Like many of Wordle’s thousands of players, Bill Gates is addicted to the daily online word game.
In a blog post on Tuesday, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft wrote that he and a group of friends play the game – and several of its variants, such as Quordle and Nerdle – daily to compare scores. The billionaire also shared his strategy for guessing the answer in four rounds or less.
“If you’ve played Wordle, you know how important it is to make your first guess strategically,” Gates wrote. “I like to start with a word that has a lot of vowels, like AUDIO or ONCE.”
The New York Times, which bought Wordle in January in a seven-figure deal, recommended a similar game plan in February: Three of the five letters in your seed word must be vowels, whether you use or not the same starting word each time. daytime.
More recently, WordleBot – a New York Times AI bot that analyzes your Wordle strategy – said the best opening guesses are SLATE, CRANE, TRACE, SLANT, CRATE AND CARTE.
Gates’ advice goes further than the Times’ recommendations. For his opening word, he specifically finds two vowels to put “in second and fourth positions, as in CAGED”. Its second-line strategy then includes usually paired consonants, such as C and H, and S and L.
The billionaire wrote that he starts each day with a new word. This likely reflects his cognitive style, according to neuroscientists – who say the way we play games can reflect our personalities, backgrounds, history and tendencies.
“Someone who is thoughtful and considered when doing Wordle [is] also more likely to take this approach to life more generally,” Catherine Loveday, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster, told Newsweek in February. “Someone who makes very quick decisions in Wordle may tend to do so more in real life. – follow their instincts and instincts and maybe take more risks, but be faster and use more heuristics.”
Gates’ tactical and somewhat risky approach to play could parallel his career path. He dropped out of Harvard University in 1975 to start Microsoft, and eventually left Microsoft in 2008 to work full-time at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation has contributed billions of dollars to initiatives such as vaccine research and disease eradication.
“Whether we invest $100,000 or $100 million, the decision is always calculated,” he wrote in a September 2019 blog post, explaining how he assesses risk. “I spend a lot of time thinking, analyzing data and talking to experts to judge if we can really make a difference.”
Whether you agonize over the first word or start with the same tried and true letters, Gates has another way to get better at the game: practice. Official Wordle puzzles are only released once a day, but Gates said he wastes time on Quordle (where you guess four words simultaneously), Octordle (eight words) and Nerdle (where you type math equations) and their unlimited practice rounds.
“I’m the kind of person who will play an addictive game over and over again if given the chance,” he wrote.
There’s a cognitive reason for that: Wordle fits “the ABCs of human needs perfectly,” Douglas Gentile, a psychology professor at Iowa State University, told CNBC Make It in February.
“A is autonomy. We want to feel like we’re in control of our lives, B is belonging. We want to feel connected to others,” Gentile said. “And the C is the skill. We like to feel [we’re] good for something.”
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