Wordle Bulletin # 612 (February 21, 2023) — “Greed is bad; gutfeel works sometimes!”

By Ashok Gupta
on Feb 22, 2023
in Daily Bulletins, Eliminate-Not-Enumerate, Seed word, Strategy

Today’s Wordle:
Target Word: RUDDY
# Of Guesses: 4.2 WordleBot average per Marc McLaren*, 5 for WordleGuru. ☹

Typical or atypical target word? — Typical, since it contains 2 vowels (U and Y) and one pair of duplicated consonants (DD). The “norm” is 2 vowels and 1 compound/paired consonant.

Seed Word: ALERT – “go-to” seed word.
What we learned from the Seed Word: The seed word revealed 1 letter (R) without its position.

2^nd word: SONIC (the “go-to” 2^nd word); We struck out! 8 possibilities at this stage. Made assumptions about “how regular are these possibilities. It proved to be a bad move, costed at least one guess. ☹ Narrowed the list to just three – RUGBY, RUMMY, and MURKY. Time to deploy the EnotE© strategy.

3rd word: I prefer to use one of the possibilities as an elimination word if it makes sense. Based on the frequency data and position mix data, MURKY had the edge. It wasn’t the target word, but it eliminated RUMMY, leaving only RUGBY as the answer (so I thought). Incidentally, RUGBY was my gutfeel answer.

4th word: I confidently entered RUGBY as the 4^th word expecting it to be the target word. Disappointingly, it wasn’t. A word that I had discounted (RUDDY) was the target word.

Final thoughts: Wordle is a game of luck and skill. Sometimes luck favors the game and sometimes it favors the player. I played poorly today. In addition to making a wrong guess about some words not being used commonly, I got greedy at the 3^rd word stage. A better choice would have been the 3^rd word of the triad (ALERT/SONIC/PUDGY). PUDGY would have pointed to RUDDY as the only option. Pathetic performance. ☹☹☹☹☹

_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________

My strategy, statistical facts and 3-word triads can be found by clicking on the following URL:

My “Go-to” Word Triad (Seed, 2nd and 3rd words), Strategy & Statistical Facts Sections for the Daily Bulletins – Wordle Guru

© 2023 Ashok Gupta All rights reserved.
EnotE © (Eliminate not Enumerate) is copyrighted by Ashok Gupta
Wordle and WordleBot are trademarks owned by the New York Times.

*The WordleBot score I refer to comes from Tom’s Guide by Marc McLaren. Marc writes his post at around 7 AM U.K. time.
https: //www.tomsguide.com/news/what-is-todays-wordle-answer#section-previous-wordle-answers