NYT Wordle #1199: How I solved it

  

 

Image courtesy: www.nytimes.com/

Today, the 30th of September 2024, is game 1199 of NYT Wordle. I try to solve this daily and have completed 357 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 resulted into:

After the first guess:

⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛

Ok. Let's put together a few sets of possibilities with the information received:

 

🅒✖✖✖✖:

1. Chimp
2. Chump
3. Chomp
4. Chink
5. Chunk
6. Chuff (Pretty sure it's a word)
7. Chill
8. Clump
9. Clomp
10. Clonk/Clunk (I forgot which one was the actual word. I think it was the latter)
11. Cliff
12. Cloud
13. Colon
14. Comic
15. Cubic

✖🅒✖✖✖:

1. Scoop
2. Scowl

✖✖🅒✖✖:

1. Picky
2. Lucky

✖✖✖✖🅒:

-

Takeaways:

• Well, seems like 'C' being the first letter has a high probability
• In case the word starts with 'C', the second letter seems to most likely either 'H' or 'L'. It seems that apart from those two letters, the probability is highest for the vowels 'O', 'U', or 'I'
• The probability of the 3rd letter being a vowel is high. The distribution is fairly even for all 3 vowels
• I haven't counted, but seems like the other highly recurring alphabets are 'P', 'N', 'M', and 'K'.

Going with the above broad observations, we can strategize as follows:

• Let's choose a word which starts with 'C'
• Use either 'L' or 'H' in the guess, one in the 2nd spot, and the other in any other spot
• Picking two vowels for this guess will be smart in my opinion. But choosing 2 out of the 3 will be challenging. Let's park this for later
• If I pick 1 vowel, I should go with any of the aforementioned alphabets 'P', 'N', 'M', and 'K'
• Another option is to choose with 'L' or 'H', which I am actually leaning towards now. In that case, having 'L' will be more preferable as it seems to occur in other spots two apart from the 2nd spot

So what's the best word which has 'C', 'L', 2 vowels, and 'P', or perhaps 'N'? If 'Colin' is a word Wordle accepts, I wouldn't mind using that. Let's try 'Colin'

After the second guess:

🟩🟨🟨⬛⬛

Let's see which words out of the list could still be a possible answer:

1. Chimp
2. Chump
3. Chomp
4. Chink
5. Chunk
6. Chuff
7. Chill
8. Clump
9. Clomp
10. Clonk/Clunk 
11. Cliff
12. Cloud
13. Colon
14. Comic
15. Cubic
16. Scoop
17. Scowl
18. Picky
19. Lucky

Not bad. 2 words survived, and I doubt the answer will be 'Clomp'. But Wordle has had crazy answers before so it cannot be ruled out. Also, let's see if there are any other possible words which I didn't consider the first time around:

🅒🅛🅞✖✖:

-

🅒🅛✖🅞✖:

-

🅒🅛✖✖🅞:

-

🅒✖🅞🅛✖:

-

🅒✖✖🅛🅞:

-

🅒✖🅞✖🅛:

-

🅒✖✖🅞🅛:

-

Either I have exhausted the possible list of words, or my brain just wasn't able to come up with anything more. Therefore, trusting in myself, I am going with 'Cloud'.

After the third guess:

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Good game! Wordlebot rates my skill 99/99. And my analysis was pretty spot on!

Beat Wordlebot too today!

My 220th 3/6 in 358 games, not bad! Average guesses now down to 3.260. 

See you tomorrow!