Ah, no. You missed my entire point. There is no such thing as “the best” starting word. It depends entirely on who’s playing, what strategy they use, and what mood they’re in that day. For example:
- Do you prefer to eliminate as many common letters as possible first?
- Do you prefer to get as many green and yellow squares as possible first?
- Do you restrict yourself to using green/yellow letters once you have them?
- Are you trying to minimize your average score, or your best score?
- Are you willing to trade a few losses for the chance of some 1-2 guess wins?
- Are you playing to beat your friends/relatives each day, or just to beat your own personal best?
- Are you playing to get the most interesting pattern to share on Twitter, rather than the least guesses? (and how do you define interesting?)
- Are you playing to always win on the 6th guess?
- Are you playing to get a pleasing pattern on your guess distribution chart?
- Are you playing to show off how you can recover from “crazy” start words?
- Are you playing the version that uses yesterday’s wordle as the starting word?
etc. Each one of these attitudes would lead to different choices of likely starting word.
