EMD question

Hello,
Just a quick question about EMD's. My EMD for niche is taken for all TLD's but I remove the last letter eg. pools=pool will it affect my EMD or will it still help me rank with the plural keyword?

It will help but you can't take the advantage as exact match. Google is tending towards branding so exact match domain has more value

just a quick question - I found a great niche but the EMD is registered by a website company who just use it as a redirect to their business. Do you know if adding a word such as "site" or "online" after the keyword would work knowing that the EMD is not being used in competition again the search term?