There’s virtually no strategy, but tactics is of paramount importance. Things like keeping your rack balanced; which one of several similarly-scoring words to play, based on your knowledge of the game state; when and what to exchange, etc. These factors are all at play very much intuitively, and are learnt with practice over the years.
Polish is especially fun to play because it’s highly inflected, meaning that:
- the number of unique words in the dictionary is about one order of magnitude greater than in, say, English or French – it’d be much harder for Nigel Richards to learn them all;
- keeping an eye on certain combinations of letters (that might form an inflective ending) is much more important.
Plus, there’s a small but vibrant community, with its very own history and folklore to be proud of. :)
[0] I don't know how much better - but Maven was considered better than the best humans in 2002, and in most such pursuits, machines have improved faster than humans since then https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437020...
It's a very different game to "family" Scrabble, but we always had the etiquette rule that you should know the definition of a word you played. It isn't enough to know it's in the Scrabble dictionary.
The way we played Quake was by taking hundreds of user made maps and playing them one by one untill they got stale.
It's completely different way of playing than what modern games do. Basically learning just a handful of maps by heart up to specific timings, sound and few pixel spots.
Basically rigidifying naturally variable parts of the game to make it more boring and repetitive for the sake of creating controlled conditions of competition.