Society of Decision Professionals (SDP) Webinar
Outsmarting the Wordle Bot
Featuring: Tom Keelin, Keelin Reeds Partners
đź“… Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2026
⏰ Time: 8:00–9:00 AM PT | 11:00 AM–12:00 PM ET
đź’» Location: Online via Zoom
đź›’ Pricing: Free for SDP Member || $40 for Non-Member
đź“… Add to Calendar (RSVP to get the Zoom Link)
Abstract
Since its introduction in 2021, Wordle has become one of the most widely played word games of all time, now generating over 5 billion plays per year on the New York Times website. After each puzzle, players are invited to “consult the bot”—an AI Wordle analyst that evaluates your play, compares you with millions of other players, and reveals how it would have scored using what it claims is an “optimal” strategy for that day. Few people beat the bot—let alone consistently.
This webinar shows how applying the principles of Decision Quality (DQ) provides a powerful, practical framework for doing exactly that.
We demonstrate how classic DQ structuring, probabilistic reasoning, and value-of-information thinking enable measurably better Wordle decisions. Specifically, we show:
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how to compute expected information gain for alternative guesses,
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how to identify an optimal next guess given any state of information,
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a DQ-optimized opening guess that outperforms the bot’s opening guess, and
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how a new method for choosing one’s guess when only a few words remain beats the bot’s apparent method
Finally, we present empirical evidence that applying DQ in this way allows us to beat the bot consistently.
We have long known that DQ produces better decisions and better outcomes on average, in business and in life, than intuition alone. Here we add a fun, data-rich, and immediately relatable demonstration—one that will help you improve your own Wordle skills and that may help persuade skeptics that DQ makes a difference more broadly: better decisions leading to better lives.
Meet the Speaker
Tom Keelin
Co-Founder, Keelin Reeds Partners
Tom Keelin has combined a career in decision analysis practice with innovations to advance the field. Tom is a Founder and Managing Partner of Keelin Reeds Partners, which provides strategy, decision analysis, and education services.Previously, as Worldwide Managing Director of the Strategic Decision Group, Tom helped enable strategic and operational successes of many Fortune 1000 companies. In the 1980’s, Tom developed an award-winning methodology for helping electric utilities plan multi-billion-dollar capacity expansion decisions under uncertainty, helped train dozens of utilities in its use, and served as an expert witness on how to recognize quality in such major decisions. In the 1990’s, with his Harvard Business Review article “How SmithKline Beecham Makes Better Resource Allocation Decisions”, Tom introduced portfolio-management methods for resource allocation under uncertainty: that have been widely adopted in life-sciences, energy, and other industries; and that led to significant job creation for decision professionals.After four decades of professional practice, Tom recognized a practical need for easier and better ways of dealing with uncertainty and developed the metalog probability distributions to meet this need. Tom is a Fellow, Director, and Pioneer Award Winner of the Society of Decision Professionals; and a Founder and Director of the Decision Education Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that helps youth learn good decision skills for life. Tom holds three degrees from Stanford University: BA in Economics and MS and PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems.
Moderator
Rob Arnold
EVP, APAC, Eversana
Rob holds degrees in English and Law from Cambridge University and an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Dartmouth College. He has a DiplĂ´me from the Sorbonne University of Paris.
His work experience began in Greece for an oil company. Following business school, he joined Strategic Decisions Group in California, where he co-developed asset securitization approaches for bank loans, including the “good bank/bad bank” structures that redefined the industry, creating new categories of securities and freeing up billions of dollars of capital for more productive use. After seven years in San Francisco, Rob started SDG’s London office with others. He co-developed a solution to pharma R&D allocation, about which he co-authored an HBR article, and which became the industry gold standard, transforming how pharma thought about value and creating the environment to resource many of today’s best-selling drugs.
Rob served as CEO of SDG for six years, ultimately presiding over its sale to IMS, where he became global VP of strategy consulting, growing the business globally to $120 million and advising IMS’s board on strategy, while working with many pharma CEOs. Following PE’s acquisition of IMS, Rob moved to Singapore, where he jointly founded a life science consulting and services firm that EVERSANA ultimately acquired. After twelve years building out a multi-country Asian footprint for the business, he returned to the US.
Rob has spoken, taught, and published extensively, promoting DQ to clients as diverse as the UK Police, government wealth funds, upstream oil and gas companies, and ecotechnology companies. He has guest lectured at Tuck, INSEAD, LBS, and the
London School of Economics, among others, and keynoted pharma industry global gatherings.
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