I ranked top 30 on typeracer at least once[1]. Here's one of the tricks: there's usually a countdown before each race starts, and anyone who cares about gaming the "words per minute" measurement will just paste the first word when the race begins.
Naturally, the other trick is to type really, really fast. This comes in handy when taking transcripts at events or meetings[2], but not often for anything else.
Woah, typing code at speed is incredibly difficult. I don't know if it picks languages randomly but it gave me Lisp just now, and... ack!
Unrelated, TypeRacer is amazing. We had a bunch of contests at my last job and they ended up making a trophy because I was the King of Speed. It was pretty fun. So, thank you!
I was fresh out of high school, and already doing small freelance web contracts for friends and family's businesses ... my first semi-technical job (other than the aforementioned contracts) was as a phone support person and I knew I was going to have to do a lot of typing; but I'd never been very good at touch typing. So I popped up notepad, and resolved to type everything that our trainer said for the week (or however long the training period was, I forget).
Best investment ever, considering this line of work :)
As others have mentioned, if you get above 100 WPM they make you do a captcha test to form your AREN'T scripting it, which I can't beat but it was a fun exercise none the less.
I don't think it will necessarily improve typing speed, but it is definitely a good test. I suggest you supplement Typeracer with a touch typing tutor app. My favorite is klavaro (http://klavaro.sourceforge.net/en/).
For what it's worth, I used type racer to learn to touchtype. Took me from about 25 wpm to about 65 wpm. I seem to have plateaued there though - I actually type at around 90, but with mistakes. The game doesn't seem like a good tool for shaking out the mistakes.
Another problem is that it doesn't teach you all the weird punctuation we use as programmers - I still look at my keyboard when typing code, which I don't have to do fit normal text...
Hm, I was able to get 104 and 111wpm, but I find the new UI to typeracer incredibly distracting. I have clocked in multiple times on multiple tests at 137wpm.
It's just very visually distracting for the words to disapper as I type them, and when I scored over 100wpm on a race, I had to take a 'test' to prove that I could do it, and on the test the UI was not all crazy, and I got 111wpm with some mistakes, including having to hit tab and enter to end the test.
Distractions are definitely a big part of what slows me down and often causes typos - it's like any time something changes on the screen, it causes an interrupt that consumes "CPU cycles". I've found that I can type the fastest if I read ahead, then close my eyes or look away while typing, and only look again when I'm almost done typing what I last read.
I actually find the >100wpm test much easier than the actual races, since the accuracy there doesn't have to be 100%, and there's no distracting changes on the screen except for the text I'm typing, so I just push myself to hit the right keys as fast as I can read the text without actually looking to see what I typed. In the actual races I usually score in the 130-150wpm range and my best is around 170, whereas in the test I get consistently 190-220 with 93-95% accuracy. On that test my bests are 188wpm with 100% accuracy, and 242wpm with 95% accuracy.
This was a typing test, where I again scored higher than in the race (I got 123), since the UI is wierd and I can't focus the text field before typing, it's hard to know how not to mess up.
I guess if you type 60wpm those details don't impact you as much.
I had one issue though. I managed to type 129wpm in one round (I normally type around 105-110, this particular paragraph was easy). It told me to be allowed to use this score I had to prove I could type 117wpm on an obfuscated (think captcha) document. I was not able to do that. It's a good idea, in theory. Maybe if I'd tried a few more times I could have gotten it up there.
I don't know if everyone has to, but my captcha document was from Alice in Wonderland or something, which already had some strange punctuation and capitalization, but the random black lines covered up some of the punctuation and I took too much time trying to figure out what they were rather than just skipping them and taking the accuracy hit.
The catpcha is fairly permissive at letting you make a lot of mistakes (i.e., don't go back and fix your mistakes, just keep typing). It feels weird at first letting yourself make mistakes like that, but you can probably type a lot faster if you don't worry about fixing typos.
You might find it surprising how much of a difference the keyboard can make, on my mechanical keyboards I'm consistently around 90 on my Ergonomic keyboards nearer 70.
I'll take the hit not to have the wrist pain though!.
Like the idea but the page and line layout is problematic. I think at a minimum the text areas should be larger and it should eat a whole line at a time instead of a single word. Somehow I completely lose my place every time I make a mistake.
Naturally, the other trick is to type really, really fast. This comes in handy when taking transcripts at events or meetings[2], but not often for anything else.
[1] http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/leaders.php
[2] http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/