Caveat: I am not to be confused with WordleGuru.  I am an average player.  My average “#of guesses required to solve a puzzle” score is pretty similar to that of New York Times’ WordleBot.

WordleGuru Grid

Wordle #434 (August 27, 2022)

Overall Summary

Today’s Wordle is relatively hard to solve.  The NYT WordleBot is giving it a score of 4.7

Guesses

Today’s word shows the power of the WordleGuru triads. Today I used the triad ALERT, SONIC and PUDGY.  This is my go-to triad*.
The first word (ALERT) did a good job in revealing two letters, one each of vowels and consonants.
Even though SONIC (2^nd word) didn’t reveal any letters, it worked like a magic, since it was able to eliminate five letters (2 vowels and 3 consonants). These five letters are in the top 10, frequency wise.
After the second guess, there were about 25 possible solutions. In the 25 possible words, there were 10 consonants (G, D, M, F, V, B, W, H, J, and P) and two vowels (U and Y). It’s obvious that no single word can include all these letters. So, the goal was to find a word that had five of these letters (mix of vowels and consonants).

The ALERT/SONIC/PUDGY triad includes the top 15 letters of the alphabet, frequency wise. About 75% of the Wordle words include 2 or 3 vowels (counting Y as the 6^th vowel), frequency wise.  Therefore, it was important that the 3^rd guess include either of U or Y or both. Since PUDGY met the criterion, it became a strong candidate as the first elimination word. That’s exactly what we ended up using.  PUDGY eliminated every possibility but one – the answer (RUDER).   Voila!

Today we demonstrated the power of the triads and the EnotE (Eliminate not Enumerate) strategy.

Wordle is a game of luck and skill.  One alone does not work most of the time.  The same fact was in full view once again today.   Coming up with the triad and using all three words in the triad, reflects my skill.  But luck also had a major role to play.

Close look with the help of the WordleGuru Microscope
Today’s word (RUDER) doesn’t reflect a common construct. I don’t remember ever seeing a comparative form of an adjective used as the word of the day. This along with duplicated R’s make this a difficult Wordle to solve.

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