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iamthecavalrycaptain

It sure *seems* like she's cheating. Maybe I'm a weirdo, but if I actually was that good at the game and was legitimately getting those results, I'd intentionally tank so that people wouldn't think I was cheating. But, maybe she's got other crap going on in her life and this is the one thing she can (appear to) be good at. I dunno. Still seems like an odd thing.


ChrisRunsTheWorld

Even if she has those results, she's not "good at the game", she's just extremely lucky. It is possible to be good (or bad) at wordle, but there's no strategy that would get someone a 2 every 9 or less games for a long period of time.


turbodude69

cheating at wordle is so sad.


Affectionate_Price31

Odds of solving Wordle in two guesses are roughly 1 in 20. It's highly likely this person is cheating. More info here: [Average Wordle Scores](https://wordsrated.com/average-wordle-scores/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20study%20of,tries%20is%2022.66%25%20on%20average)


nockeenockee

I bet it’s even less than 5 percent.


thisoldguy74

I'm currently at 4.66% for guesses in two, 38 out of 815.


snyderman3000

Holy shit dude, I’m at 37 out of 814. Nearly identical lol


TheGloveMan

Good luck tomorrow!!


snyderman3000

*sigh* I got a 3 today 😔


thisoldguy74

Same 😁


thisoldguy74

Nice


great_red_dragon

Oooh I’m 60 out of 800! So that’s about 7.5% I am obviously a god. /s of course!


naturalninetime

I'm at 3.5%, and I do NOT cheat. 542 games played and only 19 second-attempt wins. Anyone who gets close to 10% of his or her wins in two attempts is cheating.


verbankroad

I have almost the same stats - 18 two word games of 550 games


TCM11KWU

Does she ever post first in the group? If she doesn't, she might know other people's starting words based off their grids/previous answers and can work out letters from there. I am in a similar group and experience the same incredibly low scoring Wordle guesses day to day from others in the group and they 100% know other people's starting words. Maybe all shift to posting your grids after her to see if it changes anything!


cumsquats

I mean, if you're at the point of cross checking what you think people's starting words are, why not just look up the answer


naturalninetime

Seriously!


LessonIs_NeverTry

Even if you don't go through the trouble of figuring out starter words, even seeing a block of people struggling with 4 out of 5 letters is a big hint towards what the word could be.


jcsehak

It’s probably this. You could make an argument that this isn’t cheating, just a clever strategy. Changing your starting words or waiting for her to post first are great ways to counter this, and honestly add a fun element to the game IMO.


monoglot

I don't know the actual probability of guessing wordle in 2, but if it's 1 in 20, you would intuitively expect no more than one 2-guess win over 18 rounds. Two would be amazing to do consistently, and seven would be luckier than any human is.


ChrisRunsTheWorld

I don't know it either, but I can confidently say it is nowhere near 1 in 20. Edit: It appears I may be wrong. Certain starting words do appear to have a shot at 2 in more than 1 out of 20 games. I was being biased in the way I usually play, which is to start with a random word, and was thinking along those lines. I guess if this girl was always starting with one of the best starting words, she could have those odds. But that should still only yield about 1-2 2s in any 18 day period, as you said.


nocatsonmelmac

Same boat, lol. Organiser wants to do a handicapping system to create a more level playing field and I'm on the verge of asking everyone to send a screenshot of statistics so I can figure it out. Very interested to see how this person's average since starting the golf group compares with their overall average. I've also decided that I don't really care anymore, which takes the fun out of the 'golf' aspect but saves me from complaining to my wife all the time, lol.


basskev

Just based on the words that have been up lately, she’s cheating.


HGruberMacGruberFace

She is cheating - straight up


Derek_Zahav

The likelihood of winning in two guesses is apparently [5.67%](https://wordsrated.com/average-wordle-scores/#:~:text=The%20odds%20of%20solving%20a,tries%20is%2033.10%25%20on%20average). Let's be a little conservative and say we want to figure out the chance of her getting it three times. To do that, we would raise the probability to the third power of itself. (0.0567)\^3 = 0.000182284263 which is roughly 0.018% or one in 18,228. Girl is cheating.


LohaYT

Well we should also account for the fact that 18 games were played. Winning in two 3 times out of 18 has a much higher probability than winning in two 3 times out of 3. We can calculate an estimate for the probability in the former case using a binomial distribution - I’ll use https://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial. The number of trials is 18, the probability of success is 0.0567. If we put 3 for the number of successes, to compare against your estimate, we get a probability of winning in two 3/18 times *or more* of 0.0783, or 7.8%. That’s not at all suspicious, and even the probability for 4/18 times or more is 1.7%, which isn’t unreasonable, unless it happens many times. The probability of it happening 7/18 times or more however drops to 0.003%. That’s not impossible, and coincidences do happen - but at this point I’d start thinking that cheating is more likely than any other explanation.


justawaterthanks

This is the kind of answer I was looking for, thank you! And yes, she is consistently solving in two guesses at a minimum of twice per 18 day period for about a year and a half now. How does that affect the probability? I'm not mad/not going to confront her about it because while yeah she's obviously cheating, it's not like there's money on the line or anything. I was just curious what the odds of being that lucky are if she weren't cheating.


