Vowl · Strategy

The second guess

Openers get all the attention and guess two is where games are actually lost. Three boards you will see constantly, and what to do with each.

All the numbers below assume you opened with TARES on a five letter game, because that is the opener the scoring page lands on. The reasoning transfers to any opener, the specific words do not.

Board one: everything grey

This happens more than you would think. TARES comes back with five greys on 575 of the 8,636 possible answers, so roughly one game in fifteen. It feels like a disaster and it is not. You have just eliminated T, A, R, E and S, which are five of the most common letters in the language, and 8,061 words with them.

The instinct is to panic and throw another normal looking word at it. Do not. You are now playing in a strange corner of the dictionary where the answer has none of the five letters you would normally reach for, and the words that cut that corner well look nothing like English. Scoring the obvious candidates against those 575 words:

COLIN takes 575 down to about 14. That is a bigger cut, proportionally, than your opener managed. An all grey board is one of the strongest positions in the game and people throw it away by treating it as bad news.

The pattern to remember is O, I, U, C, L, N, D, M, Y. Once T, A, R, E and S are gone, those are the letters left doing work.

Board two: green S and nothing else

The other very common outcome, 539 answers, almost as likely as all grey. You know the word ends in S and you know it contains no T, A, R or E. Which sounds like progress and is actually the trickiest board of the three.

Here is the trap. You want to keep the S, so you start guessing words ending in S, and every one of them spends a slot re-confirming a letter you already know. That is four working letters per guess instead of five, and you will feel it on guess four when you have three candidates and one guess.

Drop the S. Guess a word without it, use all five slots on unknowns, and put the S back at the end when you go for the answer. The word you are hunting is almost certainly a plural or a verb, so the four letters in front of it usually form a real word on their own, which is the thing to be solving.

Board three: one yellow, four grey

The most information-poor board you can get, and the one where people waste the most guesses. You have one letter, you know one place it is not, and that is it.

The mistake is fixating on the yellow. You have four unknown slots and only one constraint, so the yellow letter should be along for the ride, not the point of the guess. Pick a word that moves the yellow to a genuinely different slot and spends its other four letters on common untested letters. If you can only do one of those two things, spend the letters.

Two yellows change this completely. Two constraints on placement plus the letters they exclude will usually cut you to single digits, and at that point it is worth burning a guess purely to place them.

The general rule

Every guess should test letters you have not tested. That is the whole thing. Confirming greens feels productive because the board lights up, but a green you already had tells you nothing you did not already know, and you only get six of these.

The exception is the race. If your opponent's lane says they are one guess from finishing, expected value stops mattering and you take the shot. That is its own page.

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