Digit Statistics

Every tile in a guess is a yes/no question put to the answer: "do you contain this character, and is it here?" A question teaches you the most when either outcome removes a big chunk of the remaining pool — ideally close to a coin flip.

The chart above is exactly that coin-flip table: 1 appears somewhere in 60.8% of answers, 2 in 52.3%, 4 in 47.2%, and 3 in 46.4%. Whichever color comes back, roughly half the pool is gone. Ask about the one rare digit instead and the question is lopsided: 0 appears in only 25.2% of answers, so three times out of four it returns black and eliminates just that quarter of the pool — you spent a tile to learn something you could almost have assumed.

That's the whole logic of the top openers in one sentence: six distinct common digits ask six near-coin-flip questions at once, and the pool collapses from 17,723 to around 33 in a single turn.

This chart describes NerdleBuddy's generated model, not a claim that we possess Nerdle's official answer list. Nerdle says its 17,723 answers were selected from more than 100,000 valid calculations; our model independently applies documented equation constraints so its statistics remain reproducible. See Nerdle's official Classic Nerdle description.

First: leading digits pile up low. The answers contain 33,319 multi-digit numbers, and 1 is the leading digit of 25.0% of them — versus 6.4% for 9. Of all the 1s on the board, 57.8% are sitting in that leading position. That skew comes from this generated equation distribution and its eight-character length limit; it is not, by itself, a demonstration of Benford's law. In the model, 22.9% of two-digit results fall in 10–19, while three-digit values must stay compact enough to leave room for the expression, and 34.4% of them fall in 100–199.

Second: zero is starved by the rules. A number can't start with 0 and a lone 0 can't stand on the left side. Zero can still appear inside a multi-digit number (10, 20, 108…) or as the result, which is why it reaches just 25.2% of modelled answers while every other digit appears in at least 40.6% — see the hidden rules for the full lone-zero story.

Practical upshot: build early guesses from 1–5, expect results that start with 1, and don't burn an early tile on 0 — let elimination find it for free.