Jakob Poeltl has become an NBA trivia game

Most people have probably heard of “Worldle” at this point. It’s a an online game or app for mobile devices created last year, and it recently went viral in part thanks to people’s ability to display their outcome on Twitter. It was recently bought from the creator by The New York Times for “somewhere in the low seven-figures”.

The way it works is the player is given five blanks to guess a five-letter word. If the letter comes back green, it’s the correct letter in the correct place. Yellow means that letter is in the word but is in the wrong place, and gray means that letter is not in the word and can be eliminated from future guesses. The player keeps guessing until they get all green.

By now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with basketball. If you’re like me, you haven’t played Worlde directly but have seen people posting their outcomes on Twitter and come across knockoffs, and the latest is an online version centered around the NBA, and what better thing to name it than after the one NBA player whose name rhymes with “Worlde”? Behold: “Poeltl”, named after Spurs center Jakob Poeltl. Here are the rules:

Personally I used the silhouette from the start, started typing the player’s name, it came up on a drop down, and I was right on the first try. As a result I went to a different device and tried again (with the wrong answer on purpose), and this was the result:

So if I was doing this without taking any hints, I would know that I was looking for a center but on a different team, in a different conference, who never played for the Spurs, and is not within 2 years of age to Poeltl. Go have fun with it (here’s the link again, and yes, it is safe), but do yourself a favor and don’t use the silhouette first like I did. There will be a new player every day. Enjoy!