More than 10,000 of these words are considered too obscure or inappropriate to ever appear as a solution, and are given a probability of zero. Instead, the bot assigns every possible Wordle guess - almost 15,000 words - an estimated probability of being a solution. The bot doesn’t use either the original list or any updated solutions list that the game editors rely on. There have now been published solutions that did not appear on the original list - like BALSA and KAZOO - and a handful of words on the list that are unlikely to pass the scrutiny of Times editors. The original Wordle game ran off a 2,309-word “solution list,” but that list is no longer the official reference. You can read more details on the mathematical calculations behind skill and luck below. The same is true for the rest of your guesses: A good result doesn’t mean you’ve made a skilled decision, and vice versa. But consider that solving in one turn with JAZZY would be the best possible result and yet would be an awful choice for a starter word. This is far from easy to grasp because our brains tend to overweight outcomes.

So if the bot comments that you’re lucky, don’t take offense - by itself, it doesn’t mean you’re not skillful.įundamentally, WordleBot measures the quality of your decision-making, not the result.

You can be both lucky and skillful lucky but not skillful skillful but not lucky and neither lucky nor skillful. The skill and luck measurements are independent of each other. A number closer to 99 means things have gone your way, and closer to zero means it’s not your day. Skill is a measure of efficiency - how closely your guesses came to solving the puzzle in as few turns as possible averaged over all possible Wordle solutions, not based on the word that happened to be the solution that day (which we can know only in hindsight).

Ny times spelling bee puzzle solutions