In video poker, if you don't know the rules, you draw five cards, and then you get one opportunity to discard as few or as many of those as you want, to try to make a good hand.

The strategy comes in when deciding whether to draw for a long shot hand (like a flush, or five of the same suit, if you have only three of a suit on the first deal), or to go for something more likely like a pair of jacks or better (by discarding all of your cards except one...you therefore get more chances to make a lower-paying hand).

In my above-posted 213 debacle, I honed in on the first three letters after one try, and I foolishly thought there only a few possibilities for what the word could be.

But I was actually drawing to a longshot. It's not a perfect analogy but if I had instead compiled all the possible last two letter combinations together into a word containing them, I could, for the cost of a slightly-reduced "payout", have ruled in or out several of them in one shot (a strategy I know many of you are using in some form, but I'm a noob at this, so it's fun to learn.).