Statistics say about 860 people a day should guess the right word on their first try. Instead, there are upwards of 4,000
Author of the article:
Chris Knight
Published Sep 28, 2023 • Last updated Sep 28, 2023 • 3 minute read
People who play Wordle, the popular word game operated by the New York Times, often have a standard opening guess to help them crack the day’s puzzle. ADIEU and AUDIO are popular, thanks to their many vowels. CRANE and DEALT use a lot of common letters. But James P. Dilger, a professor emeritus at Stony Brook University, New York, thinks there’s another common opener: CHEAT. Not the word, the action.
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In a recently submitted paper entitled “Wordle: A Microcosm of Life. Luck, Skill, Cheating, Loyalty, and Influence!” Dilger delved into the statistics behind the game. Its mechanics are simple. Players enter a five-letter word, and the Wordle website identifies any correct letters in the right place (they turn green) or correct letters in the wrong place (yellow). Wrong letters turn grey and can’t be used again. Players get six tries to guess the word before it’s revealed. It’s Scrabble meets Mastermind.
Dilger calculated the odds of guessing the correct word on the first try. Since Wordle has a database of 2,315 common five-letter words (the puzzle editors eliminated thousands of uncommon ones), the odds of getting the puzzle right on the first try should be one in 2,315, or about 0.04 per cent. But statistics show that, on average, 0.2 to 0.5 per cent of people guess right on the first try – between five and 12 times more than chance would suggest.
Put another way: Of the roughly 2 million daily Wordle players, about 860 people should be guessing the right word on their first try. If they avoid any previous daily words (and most don’t) that might rise to 1,320. And given that many players remain loyal to the same opening word, or cycle among several, that number should be even smaller. Instead, daily first-word-winners number between 4,000 and 10,000.
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“What shall we call these people?” Dilger writes. “Hmmm, ‘cheaters’ comes to mind, so that’s what I call ’em!” (Despite its impeccable math, Dilger’s paper is refreshingly free of jargon. He’s a very chatty, down-to-Earth scientist. Another quote from the paper: “Do I mean to tell you that never, not once, was the share percent of the first guess less than 0.2%? Yup!”)
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Dilger, who used three months of Wordle data from last summer, found some other interesting anomalies. For instance, he found that the number of first-word correct guesses dropped slightly over time. “Are cheaters getting bored with Wordle,” he asks, “or have they just been on summer vacation?”
He also found a spike in the use of the popular word ADIEU on Aug. 15. “A likely explanation comes from the observation that the August 15 NYT Mini Crossword clue for 6 across was ‘most popular starting guess in Wordle’ and, of course, the answer was ADIEU. This seems to have inspired about 30,000 players to abandon whatever opening strategy they had been using and follow the crowd.”
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Another ADIEU spike on Aug. 30, when the correct word was AUDIO, may have been due to people not quite cheating but going online for a hint. Googling “today’s Wordle” will bring up many sites that will tell you the correct word, but many of them will start with hints like the first letter, the number of vowels, or a cryptic definition.
Whether this constitutes cheating Dilger doesn’t say, but he does seem to have little patience with those who look up the correct word right away. “What serious Wordle player would choose NANNY as a first guess?” he grouses of the June 3 puzzle answer. “You’d be testing only two vowels and one consonant. And IGLOO? srsly?”
In his conclusions he also admits to being a regular Wordle player himself, competing against his sister and daughter. (His opening gambit is TEACH.) “We cheer each other’s successes and try to learn from our mistakes,” he writes. “Best of all, they tolerate my nerdy tendency for statistics and puns. We are baffled as to how first-word cheaters actually have fun playing, but that does not diminish our enjoyment of the game!”
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