SHOWS COVERED: S29 up to this point (#5461-81).
Now that the Mystery Round has moved (as least for now – it may flip flop around due to tapedates for a bit) to R2, the major changes for Wheel this season are done with: the Kia Soul has been established as the 1/2 Car (with great results – 3/16 converted so far), and TV QUOTE and MOVIE QUOTE open up fresh puzzles.
But one subtle thing I have noticed (and I’m not quite alone) on this is that “common” duds (RSTLN in particular) seem to have increased. The effect of this could be seen as a budget mode technique, causing more big banks to be lost, perhaps compensation for the Kia Soul being available daily.
Now thanks to WOFTracker, I’d like to quantify this subtle feeling. There have been 3 R5s and 0 R6s so far, so there have been 21*4 + 3 = 87 maingame rounds. The first output from WOFTracker:
Total called duds:
A: 5
B: 2
C: 3
D: 6
E: 3
F: 2
G: 1
H: 3
I: 3
J: 1
K: 1
L: 11
M: 7
N: 7
O: 3
P: 5
Q: 1
R: 14
S: 16
T: 16
Z: 1
TOTAL: 111
This is simply summing up every time a 0 appears in “called letters’ frequencies” of each of the 21 reports so far. Note U-Y are removed since they were 0s: no one’s dudded on them yet (a bit surprising on U).
While of course RSTLN, as the most called, will have the max totals here, the five letters accounting for over half of all called duds (64) seems particularly high.
Now let’s look at ALL duds:
Total puzzles a letter was NOT in:
A: 13 | 0.15 (1.1%)
B: 61 | 0.70 (5.2%)
C: 42 | 0.48 (3.6%)
D: 43 | 0.49 (3.6%)
E: 4 | 0.05 (0.3%)
F: 58 | 0.67 (4.9%)
G: 40 | 0.46 (3.4%)
H: 34 | 0.39 (2.9%)
I: 12 | 0.14 (1.0%)
J: 83 | 0.95 (7.0%)
K: 62 | 0.71 (5.3%)
L: 31 | 0.36 (2.6%)
M: 49 | 0.56 (4.2%)
N: 13 | 0.15 (1.1%)
O: 17 | 0.20 (1.4%)
P: 48 | 0.55 (4.1%)
Q: 86 | 0.99 (7.3%)
R: 21 | 0.24 (1.8%)
S: 29 | 0.33 (2.5%)
T: 17 | 0.20 (1.4%)
U: 53 | 0.61 (4.5%)
V: 76 | 0.87 (6.4%)
W: 58 | 0.67 (4.9%)
X: 85 | 0.98 (7.2%)
Y: 58 | 0.67 (4.9%)
Z: 87 | 1.00 (7.4%)
TOTAL: 1180 | 13.56
This is taking 87 puzzle dissections and taking the complement of the letter set in each (that is, all the removed 0s – duds) and summing all those up 1 by 1 similar to the above, as well as using a custom feature of these charts in WOFTracker to display the same chart divided by 87. Therefore, Z is the only letter so far not to appear in any maingame puzzle. Also, on average, about 12.4 unique letters are used in a puzzle (out of 26). The % isn’t too important here, it only gives the % of all duds the letter contributes (which JQVXZ dominate).
The number on the right (rounded to 2 decimal places), however, which must be between 0 and 1 by definition, thus predicts the probability a future call of this letter will be a dud (n = 87 is indeed relatively small, but n will be around 800 by season’s end). For meaningful (non-JQVXZ) letters, S in particular is quite large – one dud in 3 rounds! And L even more! It’s also funny how B manages a 70% dud rate but is the most critical BR letter so far (hopefully more about this on here soon).
I do not want to conclude anything right now, as I don’t know any stats for S28, but L and S stick out pretty strongly. At the moment, a player completely stuck, with no idea what the puzzle is, should try N/T/R over S/L. Outside of those common five, H G, C, D are also good bets.
One interesting thing to do with these numbers is to divide the first chart by the second (I will work on having WOFTracker be able to automate that). From this you can see that of the 17 times T was a dud, it was actually called 16 times (wow!), yet S avoids a dud TWELVE more times than T, 16/29. Very peculiar…
woftracker 