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Comment by farmerstan | Hacker News Reader

When you see a combination with a bunch of possible letters, you have to try to eliminate the letters instead of going for the win. Lots of people keep going for the win and losing when they could have eliminated a bunch of possibilities with a completely different search.

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Often it's more helpful to use one guess you know will not match, just to eliminate or split numerous cases at once. If trapped with _IGHT which could start with many letters, a guess like FARM would reduce your guesses in a single move.

This also helps avoid or escape focus on an expected pattern that may be wrong (premature convergence.)

Bight, eight, fight, light, might, night, right, sight, tight, wight.

By letter frequency I think rents/stern/terns are good guesses. I don't think there's any two words cover 9 of the 10 initial letters in two guesses.

Blent and frents/strew/terms/wefts/wrest cover 8.

It can be hard to realize that's the case though. (_IGHT is pretty obvious of course.) And if you can only hit 2 or 3 letters it can be somewhat of a gamble vs. just going for a valid answer. (Of course if there are a ton of options you may be in a tough position anyway.)

Or they are playing I hard mode which forces this style of guessing.

Hard mode doesn't change the optimal strategy much. It just makes a small fraction of words "insta-lose" because if play one and get unlucky, you'll have to switch to eliminating one letter at a time and probably run out of turns before you've covered all possibilities.

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