{"id":28624,"date":"2022-02-05T04:21:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-05T04:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=28624"},"modified":"2022-02-16T14:27:05","modified_gmt":"2022-02-16T14:27:05","slug":"want-to-master-wordle-heres-the-best-strategy-for-your-first-guess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/want-to-master-wordle-heres-the-best-strategy-for-your-first-guess\/","title":{"rendered":"Want to master Wordle? Here\u2019s the best strategy for your first guess"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Derek Horstmeyer<\/a>, George Mason University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Wordle has skyrocketed in popularity<\/a>, multiple media outlets have published articles<\/a> that explore the best word<\/a> to use as your initial guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often the authors of these pieces theorize that the word ought to be one that uses as many vowels as possible, contains letters that frequently appear in English or possesses features that regularly occur in the language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, my finance students and I decided to tackle this question in as definitive a manner as possible by determining the optimal first word to play in Wordle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our analysis actually ran through all possible combinations of five-letter words and ran simulations across all possible iterations \u2013 over 1 million of them \u2013 to figure out the best starting strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A \u2018tried\u2019 and true approach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In Wordle<\/a>, players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. Each time the player makes a guess, they learn whether each letter is correct and in the right location, appears in the word in another location or isn\u2019t in the word at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Players can have different approaches. Some might simply want to solve the word, even if it takes six tries. Others try to do it in as a few guesses as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on our analysis, if you\u2019re trying to win in as few guesses as possible, the top three words to go with are \u201cslice,\u201d \u201ctried\u201d and \u201ccrane.\u201d Using any of these three words will produce an average number of word attempts of 3.90, 3.92, and 3.92, respectively, if you\u2019re using an optimal strategy to play (more on that later).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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