My thoughts (and gradles) on how to make a strong guess involves the reduction of possibilities. Your guess of Baron reduced the possible amount of words it could be, down to 1. After that, you could really only have 1 word match the letters. Part of making strong guesses in my opinion are being able to either use commonly used letters and then start organizing location. I’m sure everyone has a different strategy though
Gradle has a lot of explanations of their grading, including all of their formulas (which I don’t understand 😁). Their simple explanation is a good grade “[reduces] the list of possible words as much as possible”.
Your second to last guess was good because it revealed a lot of the answer letters and reduced the number of remaining words.
In my guesses I try to eliminate as many letters as possible while also picking up letters I think are in the answer.
Another thing I sometimes keep in mind is the “Pillars of Doom” concept in hard mode – getting 3 or 4 greens but still a lot of remaining guesses. I’m hard mode I have to keep greens where they are.
Let’s say I guessed “GRANT” and I got this, _ _ A N T
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
Good that I got greens, but now I can only guess two new letters at a time. The answer would be SLANT or CHANT or PLANT, etc., so I might run out of guesses.
Some people spend a lot of time thinking about strategies and creating tools like Gradle and https://wordletools.azurewebsites.net (which I used to figure out good starter words).
I just try to have fun, not guess anything that was already an answer, and do my best to try to get the answer in 3 guesses.
Indeed, it’s very important that you know the four-green-letter traps and account for them in your strategy. Revealing green letters too fast will reduce your guessing space and lead to defeat. Make sure you guess common consonants like RTLCN early so you have fewer possible solutions when a trap comes.
Most common four-green-letter traps: _ight, _ound, _atch, _ower, sha_e, _aste, _atty, _aunt, _illy, gra_e, s_ore, and sta_e
Most common three-green-letter traps: _a_er, _o_er, _i_er, __ing, s_a_e, __lly, _ra_e, and sta_ _
If you were playing Wordle in German, you would have very different letters to guess first and traps to avoid. I hear it’s very difficult.
Ok. I kinda like playing it on english. Are you all playing it on the nyt website still? I am kinda sad that it no longer shows my streaks since i have no account. Or just gradle? I don’t like that gradle doesn’t mark the letters on the keyboard.
We currently play the New York Times Wordle, where creator Josh Wardle sold the game in 2022. Wordle has a dedicated editor there, like NYT’s famous crosswords. I have an account there but I only use it to save my Wordle stats.
If NYT screws around and starts charging money for the game, or if they start showing ads the we can’t block with ad-blocking browsers, we as a community can agree to jump ship to another version of the game. I’ve always liked Alex Berk’s mod of pre-NYT Wordle.
I don’t really understand how to make strong guesses, or how gradle grades my guesses. Do you always have that in mind, to make a strong guess?
My thoughts (and gradles) on how to make a strong guess involves the reduction of possibilities. Your guess of Baron reduced the possible amount of words it could be, down to 1. After that, you could really only have 1 word match the letters. Part of making strong guesses in my opinion are being able to either use commonly used letters and then start organizing location. I’m sure everyone has a different strategy though
Gradle has a lot of explanations of their grading, including all of their formulas (which I don’t understand 😁). Their simple explanation is a good grade “[reduces] the list of possible words as much as possible”.
Your second to last guess was good because it revealed a lot of the answer letters and reduced the number of remaining words.
In my guesses I try to eliminate as many letters as possible while also picking up letters I think are in the answer.
Another thing I sometimes keep in mind is the “Pillars of Doom” concept in hard mode – getting 3 or 4 greens but still a lot of remaining guesses. I’m hard mode I have to keep greens where they are.
Let’s say I guessed “GRANT” and I got this, _ _ A N T ⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
Good that I got greens, but now I can only guess two new letters at a time. The answer would be SLANT or CHANT or PLANT, etc., so I might run out of guesses.
Some people spend a lot of time thinking about strategies and creating tools like Gradle and https://wordletools.azurewebsites.net (which I used to figure out good starter words).
I just try to have fun, not guess anything that was already an answer, and do my best to try to get the answer in 3 guesses.
Indeed, it’s very important that you know the four-green-letter traps and account for them in your strategy. Revealing green letters too fast will reduce your guessing space and lead to defeat. Make sure you guess common consonants like RTLCN early so you have fewer possible solutions when a trap comes.
Most common four-green-letter traps: _ight, _ound, _atch, _ower, sha_e, _aste, _atty, _aunt, _illy, gra_e, s_ore, and sta_e
Most common three-green-letter traps: _a_er, _o_er, _i_er, __ing, s_a_e, __lly, _ra_e, and sta_ _
If you were playing Wordle in German, you would have very different letters to guess first and traps to avoid. I hear it’s very difficult.
Ok. I kinda like playing it on english. Are you all playing it on the nyt website still? I am kinda sad that it no longer shows my streaks since i have no account. Or just gradle? I don’t like that gradle doesn’t mark the letters on the keyboard.
We currently play the New York Times Wordle, where creator Josh Wardle sold the game in 2022. Wordle has a dedicated editor there, like NYT’s famous crosswords. I have an account there but I only use it to save my Wordle stats.
If NYT screws around and starts charging money for the game, or if they start showing ads the we can’t block with ad-blocking browsers, we as a community can agree to jump ship to another version of the game. I’ve always liked Alex Berk’s mod of pre-NYT Wordle.
Thank you both for the explanations.