wordle solv

When I first got into Wordle, I remember discussions about what is a good starting word, and I would usually opt for something like:

   STARE

Then, when I discovered https://squabble.me (which implements a competitive Wordle with "battle royale" dynamics) I decided that spending time thinking of the optimal follow-up word was costing me too much HP, so I found a pair of starting words:

   YOUTH ARISE

which gave me coverage of all the vowels (including Y) and some other common letters.

After gaining more experience with this setup, I looked at letter frequency charts, and used an anagram solver to find a trio of starting words:

   THUMP SOLID CRANE

which was enough of an advantage that I was able to win a good percentage of Squabble games.

Today, though, I checked a replay of a game where I came second, and discovered that someone had taken this strat to the next level, since they were consistently starting with the four guesses:

   DUCKY FORTH WINGS MAPLE

This seems riskier, as you only give yourself a single "spare" guess in which to try finding the locations of some of the letters you've already found, and I have often been in situations where I needed to brute force the final guess even if I have most of the letters in the right place, because a pattern like -ARN- (in green) didn't bring the word "varna" to mind, for example.

Anyway, I'll have to now try both that four word opening and this newly found five word opening:

   CHUMP DRIFT GLOBE SNAKY LATER

and see which is quicker: finding the missing information myself with an extra guess (and brute forcing plausible looking words), or solving the word directly from the minimally required information available.