[cdcox]

Originally Posted by scho63

How are you guessing these in 6 or 7 guesses???

To get it in 6 guesses you have to get lucky, by getting a word exactly right on the first or second guess. That has only happened for me twice. Another way to get it in 6 is if one of the words in the puzzle is made up of letters that appear in exactly the same place as other words in the puzzle. For example, if one of the words were:

COUCH

and the puzzle also had COULD and BUNCH in it, by guessing COULD and BUNCH you would get COUCH for free.

So my realistic goal every day is to solve the puzzle in 7. I always start with ADIEU to get most of the vowels. My second word: 1) must be a feasible word, 2) must contain an O, 3) must contain as many of these letters as possible, in order of priority: T, S, R, N, L. So after the first guess if I have a word that has an E in an undefined place, I like to guess STORE.

So after two guesses is where the fun begins. Usually I have to go to pen and paper at this stage. It can take a lot of trial and error.

Here is a spoiler from today's puzzle.

Spoiler!

After getting STORE, my grid looked like this:

STORE
***** (ADO)
***** (DIU)
****E (AS)
***E* (R)

Not much to go by, but I noticed the last word didn't have any more of the 5 main vowels. That's something! I quickly ruled out that the first three letters were consonants (if there was an S in play I would have looked harder). So my word had a Y acting as a vowel. First I tried R in the last spot. How about HYPER? So I built a grid using HYPER. I liked that the first down word would end in an H, for combinations such as SH and CH. After fussing with it for a while it ultimately was getting too hard to make it work, so I figured HYPER probably wasn't the word. How about CYBER? Even worse.

Next, I tried FLYER as the last word across. Not too promising having a word in the first column ending in an F, but it should be easy to rule out quickly. First word going down cannot be SCARF (a common word in these puzzles). But how the word ending in FF? FALSE would work for the fourth word across, so this was promising. I had already played with third word across and thought that it beginning with U was promising. So S_UFF...
SCUFF, SNUFF, and SLUFF were all candidate words. Next I turned to the second word across. Based on the letter placements in STORE I decided to exhaustively considered these patterns (by now, I thought the pattern _O_A_ for the second word across was more probable than _A_O_):

CODA_
CO_AD
LODA_
LO_AD
NODA_
NO_AD

NODAL and NOMAD seemed to be the most likely. NODAL turned out to make the whole thing come together.

So it is really about educated guesses based on how words are put together and lots of trial and error. I usually solve it on pen and paper before entering a word that I'm not sure of.