Minnesota Timberwolves star Karl-Anthony Towns is, like the rest of you, playing Wordle on a daily basis, then tweeting about it straight after. But when he shared his results last week, more experienced players noticed something was very off.
As Yahoo! report, Towns shared this on Friday night, showing that he had successfully completed the word “ulcer” in just three guesses.:
Not bad. And yet it didn’t take long for more serious players, those who can strip the game (and the alphabet) down to the frame, to get awfully suspicious. Two of many such replies to KAT’s tweet said:
no legal guess path could lead to these results given today’s answer. KAT’s posting fake stats
If you know the solution you’d know that the second guess is impossible as there are no words with that combination of letters
It seems that in order to get to the word “ULCER” on his third attempt, it was impossible for his first two tries to look like that, because there are only 26 possible combinations of characters in the language that would fit in that “U - - E R” spot, and none of those were words that are accepted by Wordle.
So many people ended up replying to him about this that Towns, in between games against the Kings and Bulls, took time out to respond and explain himself. Blaming the handover of the site following the New York Times’ purchase of the game, which coincidentally also took place on Friday, he says the results posted should actually have been for the game he’d had open, game 236 (which was “PAUSE”), but that the Times’ takeover labelled it as the more recent 237 instead.
I love this! You used to be able to do a crossword in the peace and comfort of your own home, but now you get to share a Wordle score that millions of people can go over and work out whether it’s cheating or not. Nobody should care about this, and yet it’s hilarious that we do.
For what it’s worth I believe Towns, a huge gamer in his downtime, because his explanation makes a lot more sense than a grown man lying about a Wordle score on a public forum. And while we’re on the subject, he’s not lying about teammate Josh Okogie’s scores either, look at this man go: