Wordle 727: Strip Search

I think I've written about this before, but I find myself using the letter K a lot in my opening guesses, and it's not because I'm a big fan of Franz Kafka. It's just that it seems like a lot of my opening guess gravitate to ending in K. PRICK, PLUCK, STUNK, STUCK, TRACK, FLACK, I don't know why, but it's just where I go with one-vowel words. So one of the things that I have to be conscious of is trying to avoid that tendency with my guesses. So when I typed STICK today (I've been hearing "Stick Season" by Noah Kahan on the radio a lot lately), I deleted it because it had a K. But I liked the S at the front. So I thought about STRIP, but I didn't use it for some unknown reason. I next had SPARE and was about to hit enter, but I didn't like it because I was really breaking my tendencies with that guess. You can only zig so much when you normally zag. Luckily, SPARE led me quite naturally to SPLIT, which had the added bonus of moving the lone vowel out of the third slot. I hit enter and got a green tile for the S and yellow tiles for the P and T. 

At this point, I threw strategy out the window and decided to go for a win in two. I knew I would be able to solve this puzzle, so I took a gamble. I went with STOOP for my second guess, hoping that my boldness would pay off. It almost did. I got greens for the S, T, and P. This is the general structure of the word that I assumed would be right after my first guess. At this point, I took a step back because I would rather solve in three than in four. I started running through the possibilities: STEEP, STREP, STAMP, STUMP, STRAP. I kind of wanted to double down on the double repeating vowel, but that just felt off. Ultimately, I decided to go with STRAP because my initial feeling way back at the start was to use STRIP. STRAP for my third guess, and it came up all green. Ironically, I would have had the solve in two if I'd used STRIP as my first guess. I'm not going to complain about a solve in three, but, man, I was close to something really good. Streak is up to 65.