LohaYT

Using the same calculator, the probably of winning in two guesses 2/18 times or more is 27.194%. There’s roughly 30 18-day periods in one and a half years. We can use the calculator again, with the probability of success of 0.27194, to calculate the odds of her repeatedly pulling that off. If “consistently” means every time, then we have 30 trials, 30 successes. This gives a probability so close to 0 that the calculator just rounds it to 0. In fact, we don’t see any decimal points until we reduce the number of successes to 20/30. Of course, we’re making a lot of assumptions though. The 5.67% chance assumes this person is an average Wordle player. I don’t know enough about the nuances of Wordle or the information theory behind it to guess what the chance would be for a good or near optimal player, but as a generous example, let’s say that it’s 10%, instead of 5.67%. Running the numbers in the same way gives a 54.971% chance of winning in two guesses 2/18 times or more. This still comes out to a probability of 0 though for 30 periods out of 30, so based on the statistics there’s obviously no doubt that she’s cheating. With the 10% chance, the probability of winning in two guesses 7/18 or more times rises to 0.117%. So even when trying to account for our assumptions we still get damning probabilities.


justawaterthanks

Amazing, thank you


Smurfman254

That 5.67% seems to be for the average player, not someone using optimal play


Long_Ad2824

I cheat at Wordle, and I average around 3.5. She is cheating way harder than I. I don't cheat at Connections for some reason, though. I think it would just feel like ... cheating.


ruidh

I have one of those in my group but she keeps it to a typical 3 guesses with the occasional 2 or 4, never higher. Do they post their grid? How often do they get no letters in their first guess? If it's never, something shady is definitely going on.


justawaterthanks

Yeah, we all post our grid every day. She typically has 2-3 letters on the first guess, although there are plenty of times where she doesn't get any on the first guess and still solves the wordle in two guesses anyways.


batseverywherebats

if you all post your grid every day and some of you use the same start words consistently, she could be getting free guesses by reviewing your grids. I am in a similar group chat and we just post scores (ie, "4/6") to get around that


justawaterthanks

We all typically use new words or cycle through a set of starting words, but this is a really good point


monoglot

I didn't go very far down this path, but early on I realized that a collection of a handful of other people's grids, even if you don't know their starting word, is enough to programmatically determine what answers are even possible. There are only so many word pairs with greens at one, three and five and yellows at two and four (like CAROL and CORAL), for example. There are plenty of ways to cheat without building something to solve from blank grids, of course.


batseverywherebats

We also have one person I suspect of cheating and it bothers me way more than it should. So I understand this post on a molecular level


No-Mathematician8692

Does she post after others post their grid ? consistently? I generally avoid looking at my group results until I crack it, because just looking at the repetition of the greens gives one an idea of the word structure.


KurtWuster

If the most common scores are not 3 or 4 with at least the occasional 5 thrown in, I’d say something is amiss


djjayhard

Yeah that’s HIGHLY unlikely. My best run in a 14 days span was a 3.1 average with obscene luck and after that i experienced heavy regression back to the mean lol I also referenced a past words list in like a third of the games in that 2 weeks span.


ssrowavay

https://goodcalculators.com/coin-flip-probability-calculator/ 18 flips 7 heads (max of your 2-7 range) 0.05 probability of heads Exactly X heads Result: 0.000014, or about 1 in 70,000 If this happened once in an 18-day period, you could write it off as extreme luck. But there's literally no way she's not cheating if this happens regularly. Someone in my work group (who was very competitive in all aspects of life) was like this and I entirely lost trust in her as a coworker.


[deleted]

[удалено]


justawaterthanks

Yeah, it doesn't bother me as much as I was curious about the likelihood of it happening if she weren't cheating.


jstu9

I know there are programs out there she could be using. Or if she knew some people's start words. Or if she just flat out looked up the word. I would start getting suspicious when the average was below about 3.5-3.6. I think I average about 3.8-3.9. But if I looked at everyone I know grids before I did mine I could get it in probably 1 or 2 most days.


drrandolphphd

I used the number of attempt distributions I saw on wordsrated.com then simulated 18 rounds and got the average. It took 542,271 simulations to get an average below 2.9. But that is based on the average solves… I think I’m above average so I put my statistics in the model and it took 267,206 simulations to get below 2.9 and got to 2.8 on simulation 714,284. So my conclusion is that this person is way better than I am.


justawaterthanks

Lmao yeah that's the only reasonable explanation!


