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My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

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Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#91

Post by skhm »

taberiand wrote: post #83
archi42 wrote: post #77

Obviously anyone can play however they like and how they enjoy the game. But I feel like this "enter three optimized words and win" is too easy. So instead I go with hard mode, and have to think some more. I still start with the same word every time, but from there on most parts vary. I also allow myself to fall back to normal mode if finding the word depends on pure luck (e.g. _ATCH). Bonus: If you and your friends…

My strategy on hard mode is to start with words containing uncommon letters, using new starting words each time to keep it fun. That way I find the "*atch" problem is reduced because (hopefully) the number of possible options has already been narrowed down. My histogram is mostly 4's, with 2 losses in around 100 games, so I think I'm doing something right.

exact same strat, exactly 2 losses in 100 games, gave up at 100. two anecdata is data, right?

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#92

Post by BLKNSLVR »

donarb wrote: post #31

My strategy is to never use the same start word, I like using a random word each time as that changes the path to solving. I might pick a random word from another open browser window, maybe from a news article or something like that. If I get stuck after the second or third try, I'll pick another random word, even if it contains a few discarded letters in order to ferret out 1 or 2 more valid letters. For me, the bes…

Another vote for this strategy to keep the game interesting.

Putting the same words in at the start got boring after the third game, and the first word dictates the on-the-fly logic to select the next, and so on.

It all comes down to how you want to play. Using maths optimises "winning", but not using maths challenges ones situational intellect. I prefer the latter.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#93

Post by dredmorbius »

ghaff wrote: post #90
dredmorbius wrote: post #88

I've settled on the following word list to determine if 20 of 26 characters are present within 4 guesses: thank fuels crowd gimpy If there are fewer than 5 letters present, "bevvy" will eliminate another two ('b' and 'v'), leaving j, q, x, and z as the remaining possible characters. These occur rarely (though "pizza", "bijou", and "vixen" can be challenging targets. More usually, it's words with either doubled charac…

The thing is that this doesn't help you with double letters, still leaves out some less common letters, and leaves you with very little margin for error at that point. On Octordle, 4 words seem easiest although it makes the game more of an anagram solving exercise and in my limited experience didn't give me much of a consistent score advantage vs. three.

I've used that strategy on 100s of standard Wordle games to good effect. It's not perfect, but it solves ~98-99% of all games attempted.

(That stat comes from one of the multi-play Wordle imitations which does in fact track success rates.)

I don't recall mean attempts, though I believe it's still between 3-4 tries.

Once most characters are tested, it's usually pretty clear what the actual word is, and some familiarity with the actual wordlist (which I picked up merely by playing the game, not by examining source), the harder cases also become pretty obvious.

Doubled letters and anagrams are the most difficult cases.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#94

Post by BLKNSLVR »

slyall wrote: post #89

I start with REAIS and YOUTH. But I don't think it is a good idea for the average person to have too many set words. Unless you have great knowledge of the dictionary of legal words you might need extra clues to word order etc. ie I recently got a game with a letter repeated 3 times.

Got RENEE last night. I just threw it in because nothing else was making sense with the letters we had available.

I like AUDIO and PIOUS as vowel removers depending on what's already in and out. FRUIT has also served me well.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#95

Post by BLKNSLVR »

lostlogin wrote: post #61
kcartlidge wrote: post #58

Opinions vary based on the input text, but the English letter frequency list I use starts ETAONRISH in descending frequency. Based on that, coupled with a little bit of insight on English words (as opposed to random collections of 5 letters) I've ended up with ALIEN, STORM, CHUMP as my regular first 3. Sometimes I deviate if the earlier rows offer insight, and sometimes I swap the first 2 based on a whim. And unless…

A lot of the suggested methods are doing what was suggested to me, but indirectly. Guess all the vowels early. TRADE and PIOUS is how I usually do it, but ALIEN may be a better starter.

+1 for PIOUS, and don't sleep on AUDIO.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#97

Post by BLKNSLVR »

AnonC wrote: post #41

I thought it was in that linked video or somewhere that I found a list of starting words to try to make it easier to solve it based on letter frequency and getting a few vowels in within the scope of the Wordle word list (not a dictionary list). These are the words I use: SOARE TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram) ADIEU By default my game play is like “hard mode” (only use letters already found to be correct and avo…

My wife and I don't care about the end result in those situations since the fun has been removed at that point. We just iterate through until we're right or have run through our chances.

On to the next game!

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#98

Post by ghaff »

bazzargh wrote: post #59
forinti wrote: post #53

I always start with SNAIL ROUTE. Those are the 10 most common letters in 5-letter words. Even if I get good hits with SNAIL, I enter ROUTE.

I hadn't seen anyone else use that pair when I suggested it in early Jan https://twitter.com/bazzargh/status/1477998502747779079 ... but I guess there aren't many choices with those letters and other people were bound to hit on those words! Seems quite popular now. For octordle/sedecordle I found that the 2 standard guesses wasn't enough to stop getting stuck, particularly it's missing Y for words that use that as a…

I don't regularly play octordle but came to the conclusion that you really want at least 3 start words. Otherwise, you start trying to solve with guesses that aren't globally optimum and run out of guesses.
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