Forget the hot takes from pop culture blogs. We ran the numbers.
My finance students and I didn’t just guess. We simulated over 1 million Wordle games to find the absolute best opening move. It wasn’t about intuition. It was about brute-force math.
The goal? To crack the code on the optimal first word for Wordle. Because let’s be honest. You don’t want to be the person who spends twenty minutes debating between “stare” and “raise” when you could just know.
How to Choose Your Opening Move
Here is the thing about Wordle. You have six tries. That’s it. But why you play matters.
Do you want to win in the fewest guesses possible? Or do you just want to not lose?
These are two different games. And they require two different opening strategies.
If you are chasing that perfect streak of 3s and 4s, your best friends are Slice, Tried, and Crane.
- Slice averages 3.90 guesses.
- Tried averages 3.92.
- Crane also averages 3.92.
That is the gold standard. If you start with any of these three, you are statistically positioned to solve the puzzle faster than almost anyone else.
But what if you don’t care about speed? What if you just want to avoid the dreaded black screen of defeat?
Then you need a different word.
Adept, Clamp, and Plaid are your new best friends.
Using any of these yields a win rate of roughly 98.75% to 98.79%. They are ugly. They are clunky. But they work.
If you want to win, play words with two vowels. If you just want to not lose, play words with one vowel.
Notice the pattern? The “speed” words (Slice, Tried, Crane) all have two vowels. The “safety” words (Adept, Clamp, Plaid) mostly have only one.
It makes sense. Vowels are the skeleton of a word. More vowels mean you eliminate more possibilities faster. But consonants? They are the anchors. They keep you from guessing words that sound right but aren’t real.
Why Linguistics Isn’t Enough
Other researchers have tried to solve this. David Sidhu at University College London looked at letter frequency. He said, “Hey, E is common. S is common. Let’s guess words with E and S.”
Noble effort. But it’s incomplete.
Frequency doesn’t account for structure. It doesn’t account for how letters interact in the wild.
So, we did it the hard way.
Two of my students, Tao Wei and Kanwal Ahmad, built a program. It didn’t just look at letters. It played the game.
It took the entire official Wordle dictionary—2,315 words —and ran simulations. Every possible first guess against every possible solution. That’s 1,692,265 total simulations.
The program didn’t just pick a first word. It picked the best next word based on the feedback from the first guess.
How?
It filtered.
Say you guess Bloke. The game tells you L and E are correct and in the right spot. B, O, and K are gone.
The program immediately throws out every word that has B, O, or K. It keeps only words like Flume and Slate.
Then it scores them.
It looks at how often each letter appears in the remaining pool. S is common. L is common. A is common. Slate scores higher than Flume because its letters are more likely to appear in the final answer.
The program picks the highest scorer. Then it guesses. Then it filters again.
It does this until the word is solved. Or until it runs out of tries.
Then it averages the results.
What This Means for Your Daily Routine
You don’t need to run a simulation. You just need to know the rules of engagement.
If you are playing to minimize your guess count, stick to the two-vowel rule. Specifically, try to put one vowel at the end of the word. It opens up more possibilities for the second guess.
If you are playing to guarantee a win, go heavy on consonants. End with a consonant. It’s boring. It’s efficient. It’s safe.
Does this ruin the fun?
Maybe.
But if you’re about to bet your lunch money on tomorrow’s puzzle, you’ll want to know that Slice is statistically superior to your gut instinct.
Derek Horstmeyer is a professor of finance at George Mason University. He doesn’t play the game for fun. He plays it to win. 📊
