A lot of people reach for their phones in the morning, but billionaire Bill Gates takes it a step further: He plays the guess-a-word game Wordle each day, according to a GatesNotes posted Tuesday
Gates wrote that just after waking up, he grabs his phone to play the daily game, and then checks in with his friends who also, of course, play Wordle.
“Unlike some time sinks, Wordle and the other puzzles are a great way to stay connected with people, because they’re the same for everyone,” he wrote.
Gates also posted a video showing off his feelings about the game:
“Your first guess, you always put in something that has three vowels,” he said in the video while guessing “audio.”
Then, he says, he thinks about what consonants can go next to each other.
While the vowel strategy is typical, Gates’s consonant strategy takes it a bit further, per CNBC Make It. He called it a “chain of logic.”
“I like to look for C and H, for example, or S and L. Then the consonants that are almost never paired with others—like Q, V, X, and Z—really jump out,” he wrote.
Here are his other tips:
- Don’t forget a vowel could begin or end a word, as it is not hard to mess up when words start with a vowel.
- When there are two vowels in the word, he tries them in the second and fourth places.
- Remember the answers could be more esoteric words like Smite or Duchy
- The hardest words are ones without an A, E, I, O, or U. But there’s another vowel – Y!
- Remember “one of the cardinal rules of Wordle: Letters can be used more than once,” he wrote.
- Finally, some of the hardest words to guess are ones that end in “IGHT” because the starting letter could be so many different ones (anything from “light” to “sight”) and you only have five guesses. “It’s just a matter of luck,” on those ones, he wrote.
He finished up that using his strategies, he often gets the word with four guesses, or “sometimes” five.
How Do You Play Wordle?
You play Wordle by blind-guessing words to try and find the pre-selected five-letter word of the day. The interface lets you know when you’ve guessed a letter that is in the word but in the wrong place, in the right place, or not in the word at all by using a colored-coded (green for correct, yellow for in-the-word but not the correct spot) system.
The game tracks your success at guessing with the (very shareable) iconic yellow, green, and gray squares. You get six tries to find the word.
A new game is released every day at 12 a.m. EST.
Who Invented Wordle?
Wordle was first released in October 2021, and within a few months, hundreds of thousands of people played the game, according to The New York Times.
The inventor of the game, software developer Josh Wardle, originally built the game as something fun for his word-game-loving partner and sold it to the NYT for an undisclosed seven-figure amount.
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