Target Word: TRICE
Typical Wordle Word Construct: 2 Vowels and one or more compound consonants (seen with >50% frequency)
Today’s Wordle Word Construct: Typical; 2 vowels and 1 compound consonant (TR)
Difficulty:
– “A potentially difficult one, although not as bad as some we’ve had recently” per Marc McLaren*
– “Slightly difficult due to the presence of orthographic neighbor words” per WordleGuru
# Of Guesses:
– 4.2 per New York Times’ WordleBot*
– 4 for WordleGuru
Average Guesses introduction-to-date for the WordleBot* community:  4.1
Average Guesses Jan ’22-to-date for WordleGuru: 3.75 (aspirational goal is 3.5)

Seed Word & the triad: SALET (SALET/RHINO/PUDGY)
Seed Word Revelations: 1 vowel (E), 1 consonant (T); but not in exact positions
# Of Possible Solutions After the Seed Word: >25.
Second Word: OPIUM; the best option containing three vowels (I, O, U) and 2 high frequency consonants
Objectives for the 2^nd word: Reveal vowels (I, O, U) and consonants (P, M)
Revelations from the 2^nd word: One vowel (I) in the exact position (3^rd)
# Of Possible Solutions After the 2^nd Word:
Just 10 – but potentially 4 sets of orthographic neighbors. The first set includes. TRIBE, TRICE, TRINE, TRITE. The other sets could be TWICE/TWINE, or THINE/WHINE, or THINE/TRINE or WHITE/WHINE, or WHITE/WRITE.
The one by itself is DEITY.

EOE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment:
I prefer to pick one of the possible answers as the elimination word, if viable, since it gives a chance to solve the puzzle right then and there. I was not able to do that today. After a lot of deliberation, I settled on CROWN as the elimination word. It may not be able to eliminate all but one, but it should come close. And it did. CROWN revealed two letters (C and R to go with the three letters revealed by the seed word and the second word E, T and I).  There was only one valid word – TRICE.

Hindsight:
The second word of the triad (RHINO) instead of OPIUM would have revealed R and I to go with E and T revealed by the seed word.  The puzzle could have been solved in the 3^rd guess.

Lesson Learned /Relearned:  Follow the strategy; don’t dilly dally!
Gut feel answer:  none
Final thoughts: Successfully avoided the temptation of falling into the enumeration hell.
Golf Speak: “Par” for me; More “pars “(4 guesses) and a few “bogies” (5 guesses) for the WordleBot community.

© 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.