nice work............I'll likely never achieve what you do but I wish I could get a little closer to at least be able to push you a little bit! I'm a decent typist with a fairly strong vocabulary but my Achilles heel is that I simply cannot train my brain to see words that start with vowels. When I come across a board you've scored 1200-1500 I usually get 900-1000 and when I look at your word list you typically have 50-60 more words than I do and 90% start with vowels. Plus I usually know most all of these words but just don't see them. If I could somehow train myself to see the words that start with vowels I'm sure I could rapidly increase both my average and number of words per game. If you want some real competition, tell me how to reprogram my brain to see words that start with vowels