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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

What has been driving me a little nuts about it is the amount of luck involved with getting the word in a few tries. I can reliably get the word in 4 tries give or take. But when you hit something equivalent to *AR you can guess BAR, CAR, PAR, MAR, TAR, JAR, FAR, etc. The number of times I got 4 out of 5 letters on the second try just to finally get the word on the 5th or 6th try feels like I am cheated of a victory.

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You could use one guess of BCP to gain more information. That'd eliminate 3-4 out of 7 words in your example with the tradeoffs that you won't win with that guess in particular, but it's better on average

I agree that choosing a word that contains as many high frequency letters as possible to eliminate them is a good strategy.

Side note on P, B and C: in terms of five letter words, there are vanishingly few; maybe two or three? PUBIC is the only obvious one.

Pretty inevitable, though; there are some letter groups in english that make that unavoidable.

I use this (the second table).

https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfr...

I memorised STARE/TASER, UNLID, CHOMP (all the letters with more than 3% incidence, in a word order with a good letter distribution close enough to the statistical one, and some useful letter groups) and the remaining significant ones(GBFYWKV) and work with that.

If I get a green from the first word I assemble a new word from the letters of the other two; this strategy has seen me guess it in two or three a bit more often.

This may be obvious but in your scenario where there are lots of permutations, it's worth considering that you can solve words two ways -- first by thinking of a word that fits the shape available, and second by carefully thinking of the words with the highest frequency unused letters in all available slots (if there are two or three remaining letters, a guess that is likely to provide you two yellows is vastly better than a guess that will provide you one green).

If you use a three word opening gambit (which you can't do in 'hard' mode) then you'll regularly guess it in four or five, anyway. I strongly suspect that four is the most common number of guesses for good players.

I keep in mind that OTHER NAILS contains the most common letters, but I play in hard mode and don't use either of those as a start word. My second guesses onwards are made up of clues shown and letters from those two words.

I don't understand the fun in playing easy mode and laying down words just to eliminate letters. I see a lot of people saying that it guarantees them a win in 4 moves, but once I adopted the above strategy I regularly started getting 2s and 3s. Four for me seems just ok, no big deal. At five I start making excuses/blaming the injustices of the game.

... and today I got a 5, so I will be signing the NYT petition, plus my elbow hurts /s

I typically start with READY or STEAD or STEAM. NAILS is a good one!

I don't play in hard mode, still -- I enjoy the flexibility of solving it both ways.

But I do use a start word and as a rule I will try to reuse all the placed letters if I get a single green.

Mind you, I keep frustrating myself because the redirect from powerlanguage.co.uk to the nytimes.com domain is in my browser history and if you accidentally use it again it destroys your stats. Which is fine today of course because I tried to solve it at 5am and didn't get it ;-) but still.

Eventually I will lose interest. Not sure when. A friend of mine pointed me at Sedecordle and I was like, no, not getting into that, and then there I am, addicted to it.

I started playing an Wordle-like app to get around the one-per-day limitation (I know, sue me), and played probably dozens of rounds per day. I ended up with a simple strategy of always starting with the same 3 words: LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES which cover all the vowels (and y) and put an S at the end where it's most likely to be found. Generally I can "waste" the first 3 guesses on those words and still find the solution.

Then one day, I typed LAUGH and got 5 greens on the first line! Had to happen eventually, but still...

LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES is good -- but no C/P/M/N which are all much more frequent than G/J/K/Y.

In my experience, Y is rarely difficult to place; it's almost always obvious when you're going to need it.

And you rarely need to think about J at all -- like with Q and Z, it's usually obvious when you need it. (Not many five letter english words have J anywhere apart from the first letter, and the few that do mostly have it in the second, like EJECT, or uncommonly the third, like MAJOR, though it might be more common in loanwords like BIJOU I guess).

> no C/P/M/N which are all much more frequent than G/J/K/Y

Yep, I sometimes follow up with MANIC or PANIC if I've got too few letters, to test for C/P/M/N

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