Gambling is not in my constitution. I’m one of those people who has occasionally gone to a casino armed with $10 or $20 — after the loss of which I’m done. There is no temptation to go to an ATM. None at all. I assume going in that I’ll lose it all; and if Lady Luck smiles upon me and I don’t, well, then, I am able to leave $20 or so richer without feeling the pull to see if I can extend that smile.
And, yet, the other day, I was wishing that I’d been somewhere where I could buy a lottery ticket. A big one. One of those where the payout is potentially millions.
That’s because it was my lucky day. It had to be luck — it couldn’t possibly have been skill. After all, is there any skill whatsoever to picking the correct answer in a Wordle game on the first try?
Yes, I truly did that. The word was “FREAK” — which in and of itself seems a little bit freaky.
Wordle is an online game in which you have six tries to guess a five-letter word of the day. Dedicated players often have a particular word that they always guess first so they can get as many vowels as possible into play as soon as possible in an effort to guess the word of the day in the fewest guesses possible.
I used to be one of those who always played “ADIEU” first but then decided that was too boring, so I started picking random words — often with little-used letters such as B and C, and in this case F and K — to play first to challenge myself.
Imagine my surprise when “FREAK” was actually a winner.
Naturally, I wanted to know what the odds are of that happening. As with many things on the internet, the odds of finding the correct answer are not exactly 100%.
One article discussed the odds in terms of the percentage of players who post to social media that they’ve picked the correct answer on the first try —but the article itself noted that this is not necessarily an accurate picture as losers are less likely to post their results.
Another article figured the odds based on the total number of possible five-letter words that Wordle actually uses in its bank of answers, which is more than 2,000 (the exact number varies, of course, depending on the article consulted). Another article noted that those odds are too high as the odds have to be figured based on the total number of five-letter words that the game will actually accept as valid guesses, which is close to 13,000 (again, the exact number varies depending on the article consulted).
The latter argument seems valid to me, so we’ll go with odds of one out of 13,000, which computes to about 0.0008%. In other words, that’s worse than your chances of finding a four-leaf clover.
(As with guessing a Wordle word on the first try, the exact odds of finding a four-leaf clover vary depending on the internet source, from about one in 10,000 to about one in 5,000.)
In any event, I think we can agree that since I didn’t cheat, guessing “FREAK” was a crazy-lucky feat.
And I think we can agree that maybe it would have been a good day for me to buy a lottery ticket.
Naturally, though, my odds of being somewhere where I could buy a lottery ticket were somewhere in the neighborhood of the odds of finding definitive answers on the internet.
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