I hate one-vowel puzzles. This is not the first time.
I made it to QB with hints but without clues, but only by guessing likely words for the two Japanese cooking terms. (I had no idea what they meant until after guessing them. Checking the clues would not have helped.) I wish he’d get rid of all those obscure foodie words.
One is sitting on my pantry shelf, and the other is the standard term for the style of sushi with a slice of fish atop an oblong of rice. A lot less obscure than “nankeen” .
To most Americans, those two words are going to be obscure. Maybe not quite as obscure as ‘nankeen’, but still not common words.
To be fair, I eat a lot of the latter. But I’m not in America. Probably well-known in NYC though.
Today (Wednesday) so far I’ve swung and missed at a few slang terms and alternate spellings (rarify, naff, yiff) although I’m surprised IFRIT wasn’t included.
I had a tough time today with words that should have been easy.
Today it accepted tiffany, though I thought that was someone’s name?
Merriam-Webster website says that tiffany is ‘a sheer silk gauze formerly used for clothing and trimmings’.
Hope that doesn’t give it away for somebody…
Today (9 Aug) was an example where knowing the point total for QB aided me in getting there without looking at hints. I’d gotten a rather low number of words but past Genius level and was stumped about any more. Finally I thought to look at the Rankings popup and it turned out I was only a single point from QB. So I tried a number of likely 4-letter letter combinations until I stumbled on the right one.
How did you determine the score for QB from the rankings popup? On my device it only goes to Genius. I have to go to the Hints page to see the QB number.
You can get a pretty good idea of the QB number by adding 40% to the genius score - so today it would be about 112
Or divide by 0.7…I think they get the Genius score by taking 70% of QB.
I wish they just showed it in the app.
The QB score is double the Amazing score. However, due to rounding, there’s two possible QB scores: 2A and 2A-1 (A = Amazing score). In this case, since my current score was 2A-1 and I hadn’t reached QB, obviously it was 2A.
Most of the time, I’m no where near 2A. So to figure out which is the right QB score, I take advantage of the facts that Genius is .7 QB, Great is ,4 QB and Nice is .25 QB.
Calculate 2A*.7, does that round to the Genius score? If not, then QB = 2A-1. If yes, subtract .7 from that number and see if it also rounds to Genius. If it doesn’t, QB = 2A. If they both round to Genius, then the Genius score can’t be used to figure the QB.
So repeat the above with the Great score and replace .7 with .4. And if that still doesn’t give you the exact QB, try the Nice score using .25. The lower scores could also be used for this (I don’t know their fractions off-hand) but it’s not very likely they’ll be of help, so I just live with the uncertainty. It’s usually not that critical that I know the exact QB score.
You can also load the NY Times Spelling Bee Forum and carefully scroll down, revealing just the numbers of words, points and pangrams, without showing the grid beneath (because that would be cheating 
)
Huh! TIL.
I’ve always been a little annoyed that the popup didn’t include the QB score. Do you suppose people prefer not knowing when they’re trying for QB?
My guess is they’re trying to downplay QB. Many people apparently have trouble just getting to Genius, so they don’t want to discourage them by showing an even more difficult target.
And actually, they once did show the QB score, but the next day it was gone.
One of the quirks of the Spelling Bee game is the benefit of walking away. Does anyone else do this? If I leave it and come back hours later, I almost always instantly see words that eluded me the first time around.
Absolutely, almost every day. My first goal is get to the Nice rank, and if that’s easily accomplished, then Amazing. At that point, I almost always stop and do Squaredle and then read the local online daily paper. After that, it’s back to SB. And, yes, there are usually words that immediately jump out at me when I return.
The same thing happens when I’m stuck on the crossword puzzle; leaving it for a while means I may think of a answer I was stuck on.
Walking away usually works for me – but not today.
I had 15 out of 16 words by midafternoon, but that last word kept eluding me. My goal lately has been getting to QB with the grid hints, but without clues. I knew I wasn’t alone struggling for the word since the SB Buddy page showed that it was the least frequently found word today, with only 50% of players getting it. But it’s late and so I gave up and looked at the clue.
And, most annoyingly, it’s a word that I should and could have easily guessed without the clue. In fact, when I was out for a walk this evening, I saw a flower and wondered, was it a dahlia or a ZINNIA?
Note to self, remember that Ezersky likes plant and flower words!
Another trick I’ve found is guessing sort of plausible words, occasionally a real word will then jump out. Plus, the fake word turns out to be valid now and then.