Strategy Session: Lingo (part 2)
In Lingo, you have five guesses to pinpoint the solution; otherwise, control is given to the other team. In Part 1 of the Lingo strategy post, I described how, for each starting letter, to pre-plan the first two words to guess. Assuming you did not get lucky and solve the puzzle in the first two guesses, you have three more guesses to pinpoint the solution.
Before each remaining guess, you will be in one of three situations:
Situation 1: you know four or five letters in the solution,
Situation 2: you know two or three letters in the solution, or
Situation 3: you know only the first letter of the solution.
The Third Guess
To review, as discussed in part 1 of this post, good strategy is to use 8 of the 10 most common letters in the first two guesses.
The third word you guess is all-important. It often determines whether you will fail or succeed in solving the puzzle.
How you should guess the third word depends on which situation you are in.
In situation #3, you need to go to a third word that ideally contains letters that were not guessed in the first two words. I have found that words that end in “MP” or “CK” and whose second letter is either “R” or “H” work the best.
In the example in part 1, we guessed CLEAT and COINS. If none of those letters are in the word (apart from the “C”), then the next guess should contain the two of the ten most common letters that you did not already use: namely, R and U. What words begin with C, contains R and U, and end in “MP” or “CK”? Unfortunately, none. Relaxing the criterion on the vowel is useful. CRIMP would be a reasonably good guess. If we consider using H instead of R, we see also as good guesses would be CHUMP or CHUCK.
In situation #2, you usually do not have sufficient information to solve the puzzle by the third word. Again, you should assay for extra consonants. The very same words helpful in situation #3 are the same words you should guess in situation #2. Hopefully, the third guess will give you at least four letters, putting you in situation #1 with two guesses to go.
In situation #1, you have considerable information by which to solve the puzzle. You should refine your guesses based on what you know.
The Fourth Guess
If you do not guess the puzzle by the third word, you will again be in one of the three situations above– but this time with just two guesses remaining.
If you are now in situation #1, refine your guesses.
If you are now in situation #2, you need to consider a couple of possibilities. First, it is likely that some of the letters in your puzzle are repeated. For example, you might see CRO_S. Within the blank, many letters can fit. You need to consider that a letter already in your answer is repeated. CROSS could be the answer. Then again, CROPS or CROWS could also be the answer. Nevertheless, the repeated letter is often the downfall of an attempted solve.
The second possibility is that less common letters appear in your puzzle. Letters like B, D, F, G, and K may be in the answer. I personally have found that selecting the ending that you did not use in Situation #s 2 and 3 on your third guess is a good strategy. For example, if the guess of CRIMP does not give you a sufficient number of letters, then try CHUCK.
If you are in situation #3, you should consider either proceeding as you would in situation #2 OR giving up (!). Entertaining the idea of giving up should be considered sparingly, but it may be appropriate, given the way the game works.
More on this in part 3.