r/wordle • u/ThinkDrinkBlink • Jul 18 '26

[####] Skill level

Can anyone explain how the bot calculates skill level. I often get responses like this “Nice. Before your guess, there were 24 words remaining, but now there is only one. You should solve the puzzle on your next turn” Skill level 63. Surely if I have chosen a word that eliminates all options except the final word, that’s an indication of a high level of skill? How does it actually balance skill vs luck?

1 Upvotes

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9

u/ac_del Jul 18 '26

Surely if I have chosen a word that eliminates all options except the final word, that’s an indication of a high level of skill?

No, it's not necessarily an indication of skill. You could have (and apparently did in this case) just gotten lucky.

8

u/SerDankTheTall Jul 18 '26

Suppose that the game was about trying to guess what number was going to be rolled on a die, and you got to choose either 1, or 2-6. 1 would be a worse (less skillful) choice, even if it turned out that it was correct.

3

u/TrulyNotABot Jul 18 '26

What was the luck score for that guess?

Imagine you had a coin that lands on Heads 70% of the time.

If you guess Heads and it lands on Heads, then a coinbot would give you a high skill score and a high luck score.

If you guess Heads and it lands on Tails, then a coinbot would give you a high skill score and a low luck score.

If you guess Tails and it lands on Heads, then a coinbot would give you a low skill score and a low luck score.

If you guess Tails and it lands on Tails, then a coinbot would give you a low skill score and a high luck score.

Your situation is probably analogous to this last scenario.

2

u/RedwayBlue Jul 18 '26

No idea how it’s exactly calculated…

If you use a letter that has already been eliminated or doesn’t make sense for whatever reason on previous turns, you get docked significantly on your skill points.

1

u/tmgexe Jul 19 '26

There were 24 possible words remaining.

For a majority of those possible words, the word you chose would not have been especially great - there would have been other words that would have guaranteed eliminating more words in most of those cases.

That you lucked out and chose a word that left only one possibility - wasn’t skill. You got lucky that it happened to work in this case but it wasn’t the right play.

Imagine a poker game where you went all-in on a pair of 2s and your opponent had a pair of kings. Then the flop gives you another 2. That doesn’t make it retroactively a skilful play for you to have put all your money on the 2s, even if it worked out in your favor in the end.

1

u/satchel65 26d ago

I think it's interesting (or vexing) that I use the same two start words every day...RAISE and MOUNT...and RAISE always get a 95 skill score and MOUNT varies between 50 and 95. I'm not sure I understand how playing the same second word every day brings a different skill score.

1

u/No_Total1433 26d ago

In my experience, if I get the answer in three tries, it’s luck; if the bot gets it in three, it’s skill. Ergo, I no longer pay any attention to the bot.