If you've got your own methods that you don't want to reveal thats fine, don't think I've made this thread to try and coax you into revealing them. On the other hand, if you feel like sharing things you thing people might find useful, then please do
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_e_biggrin.gif)
I'm currently doing a couple of things to try and improve my game, and its working a little bit, but I'm not really improving as quickly as I'd like to be.
Letters
The main thing i use is stems, for this I've made a sheet in excel that has one column with base words in it, another column with stemming letters in it, and then more columns with my attempts to recall the correct stems in them. Whenever I do this, I hide the columns with the correct
"answers" in them so i can just see the base word and the letter, and then I'll type my response into the corresponding cell. When I've done as many as i can, I'll unhide the columns with the correct answers in them, and see how i did. If there are any which i couldnt recall, or got wrong, I'll overwrite the cell to contain the correct answer, but I'll make it bold and red to indicate that i got it wrong. I do this for words of length 6, 7 and 8, so that I'm learning how to spot lots of 7's, 8's, and 9's. Stemming the 6's isnt going that well, because sometimes i dont even spot that a potential stem is available, whereas with the 8's I will normally always spot if there is a potential stem, that I've covered.
Another thing i recently did with letters was to dig out the 5 or so most common 9's with the aid of statland, and note down any other possible 9's that can be obtained with the same set of consonants, but a set of vowels with one vowel different form the original set. I'm not sure weather this is useful at the moment, but if i find that it is, i might do it with more nines, and even some eights.
There's not really anything else Im doing at the moment, but I'd like to think of some other methods I could use. Of course, these are just methods of learning ways to spot high probability words, and what I use for putting it into practice is apterous, which is brilliant.
Numbers
Numbers attacks on apterous are the best thing for me. I also tried figuring out most of the stuff you can do with the four large numbers which will hopefully give me a significant edge in four large one day (I'm far from it now though). I also found a list of numbers you can get to by multiplying different combinations of 3 small numbers (someone posted it in another topic), but I've not really studied it yet. Hopefully that will come into use for 6 small. As for the other numbers choices, I've assumed that the skills will be a mixture of the stuff used for 6 small and 4 large.
Conundrums
Just conundrum attacks on apterous. I'd be interested to hear if anybody has anything else that they believe has improved their conundrums.
Dunno if this topic is useful, or if its in the right area. Punch me in the nads if its not.
Oh yeah, sorry Im a massive fuck up at writing anything more then 3 sentences long, most of the stuff above is probably so grammatically incorrect that it makes little sense.