While some people prefer to play the center, the most widely accepted method of doing well is to get your high-scoring cards in a corner and moving cards in that direction. This means most of your gameplay will only involve moving in two directions. With the highest-scored tile caught in the corner, it minimizes how much chasing you have to do to match it up. Besides, there aren’t going to be many cards to pair up with your top one, so a central, easily-accessible location is better served by lower-value cards. With other high-value cards drifting in the same direction, it’s easy for them to find their matches huddled around that corner.
It is always tempting to go for big matches without considering any other cards on the deck. This might get you the big match but after that, there might only be few options to combine. Very often, your high value cards will be close enough that doing few cleanups before bringing them together yields the best results.
You can preview the next move without actually moving by pressing shift and the arrow buttons. This is a great way to calculate your next combinations accurately. This is especially helpful when your board has both blockages and openings in weird places that make visualizing a move difficult.
Though a big part of the game is the luck of the draw (i.e. which card comes next), you can still plan accordingly. First off, new white cards on the board are always divisible by five. Count on them being a 5, sometimes a 10, and rarely something higher. Also remember that new cards arrive from the edge you’re swiping away from. For example, if you have a red 3 card coming up and two viable directions to swipe in, swipe away from the side that has a blue 2 card. With any luck, the new card will show up close enough to be paired in two swipes.