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 #447 September 9, 2022

Overall Summary: A “middle of the road” puzzle in terms of difficulty. The New York Times’ WordleBot gave it a rating of 3.8. Marc McLaren’s blog* says that the average of all the puzzles thus far is 4.1. So, in that sense today’s puzzle is a bit easier than the average one.

Structure: Structure wise this word is fairly typical. It has two vowels (even though they are duplicated E’s), and a compound consonant (TH). The letter E is the most frequent letter in the fifth position.

Quality and the impact of the first two words:   I used my standard go-to seed word (ALERT). It revealed two letters, one in the right position (E). So, it was a decent start. Instead of entering the second word from the triad COINS (ALERT/ COINS/ PUDGY) as the second guess, I decided to look for all possible solutions as a result of the learnings from the seed word. I came up with only seven possibilities. These are STEED, STEEP, TEENY, TEETH, THEME, THESE and TWEEN. I felt I had a decent opportunity to use the EnotE (eliminate-not-enumerate) strategy.

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

The elimination word I chose is NYMPH. Actually, NYMPH is the third word in several of the triads that I have defined (example SOARE/CULTI/NYMPH). NYMPH did the job!  It revealed the presence of the letters H and M. So now I had four letters identified, i.e., E, T, H and M. There is only one word in the list of seven possibilities that meets the Wordle rules. The target word happens to be THEME.

A new Lesson Learned:  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 the 3 letters had the capability of ruling out all but 7 possibilities!

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.

Final Thoughts: I am amazed at the prowess of my favorite seed word (ALERT).  Today, it narrowed the possibilities to mere 7 words! WOW!  From here on, I will deploy the “how to save one guess” strategy, wherever possible.

© 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