Just finding the highest scoring word won’t make you all that good. If you played the highest scoring play available to you each turn you wouldn’t be that strong of a player. Maybe around top 200-500 or so in the US I would guess? And it’d be a super exploitable strategy by a decent player.

The reason is that you need to apply some rules, like when to trade vs. making a play, balancing consonants and vowels for future plays, what parts of the board are too dangerous to make certain plays in, etc. It’s because of the distribution of unplayed tiles, the high-scoring spots on the board, and the 50-point bonus for using all of your tiles.

Because of that, generally, you’ll do better by building towards a 50-point bonus play every 3 or 4 turns than by maxing your score on each turn.

I’d be curious about letting a human player play with the assistance of the best bot available and seeing how much better that would make them. I guess part of the issue though is that in a 13 play game maybe 3 plays are meaningfully difficult. So it’d take awhile to see if the human is improving on the bot or not.