Another day, another opening salvo of SALET — the trusty first guess that covers five of the most common letters in the English language. Today it returned nothing but grey squares, telling me that S, A, L, E, and T are all absent from the answer. That’s actually useful information: with over a thousand candidates still in play, the puzzle was wide open.

Round two brought CORNI, the solver’s weighted-entropy pick for maximally carving up the remaining space. It landed a yellow R (right letter, wrong spot) and a green N locked into position four. Seven candidates survived, and suddenly the shape of the word was coming into focus: something with R and N, no common vowels, nothing familiar.

DRUNK walked straight through the door on guess three — all five squares lighting up green. A punchy five-letter word, harder to see coming than it looks in hindsight. Three and done.