NYT Wordle #1150 : How I solved it

Image courtesy: www.nytimes.com/

Today, the 12th of August 2024, is game 1150 of NYT Wordle. I try to solve this daily and have completed 319 of these over the last couple of years. So here is my Wordle journey for today, which includes my guesses, thought process, some statistics, and, of course, the ANSWER!

I always start my Wordle with 'Trace'. Let's see what that led to:

After the first guess:

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛

My 200th 3/6 is at risk already. Nothing to analyze, going for my standard second guess 'Pound' for this situation. 

After the second guess:

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛

I'm cooked! This is a terrible start. Can't analyze much. The word most probably will end with a 'Y'. Some options could be:

Milky

Silky

Filmy

Hilly

Fishy

Silly

I am confining my assumptions to these because I think Wordle will not give words like 'Films' and 'Silks' as they are plurals. Anyway, my 3rd guess needs to be an elimination guess, meaning it will have next to 0 chance of being the right answer, but needs to eliminate as many words as possible so that I can get it in 4. Otherwise, I run the risk of taking 5 attempts. Let me explain.

If the word is say 'Hilly', and my 3rd guess is 'Fishy', I will have no way to determine whether the word is 'Milky' or 'Hilly'. But if I use the word 'Films', I will have the following unique returns for the words I mentioned above:

• Milky: 🟨🟩🟩🟨⬛
• Silky: ⬛🟩🟩⬛🟨
• Filmy: 🟩🟩🟩🟩⬛
• Hilly: ⬛🟩🟩⬛⬛
• Fishy: 🟩🟩⬛⬛🟨
• Silly: 🟨🟩🟩⬛⬛

Disclaimer: The actual word could be something entirely different, but it is impossible to determine/analyze all the possible words like Wordlebot does. So I am making a list based on words that I could think of only. 

So let's go with 'Films' and see

After the third guess:

🟨🟨⬛⬛🟨

Hehe, so the word is not from the above list. My immediate instinct is to go for 'Swift' but let me still analyze this properly once again.

Possible words:

Skiff

I have no idea why I wanted to go for 'Swift'. It would have been dumb. But 'Skiff' seems promising because I cannot think of any other word. Let's for that:

After the fourth guess:

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Right off the bat, I can say that this wasn't easy. Here are some stats to back that:

Average number of guesses by users: 4.8

Wordlebot turns: 4

Users who got it in their 3rd try: 4.7%

Users who got it in their 4th try: 26.1% 

Users who got it in their 5th try: 65.1%

Users who got it wrong in their 6th try: 9.3%

All of the above numbers are abysmally low comparatively. 

As for me, I think I did pretty well. 95/99 on skill is great, but 29/99 on luck wasn't. Still, I'll take it. 

Got to wait some more for my 200th 3/6. Hopefully it'll be tomorrow!

See you!