I've just started playing Wordle with a Spreadsheet "helper" that uses the information that Wordle provides for the each guess. Some rules of thumb that seem to work for me so far.
1. There are plenty of good first words, probably not a lot different in performance. In practice it seems humanistically better to use the same first word all the time. Better the devil you know rather than the angel you don't.
2. Assuming you don't get too lucky, always use a word with 5 different letters, which I think provides more information on average.
3. The hard finish trick, which comes up a lot. Best to explain this by example.
Suppose you have just 2 guesses to go and you have 4 out of 5 letters located. In this simple example they are : ended, unfed, unred, unwed.
Looks like you need a bit of luck to be sure of a win. Not if you use what someone has called a "burn word". Off to the side find a 5 letter word that contains r, f & w. The burn word I used was dwarf, which you use for Guess 5. The response is "df" in the required word and "war" not in the required word. The only one that fits this response is unfed and you have achieved the counterintuitively impossible.
4. If you are absolutely desperate and have to take a wild guess, use the most common word. That seems to work at all stages. With a 12,800 odd word dictionary, there must be a lot of "rubbish" words in there (Andrew Stuart's word game Letterlicious only has about 9,000 five letter words) but I have yet to come across a "rubbish" word as the answer.
Got a two guess solution today. 117 possibilities after Guess 1 and picked the right one. Skill !!! OK you got me, dumb luck
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Leren
<edit> More on point 4. I just played a game where the last two options were crude and cruve. Does anyone even know what cruve means without looking it up ? As I said, a lot of rubbish words in the dictionary.
Leren
