Puzzles

My wife is a dirty, rotten cheater.

I say this with all love and respect for her as the mother of my children and the person with whom I chose to spend my life with more than 25 years ago.

We all have our flaws, after all. It is important for us to look beyond those flaws and be the bigger person. We must be supportive as our loved ones struggle and occasionally stumble and fall along the way.

According to the New York Times, about 300,000 people each day play Wordle, an online word puzzle game. For those unfamiliar with it, the player gets six chances to guess a five-letter word.

I would be lying if I said I actually enjoy playing the game. In all honesty, I view it as something of a daily chore, much like doing warm up exercises or leg lifts. While many people find great relaxation in doing things like crossword puzzles, word searches and letter scrambles, I find that I take them too seriously. If I get the puzzle solved too quickly, I feel vaguely cheated — as if I had any right to feel cheated by a free online game.

Likewise, being stumped only to find the answer was some incredibly common word is enough to make me grumpy for hours.

It stops being fun when you get frustrated over not being able to finish. Imagine, if you will, running a marathon only to find that when you get within sight of the finish line, the organizers have packed up and gone home and reopened the road.

In light of these disclosures, it would be perfectly reasonable to then ask why I bother doing these puzzles. Why do I make a point every day to spend 15 minutes guessing combinations of letters? Or why I read articles about effective strategies on which words to guess at various points to maximize letter use combinations. I ask myself the same thing.

A well played C- H or C-K combination can be the difference between quick success or being tempted to chuck your phone across the room and say the heck with it all.

Wordle, and its various clone-like offspring, gives you the chance to share your results with your online friends along with a little graphic that shows the pattern of correct and incorrect letters it took for you to get the answer.

This is where my wife gets dodgy. We have something of a friendly competition going on where we share to each other our results and casually keep track of who got the answer in the fewest number of guesses.

I follow the strategy of always starting with the word “irate.” People with far more time and not enough hobbies on their hands, have studied the puzzle and determined “irate” to be among the best starting word given how common its component letters are in other words.

My wife knows my strategy. Furthermore, she uses it to her advantage, waiting until I have completed the puzzle and shared my results before she begins.

I always chocked up that she would routinely finish a line ahead of me because she is just better at word puzzles than I am.

However, after a particularly tricky word, she let slip that she knows what I start with and uses that in choosing which word she starts with.

I feel used. In the cutthroat world of competitive word puzzling, such an action may be common. Pursuing every possible advantage to secure a victory is not only an acceptable strategy for many people, but something to be admired and emulated.

Knowing what I now know, as a sadder, but wiser man, I have learned the hard lesson to keep my proverbial cards close to my chest and at least make sure she has started her puzzle before I share my results.

All’s fair in love and word puzzles.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.