Let me start this with a confession:

I don’t (technically) play Wordle

This is very important, as recently my wife came to me and proclaimed “I just got a “magnificent” in Wordle” (the blank look on my face definitely bumped up my heating bill for a few days). When I asked my daughter if she played it, she pointed me to Word Master and I was hooked.

Many discussions (with my daughter — my wife had no interest in our flagrant disrespect of Wordle) ensued about the best words to start. For the longest time, mine were train, speck, dough. You see, our philosophy was to bang out 2-3 words and get the letters, then stress over guessing the word after establishing a good set of letters (hopefully in the right position). I searched online for the best 3 words, but nobody seemed to follow this technique. Everybody writing about this only was interested in the best first word. So, off I went to figure it out.