Wordle Strategy Redux

Posted byKendall DunkelbergPosted inUncategorizedTags:, , , , ,

Today’s Wordle threatened to break my 81 game streak, but I paused for a moment, used strategy, and defeated the deceptively simple game.

Without giving away the word, I can say that I got four correct letters on my first try, made a good guess and got them all in the right place, guessed another good word and didn’t get that pesky fifth letter. That’s when I stopped guessing the word, as you can see by my results.

Wordle 1,052 6/6

🟨🟨🟨⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩
⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

With onlhy three more guesses, I realized that I should see how many other possibilities there might be. I quickly found at least six words that used letters I hadn’t already used in the blank space. Unless I guessed the right one in three tries, I would lose. So I chose three of those letters (all consonants) and made a word with them. None of those letter were right, so I tried again with the remaining letters. As you can see, one of those letters matched, so I could fill in the word with my last guess.

I’ve found that you lose when you keep guessing the word and there are too many possible words. This happens more often if you guess a lot of letters correctly in your first tries because then you’re reusing those letters whenever you try to guess the word.

I should have stopped after my second guess when I had all the letters I needed in the right place. The urge to guess the word right in the fewest number of tries lured me into guessing the whole word again. I should have tried different letters at that point, and I might have guessed the right one sooner or at least had a better chance of not running out of guesses. Fortunately, my better instincts kicked in soon enough, and I did give myself enough guesses to make it through the possible letters that could be the right one.

If I hadn’t gotten it on my fifth try, then maybe there would have only been one possible letter that I hadn’t tried, or if there were two, I would have had 50/50 odds. By that point, I was running out of consonants that I hadn’t used, so I knew that if I could guess six in two tries I ought to know which one I needed to use on my last try. And that’s how I saved my streak.

Is there a lesson here beyond how to play a silly game? Sure. It’s not always best to try to risk it all for immediate success, even when success seems immanent. Sometimes it’s best pause and consider all of your options. You might avoid making a costly mistake.

Published by Kendall Dunkelberg

I am a poet, translator, and professor of literature and creative writing at Mississippi University for Women, where I direct the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, the undergraduate concentration in creative writing, and the Eudora Welty Writers' Symposium. I am Chair of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy, and I have published four collections of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as a collection of translations of the Belgian poet Paul Snoek, Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus, and the textbook A Writer's Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing. I was born and raised in Osage, Iowa, and have lived for over thirty years in Columbus, Mississippi, where my wife Kim and I let wildflowers grow in our yard to the delight of spring polinators and only some of our neighbors.

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