The fastest winning strategy ever found.

Want a quick way to win Wordle in 30 seconds or less, every time?

It seems implausible, but it’s ridiculously simple. My friend Dove Sussman, a screenwriter living in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, invented the method and practices it every day. He taught the technique to his 10- and 11-year-old sons, Dexter and Darius, and all three taught me.

Here’s what to do: guess LIGHT, CANDY, POWER and BUMFS. This represents four guesses with 20 unique letters, including all five vowels. At this point, after just a few seconds of typing, you are virtually guaranteed to know all the letters of the winning word. Some may already be in the right place.

All you have to do is solve a five-letter anagram. Y, A, O, M, R = MAYOR, to use Tuesday’s Wordle as an example.

You don’t even need to say all four words to find the correct answer. Often, LIGHT-CANDY-POWER, or even just LIGHT-CANDY, gives enough correct letters to win. Take the Wordle of March 20:

LIGHT gave L and I in the correct places and G as the correct letter.

CANDY gave N as the third letter.

POWER gave O another correct letter.

So, what word starts with LIN and also has a G and an O? LINGO—and you got it in 10 seconds.

Dove showed me the overall game stats on her phone:

In 68 percent of their games, he and his sons win in five attempts. In 20 percent of their games, they win in four attempts. In 6 percent, they win in two or three attempts. Only 6 percent of their games require six guesses.

It’s true that Wordle’s official goal is to guess the word in as few tries as possible. Most people wouldn’t brag about getting Wordle in five tries. But the method has opened the door to a different type of play for the family, and it’s infectious once you try it.

And again, all of this is doable by a 10 or 11 year old, and still in 30 seconds or less – the pun equivalent of a Steve Nash fast break. The Sussmans use the same technique to truly dominate the everyday Sedecordle, a 16-word variation of Wordle. In Sedecordle, a guess for any of them the word is a guess for each word, and you have 21 guesses in total to try to solve all the puzzles.

No worries though. Start with LIGHT-CANDY-POWER-BUMFS, Dove says, and “win every time.”

In addition to participating in almost every aspect of the Wordle multiverse, the Sussmans carry out the geography-based Worldle and the logic-based Murdle on a daily basis. They also do the New York Times Connections, Letter Boxed, Strands and Mini Crossword puzzles. Elsewhere in the family, Dove’s nephew Ezra, a high school student in Toronto, coded a program to remove the Spelling Bee game from the Times and repackage it with a list of high scores.

Dove, Darius and Dexter can also solve both the normal three-by-three Rubik’s Cube and more difficult versions of different shapes and sizes. Last year, they embarked on a massive collection of more than 70 die-cast metal Hanayama puzzles, of which they mastered about a dozen. “We are working to overcome them,” Dove said. “It’s literally years of fun.”

But LIGHT-CANDY-POWER-BUMFS may be their masterpiece. And it’s spreading. On our first day back from spring break, my 13-year-old daughter taught the technique to her entire bus on the way to their middle school in Montana. By lunchtime, the news had spread to the point where cell phones in the cafeteria were quickly giving Wordle a beating.

There are dozens of guides online for winning Wordle, all of which are paragraphs long and would take much more time to implement. The closest I could find to the process of Dove, Darius, and Dexter is a 2022 local TV report about a crossword writer who always guesses DERBY-FLANK-GHOST-WINCH-JUMP. That’s five words instead of four, with several duplicate letters, so I consider the Sussmans’ independent invention considerably more efficient. Indeed, the crossword genius only promises a winning answer in “two minutes or less”.

“When Wordle first came out, there were all these people talking about the best first word,” Dove said. “I remember Bill Gates having a favorite first word.” Dove decided to accelerate its innovation: “How quickly can we solve this problem, in a repeatable way, every day? » Dove challenged the boys.

They guessed LIGHT-CANDY-POWER-BUMPS. This resulted in 19 unique letters, with six letters remaining on the keyboard: Q, Z, V, F, X and K.

Darius, the 11-year-old, worked hard to enter random variants until he found BUMFS. It worked and was even better because it gave them an extra letter – F – instead of a second P.

But what are “BUMFS”?

“I still don’t know,” Darius said.

“You know,” Dove nudged. “I keep forgetting,” Darius insisted.

“They’re useless pieces of paper,” Dexter said. In Britain, Dove added, it’s also slang for “toilet paper.”

Growing up in southern Mexico, the boys work in Spanish all day, every day. They attend a local school co-founded by their mother, Donna, who is from Oaxaca, and often only speak English with Dove, who is Canadian, and with each other. Games enrich their vocabulary.

“The words are mostly words they know,” Dove said. But Connections — the Times’ word-bunching game, which draws on cultural references — “is a whole new world for these guys.”