Wordle Bulletin – Wordle #440 (September 2, 2022)
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.
WordleGuru Grid
Wordle #440; September 2, 2022
Overall Summary
I performed better than I have been during the last 5-7 days. I have designated September as the “go with gut feeling” month, instead of always relying religiously to frequencies and analytics. Today’s Wordle puzzle scored a 3.6 on the NYT’s WordleBot.
1st and 2nd Guesses
The first guess was from my go to triad of ALERT/SONIC/PUDGY. ALERT revealed the presence of one vowel – A (not in the exact position) and one consonant – R (in the 4th position). Since the odds of having a single vowel are only 1 out of 4, I needed to search for additional vowels. I reverted to the second word in the ALERT triad, i.e., SONIC. SONIC revealed the presence of only one letter C, but not in the exact position.
After the second guess there were three possible answers – CARRY, CHARM, and CHARD. If I wanted to play safe and use my “eliminate-not-enumerate” strategy I could use either CHARM or CHARD as the elimination word. Either would have eliminated the remaining two.
3rd Guess
My goal was to use one of the three possible words as the elimination word for the third guess. This gives a chance to solve the puzzle in 3 guesses. CARRY would not have eliminated CHARM or CHARD, leaving me in a “enumerate” hell. Either CHARM or CHARD would have eliminated the other.
I could still play CARRY as the third guess, if I was “sure” that this move would have a higher chance of success. Y in the 5th position is the third most frequent letter after E and T. CHARM and CHARD on the other hand have two sets of compound consonants (CH, RM/RD). About 60% of the Wordle words include either one set or two sets of compound consonants. CARRY has two R’s side by side (duplicate). Frequency of duplicated consonants is lower than the frequency of compound consonants, so I was pretty “sure” the answer is either CHARM or CHARD.
Clearly, I had no idea what the WordleGod had in mind! Both CHARM and CHARD would have served the purpose of an elimination word. Now I had a decide between CHARM and CHART. From a frequency perspective, I should have picked CHARD, but my gut feel led me to pick CHARM. Since September is the month of going with my gutfeel, I picked CHARM and lucked out, hereby confirming once again that Wordle is a game of luck and skill.
Final Words
It was my lucky day. I was due for one, after the pathetic performance during the last few days.
Thank you WordleGod. 🙂
© 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