Caveat: I am not to be confused with WordleGuru.  I am under my guru’s tutelage.
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.

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Wordle #448; September 10, 2022

Overall Summary: A “middle of the road” puzzle in terms of difficulty. The New York Times’ WordleBot gave it a rating of 4.2, indicating it is just slightly above the average rating of 4.1 (per Marc McLaren) ^*.  In my case, today’s Wordle is an example of a missed opportunity. I could have solved this puzzle in two guesses. 🙁  I will comment on why I think so later in the bulletin.

Structure: Structure wise this word is fairly typical. It has two vowels (counting Y as a vowel) and a compound consonant (FT). The letter O is the most frequent letter in the second position.

Strategy Tweak: I have now modified the implementation of the EnotE (Eliminate not Enumerate) strategy to look for an elimination word starting with the second guess, not third guess, provided the seed word reveals two letters, regardless of which position they are in.

Quality and the impact of the seed word:   I started with my go-to seed word – ALERT. It revealed two letters L and T, though not their exact positions. Similar to yesterday, right after the seed word, I searched for possible answers. There were 10 possible answers (excluding the plurals that end in an S; Wordle does not use such words as target words). The 10 words are CULTY, FILTH, HOTLY, LOFTY, LOTUS, LUSTY, MULTI, STILL, STOOL, and UNTIL.

Eliminate-not-Enumerate strategy: I had to come up with an elimination word that would eliminate nine of the ten possibilities and leave me with the answer. I wasn’t sure whether the elimination word I selected would work for all the ten possibilities. Though I was quite sure it would work in most of the cases, so I proceeded.

The elimination word I chose is among the ten possible answers – LUSTY. It did the job!  It revealed the presence of an additional letter (Y in the right position) and confirmed the positions of the two previously revealed letters (L and T). So now I had three letters identified, i.e., L, T and Y in exact positions. There is only one word in the list of the ten possibilities that fits the mold. It happens to be LOFTY.

A Lesson Reinforced:  It is worthwhile to look at the list of possible words just after the seed word.  The revelation of 2 letters and the identification of the absence of 3 letters had the capability of ruling out all words but the 10 possible words.

The second word of the triad that I would have entered to follow the seed word (COINS) would not have revealed any additional letters for this particular puzzle. This meant that I would have had to use the third guess as the elimination word and then, hopefully, the target word as the fourth guess.

This is a powerful stuff.  I call it “how to save one guess” strategy.  Using the golf metaphor (to be explained separately), “how to save one stroke” and, hopefully, make a birdie (score of 3 for a par 4 hole)!  Since Marc McLaren* is reporting that the average WordleBot score of all the Wordles thus far is 4.1, we can say that Wordle is a par-4 course game (18 holes, typically 72 total score, or average hole score 4 (par 4).

Hindsight: I should have used LOFTY as the elimination word not LUSTY, since O is the most frequent letter in the second position, whereas the letter U is way down in the list at the 8th spot. I could have solved this puzzle in two guesses (an eagle in golf). I have to remember this element of the strategy going forward in order to keep my score low.

Final Thoughts: I continue to be amazed at the prowess of my favorite seed word (ALERT).  It narrowed the possibilities to mere 10 words! WOW!  From here on, I will deploy the “how to save one guess (save one stroke, in golf parlance)” strategy, wherever possible. 

I missed an opportunity to solve it in 2 guesses due to not being thorough in the search for the ideal elimination word. The fact that I was able to select one of the possible words as the elimination word attests to the potential of the EnotE (eliminate not enumerate) strategy.

© 2022 Ashok Gupta All rights reserved.
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