Your presumption about serious Scrabble is actually very accurate. The actual words themselves don’t even matter that much. I practice anagramming during a lot

Your presumption about serious Scrabble is actually very accurate. The actual words themselves don’t even matter that much. I practice anagramming during a lot of my free time, to the point where seeing letters like EOHISTRE immediately (within less than half a second) brings up theories, theorise, isothere in my head. The game is largely about controlling the board, rough probability calculations, inferencing of your opponent’s tiles from their previous moves, etc etc. There’s a lot to it. It hasn’t even been seriously solved by a computer (the best AI does not beat the best player more than 50% of the time).