How to improve your Wordle score in 45 seconds

Yesterday, the NY Times issued its first report analyzing how players approach its daily Wordle puzzle, which drew more than half a billion attempts over the past year.

Some key takeaways:

• You should probably bid adieu to your starting word. The most popular opener by a nearly 2x margin is “adieu” – despite it being the least efficient option among all top-30 starting words. For those feeling called out by this fact (🙋), the Times ranks “slate,” “crane,” and “trace” as the best possible openers.
• Some of you are big ol’ pumpkin eaters. On average, players guess the answer correctly on the first try once every 250 games – a rate far higher than if things were left up to chance. Analysts largely attribute this discrepancy to cheating, but also note some players could be re-entering a solution to maintain a streak.
• The hardest Wordle of 2023 was “Jazzy.” The word, which combines all three hardest Wordle sub-categories (starts with J, ends in Y, contains a double letter), took players 5.82 out of 6 turns to solve on average.

🤖🧠 Looking to improve your scores? Try using the WordleBot. In general, the Times found average WordleBot users – aka those who click on the “Did you beat the bot?” link upon completion – take a quarter-turn less to solve the puzzle than the average player.

Now, armed with this knowledge, it’s time for Dunkers to take the Wordle world by storm💪.