Wordle: best starting words, and how do you keep a streak alive?

Streak at 412. My opener has been CRANE forever. Is there a better one, and does anyone use a fixed second word? Also, tips for not losing the streak on holiday.

CRANE is already one of the best human openers; you are not leaving much on the table. The words that keep coming out on top in the analyses (the 3Blue1Brown one, the WordleBot data) are CRANE, SLATE, TRACE, CRATE and, for pure statistics, SALET. They all work because they hit the most common letters: E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, N.

What matters more than the opener is the second guess. Two schools:

• Adaptive: build the second word around the greens and yellows. This is what the bots do and it wins on average.
• Fixed pair: a second word that shares no letters with the first and covers other common letters, for example CRANE then SPILT or SLATE then CRONY. Slightly worse on average, but it keeps you out of trouble on the tricky days with repeated letters (the ones that kill streaks).

Avoid repeated letters until you have to, and on guess four, if two words fit, pick the one with the more common letter.

Streak survival is boring but simple: the puzzle changes at midnight local time, so play it at the same time every day and set an alarm on holiday, because the time zone shift is what gets people. And never guess a word you have not checked against all the greys; that is how a 400 streak dies on a Tuesday.