Wordle Up!

In January 2022 I wondered what all these green and yellow square boxes were that kept being posted on Twitter and so I discovered Wordle. I caught the bug like everyone else not least because I share my surname with the creator. After a couple of weeks, I was wondering if a Wordle League could be a thing. I needed to up my profile on Twitter anyway, so I made enquiries. It would not have got off the ground without my co-organiser Jacko – my reach on Twitter compared to his is more like Morph to Peter Crouch – and in March 2022 we started the league. When the idea first came to me I thought we could get about 20 people in it. On the first day we had 18 entries and now two years later we have 265 regulars and a number of irregulars too.

I never thought it would take off so well and it is gratifying that a lot of people get a kick out of it, seen by the chagrin when we take a summer or Christmas break. It is a lot of work – Jacko and I both spend many hours a week running the league, but a lot of people depend on us now for their daily fix.

It does come with its problems though, the major one being cheating. The average score for Wordle is 4 so 3 is good and 2 is very good. The problem is as the months have gone on we have more and more people posting a long sequence of continuous 2s and 3s which is not logical whether one plays with the same starter word each day or slects a different word each day. We get some members querying such scores and we have others leave because of the perception of people cheating.

What can one do though? We have had a couple of conversations with individuals about their scores, but we can only take their word for it. There is no way to prove anything. Personally, I think a continuous run of 2s and 3s is impossible. The maximum run of 3s I have had is five in a row over the two years. We have some players who have never posted a 5 or 6 ever. This week we have seven players posting 3 or lower over the 7 days. Our current longest consecutive run of 2s and 3s is 41. What are the odds of that?

It is a topic Jacko and I discuss quite often. We want a fair league so that everyone has the chance of winning each month. We ended up taking the high achievers and creating a separate Champions League to give others more of a chance of winning the main league, but we are getting more and more people who are achieving an average score of 3 and over in a month.

For most it is not about the winning but the taking part. A sort of Wordle community has built up. As we both decide whether to continue on for Year 3 we have to wonder if the persistent high scores spoil it for the majority.