NYT Wordle #1151 : How I solved it

 

Image courtesy: www.nytimes.com/

Today, the 13th of August 2024, is game 1151 of NYT Wordle. I try to solve this daily and have completed 320 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:

⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨

1 yellow. Way too many possibilities. Won't lie, I prefer all 5 blacks over this 1 yellow. Now we got to place this E somewhere else and think of another word. I generally avoid words starting with an E in these kind of scenarios. I tend to use alphabets like 'P', 'S', 'H', 'L', 'M', 'I' etc. as early as possible. So let's just go with 'Plies' and see where it takes me

After the second guess:

⬛⬛🟩🟨⬛

 

Not the best outcome, but not the worst either. I at least know that it's either ✖🅔🅘✖✖ or 🅔✖🅘✖✖. Few possibilities could be:

✖🅔🅘✖✖

Feign

Deign

Weigh

Veiny (not sure whether Wordle recognises this)

🅔✖🅘✖✖

Can't think of a word with this structure

Even though I feel the possibility of the word being 'Weigh' is the highest, I can't go for a direct guess because the chances of getting it wrong and hence, having inadequate information going into the 4th guess is high as well. So I will have to settle for a guess which eliminates as many possibilities as possible now, so that I can at least get it in the next try. In order to do that, we need to ideally have a few alphabets like 'F', 'D', 'W', 'H', 'G', 'N' and 'E' (in 2nd spot). Now we can't have them all in a single guess, so we need to figure out a word which can eliminate at least 2 of the first 3 possibilities. The best word I can think of is 'Hedgy', which sneakily can also provide some info on the 4th (though quite unlikely in my opinion) possibility (Veiny). Also, it will tell us whether the word follows ✖🅔🅘🅶🅽 structure or not. Let's go for it and see.

After the third guess:

🟨🟩⬛🟩⬛

Ok, so the word is ✖🅔🅘🅶🅷. The fact that the word can be 'Weigh' or 'Neigh' has suddenly dawned on me. I don't think I could have done much about it in the previous guess, so it's alright. Let's just pick one and hope we get it right. 

So I thought about it for a couple of minutes. I think I will go for the noun over the verb here, because I don't know, I feel it's a slightly safer option perhaps? Fingers crossed and 'Neigh' it is.

After the fourth guess:

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Very curious to look at the analysis today and find out what I could have done better to not get into a 50-50 at the end. In my opinion, it wasn't that easy, and the average number of guesses should be around 4 or more. Let's find out.

Sure enough, 4.0 as NYT average is indicative of a medium difficulty word in my experience.

So as per Wordlebot, my guesses were good, except that I should have chosen 'Weigh' for my 4th guess instead of 'Neigh'. Well it's not wrong, but I think I'll take a 4/6 with a lower skill score any day. In hindsight though, my third guess should probably have been 'Feign' or 'Deign'. I did overthink a little there, but 'Hedgy' wasn't a bad guess either. So no harm done.

Some more wait for my 200th 3/6 then. Hopefully tomorrow!

See you!