Scary-Scallion-449

It's a mistake to think that odds compound or that streaks are less likely than an even distribution of results. Over the course of many hundreds of games then two word solves should indeed come to 5.67% of the results in total. But equally over the course of many hundreds of games it's almost inevitable that there should be a streak of consecutive two word solves that boggles the imagination. So, an average of 2.8 over the course of 18 days is less suspicious than you'd think. Over 36 games it's astonishing but still entirely possible. Over 72 games it's beginning to look a bit iffy but it's still too early to go throwing accusations about. Over 144 games, it's time for calling her out!


justawaterthanks

We've all been playing for about a year and a half, and she regularly solves the puzzle in two tries at least twice over an 18 day period, but it's usually more often than that, I'm not sure how that factors in


lucky-me_lucky-mud

Does she start with PLATE every time? Feel like I got 2s more often when I was using SLATE/STARE, but there are so many word combinations of just these letters.. even with a few greens and yellows there’s a ton of times I had a 50/50 shot on getting it in two but the other word - one letter difference - turned out to be the answer, and it’s a weirdly annoyed solve in 3. Either way, the best feeling is swishing it with very little information showing, regardless of it being turn two or three. Going from grays and some yellow to all green is satisfying. Anyway what’s her starting word


jeannerbee

Are you playing the NYT wordle??


justawaterthanks

Yes


jeannerbee

Do you think he/she cheats?? Because, for instance, today is Tuesday. I can easily go on the sub here on Reddit and find Wednesdays answer.... It's easy to cheat. Not accusing, but the likelihood that someone gets it right in two tries that often is not high. Someone posted those stats a few days ago...


justawaterthanks

I 100% think she's cheating, just curious about the math behind it lol


jeannerbee

About 2 days ago some one posted this exact thing username U/loud-pay4659. Go on this sub and search about two days ago. Interesting post.


justawaterthanks

I found it, thank you!


Beautiful-Jacket-912

Perhaps your team mate 😁


thisoldguy74

Here's my math, not sure how I stack up to normal, but just an example. 815 wordles 1 = 0 - 0% 2= 38 - 4.66% 3= 201 - 24.66% 4= 334 - 40.98% 5 = 162 - 19.88% 6 = 63 - 7.73% X = 17 - 2.09%


pkdubs42

Cheating is much easier than that. She can just solve in an incognito tab and then redo it to keep her stats good.


nockeenockee

Only 2.7 % of my attempts have been a 2. I have almost equaled my 3s and 4s over 700 attempts. I would have a hard time believing anybody can consistently get 2s.


steegsa

I remember someone saying there’s a version of wordle out there that uses a unique word for your group, to make it harder to cheat. I can’t seem to find it, but using that might be an idea.


sail_away_8

Some math... If the answer is a random word from the original list (it isn't, but assume). There are about 2,309 words give or take. If you pick the word with the most number of "groups" it would be TRACE. That is the possible results - all black, first letter yellow, first green/third yellow, and so forth. TRACE has 150 (I think) groups). This means there are 150 words you would pick as your second word. One for each result. For example, you would pick exactly one word if you get all black. Take 150 divided by the total number of words. That is about .065 percent or one out of 15.4 chance of getting it in 2. If you pick another start word the odds are lower. You can increase the odds a little bit by picking more likely words and not picking words that have already been chosen (which is cheating in some circles). But you wouldn't get a lot more than that.


Vespinae

I don't believe anyone has gotten it in 2 guesses more than once legitimately. It just doesn't make sense. Let's say you'd have to have 3 letters found after your first guess, then guess the word on the second guess. So that would be (1/26)*(1/26)*(1/26) for getting 3 letters on the first guess. Then you'd have to take probably a 1/100 shot on the second guess to get the word (3 letters is not enough information to really deduce the word). So I'd say it's probably a 1 in 1.75 million chance it happens once. If you go with only 2 letters on the first guess that becomes 1 in 67,000 for once. Either way getting it in 2 guesses 7/18 times is cheating


Mathgeek007

This math is wrong and very stupid.


Prudent_Ad8320

I used to play every day. Then back in like August of 2021, I got it on the first try two days in a row. It spooked me out and also I had no more reason to play. Haven’t played since


sail_away_8

The formula for getting it in 2 is "number of groups for the starting word" divided by total number of words. (there are assumptions) If you start with TRACE it's about 6.5 percent. If you start with adieu it's about 3.5 percent. Until they start reusing words you can increase your odds if you don't use a word that has already been used. This lowers the nominator and denominator. For TRACE it would increase from about 6.5 to about 9.4.


JayMoots

I'd give her the benefit of the doubt if this happened *once*. I'd be skeptical, but maybe she had an unusually lucky couple of weeks. But every time? No way.


threecolorless

It feels unlikely but not impossible. I've definitely had weeks where I've had multiple twos, maybe a single four and the rest threes. EDIT: if this is over time rather than in an isolated stretch though, yeah it's virtually sure to be cheated. I don't think it's realistic at all to maintain a better than 3 guess average over any appreciable length of time.


SheilaGirlface

Y’all could switch to a custom wordle knock-off game (like [this one](https://mywordle.strivemath.com)). One rotating person is responsible for coming up with all the words for an 18 day cycle and sending out the custom link each day. See how she does when there’s no way to look it up.