On Playing Wordle . . .

[JTB_5]

Does anyone else play with the rules set to require you to use found letters? I've been playing that way for awhile now. It is definitely more challenging.

 

[Richard338]

Does anyone else play with the rules set to require you to use found letters? I've been playing that way for awhile now. It is definitely more challenging.

I don't set it on hard mode but occasionally notice that I effectively followed it for that particular game. r8shell plays hard mode. You can see the asterisk where it lists the number of guesses. I think it can kill you occasionally if there are too many possibilities and you can't use an eliminator word.

 

[r8shell]

Yes, I just naturally played that way, before I knew there was a "hard mode" setting. I use it for both bragging rights when I do well and a handy excuse when I don't.

I average around 4 guesses.


Wordle 423 4/6*

 

[JTB_5]

Yes, I just naturally played that way, before I knew there was a "hard mode" setting. I use it for both bragging rights when I do well and a handy excuse when I don't.

I average around 4 guesses.


Wordle 423 4/6*

Yeah, when I first started I didn't know you didn't have to use the letters you found. Then I put it on hard mode just to keep myself from slipping. I enjoy the challenge, and it really doesn't bother me too much if I lose because there are more possibilities than I can guess.

 

[Richard338]

Wordle 424 3/6

 

[JTB_5]

Wordle 424 4/6*






Almost three.

 

[madcap_magician]

Wordle 424 4/6





Another thing I've found that was really kind of common sense was that if you care about your average number of guesses being lower, if you're stumped, it pays to leave it and come back. I was stuck on guess three for a while after I got up, so I went to the gym and did my morning devotions and then picked it up again an hour after I started work and it immediately came to me.

I'm going to start hard mode tomorrow, but I'm not convinced it's really a lot harder, since it really only removes the Hail Mary guesses to pick up a new letter.

 

[fishface5]

Crikey
Wordle 424 4/6

 

[sgt1372]

Does anyone else play with the rules set to require you to use found letters? I've been playing that way for awhile now. It is definitely more challenging.

I don't set the game to "hard mode" but I play it that way, unless I just can't come up w/a word in the next guess that uses all of the found letters, in which case I try to use as many "new" letters to increase the likelihood of revealing more.

 

[Richard338]

I don't set the game to "hard mode" but I play it that way, unless I just can't come up w/a word in the next guess that uses all of the found letters, in which case I try to use as many "new" letters to increase the likelihood of revealing more.

I believe that you use the same two seeds most or all of the time. That isn't consistent with my understanding of hard mode. If I understand hard mode, you would have to abandon your second seed and pursue the solution whenever you get at least one letter from your first guess.

 

[Richard338]

Wordle 424 4/6





Another thing I've found that was really kind of common sense was that if you care about your average number of guesses being lower, if you're stumped, it pays to leave it and come back. I was stuck on guess three for a while after I got up, so I went to the gym and did my morning devotions and then picked it up again an hour after I started work and it immediately came to me.

I'm going to start hard mode tomorrow, but I'm not convinced it's really a lot harder, since it really only removes the Hail Mary guesses to pick up a new letter.

In rare cases with a lot of possibilities, I use a completely unrelated word that incorporates as many of those letters as possible. You can't do that in hard mode and so you risk running out of guesses.

 

[sgt1372]

08/17/2022: Wordle 424 4/6






Almost got it in 3, again. Only 1
other choice after the 3rd guess.

Gotta change the way I pick letters off the
board -- top to bottom/left to rt -- which
seems to reduce my odds of scoring a
Birdie in these situations.

The current NYT average is 3.7. So, a pretty
easy puzzle for most.

08/16/2022: Wordle 423 4/6

Weirdly got all 5 letters w/the 3rd guess.
Easy enough to solve after that by just
transposing the 2 remaining letters.

The final NYT average was 4.0.

 

[sgt1372]

I believe that you use the same two seeds most or all of the time. That isn't consistent with my understanding of hard mode. If I understand hard mode, you would have to abandon your second seed and pursue the solution whenever you get at least one letter from your first guess.

I do it AFTER the 1st 2 words which almost always results in a solution in the next 2 guesses.

The 1st 2 guesses reveal all of the vowels and certain common consonants. The next 2 guesses allow me to focus on those remaining consonants that appear to "work" best w/the vowels/consonants revealed in the 1st 2 guesses focusing on likely letter placement and patterns to chose an answer while also taking into account the possibility of a double letter -- whether a vowel or a consonant. Beyond that, it's all luck.

Using this approach, I seldom score worse than Par and have never Failed to solve a puzzle in the past 219 games which is my current "streak" and I haven't scored a 6 since Jan/Feb (which I consider my "training" peroid) when I started playing the game.

I keep all of my results on a spreadsheet. My average score since January (for all 219 games since I started) is 3.68 and since March (after the training period) it's 3.57. These results mean that I consistently score more Pars than Birdies on average.

In comparison, WordleBot (the NYT's Wordle analylsis program) claims an average of 3.4 (more Birdies than Pars on average) but there's no way to verify the results that are claimed by WordleBot and when you look at the WordleBot solutions they often seem entirely out of left field which look like blind guesses to me.

So, I'm suspicious of this claim and only use WordleBot to assess my own approach as it compares w/the average of other players as reported by WordleBot.

 

[madcap_magician]

In rare cases with a lot of possibilities, I use a completely unrelated word that incorporates as many of those letters as possible. You can't do that in hard mode and so you risk running out of guesses.

Right but I'm just thinking that's pretty infrequent, and the only other situation is where I can't think of any word and just guess, and in those latter cases I'm trying to train myself to stop guessing and just set it down for a bit LOL.

 

[Richard338]

My recent failure came from sticking to guessing. I should have bailed and used them up.

 

[r8shell]

Wordle 424 4/6*

 

[mb>]

Didn’t even know there was a “hard mode.” Obscure words like “gruel” are hard enough! Lol

Not much to work with on this one, but about pulled off a birdie Hail Mary. Dumb 3rd guess.

Wordle 425 4/6

 

[Richard338]

Wordle 425 4/6

 

[sgt1372]

08/18/2022: Wordle 425 4/6






Three tricky words and 3rd Par in a row.
Only one choice left after the 3rd guess
for a Par.

The current NYT average is 4.0.

08/17/222: Wordle 424 4/6

Another 3rd guess that left only one choice
remaining for Par.

The final NYT average was 3.7.

---------------------------------------------

NOTE: The NYT has just released what it's calling WordleBot 2.0 supposedly to better emulate a human being in analyzing a player's results and also provides a distribution diagram of the % of people using particular words for each guess in attempting to arrive at a solution.

The NYT is also recommending new and different starting words for those who prefer to vary their approach to the game:

See: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/17/...ested-starting-word-wordlebot-2-0-slate-crane

PS: I have downloaded a copy of thr NYT's own article on this topic, which is
only available to people who are subscribers to the newspaper. I've converted it from pdf to jpg but need to edit it for easier reading. Will post it in this thread when I have more time to do so.

 

[r8shell]

I really thought my third guess was gonna be it.

Wordle 425 4/6*