Target Word: VALID
Typical Wordle Word Construct: 2 Vowels and one or more compound consonants (seen with >50% frequency)
Today’s Wordle Word Construct: A-Typical; 2 vowels (A and I); no compound consonant
# Of Guesses: 3.8 WordleBot average per Marc McLaren*; 4 for WordleGuru

Seed Word: TRACE
Seed Word Revelations: “A” but not its correct place
# Of Possible Solutions after the Seed Word: Too many to count!

Second Word: SOUPY
Primary Objective for the 2^nd word: Since most of Wordle words have 2 or more vowels, test for additional vowel(s) (among O, U and Y) and 2 high frequency consonants (in this case S and P)
Revelations from the 2^nd word: None. ☹
# Of Possible Solutions after the Second Word:>25

Third Word: BLING required thinking; the word had to eliminate as many candidates as possible.  Wanted the word to include the remaining vowel (I)
Revelations from the 3^rd word: One consonant (L), one vowel (I), but not their exact positions.
# Of Possible Solutions after the 3^rd word: BLING did the job very well by eliminating all but 5 words – ANVIL, FINAL, LANAI, VALID, and VILLA.

EnotE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: It was an easy deployment since we were dealing with only 5 possibilities.  Still, the choice of potential elimination word required some thinking.

My preference always is to select one of the possibilities as the elimination word, if possible. This yields an opportunity to solve the puzzle at this stage itself.

In this case it was possible.  VALID would have eliminated the remaining 4 words.  I was mentally prepared for having to enter the target word as my 5^th guess. To my utter and pleasant surprise, VAILID turned out to be the target word. 😊

Final thoughts: It was my lucky day.  Clearly Lady luck was on my side and Wordle God saved me from having to deal with orthographic neighbors.  After yesterday’s debacle, order got restored!

© 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