When Burke first sees a puzzle, she immediately begins breaking it down into smaller pieces — “chunks,” she calls them. Each word becomes its own miniature puzzle. In Burke’s case, she was given a couple of leads during the Prize Puzzle of last Friday’s episode. The third word was a single-letter word, which had to be either A or I. And more important, there was that apostrophe in the opening three-letter word, between the first and second letters.

Of the few hundred thousand words in the English language, only two — I’VE and I’LL — fit that construction. Which meant the single-letter word was almost certainly A. The first phrase that popped into Burke’s head while she hoped for her turn at the wheel — I’LL HAVE WHAT SHE’S HAVING — didn’t come close to fitting the puzzle, but it made I’LL seem an unlikely starting point. Because HAVE is the word that probably follows I’LL, and here, Burke was searching for a three-letter word.

I’VE… A… I’VE GOT A…

Part of the art of designing a game show is making the basic and routine seem chaotic and unpredictable. The trick is, most people watch a show like Wheel of Fortune, and their heads begin swimming with the nearly endless possibilities: twenty-six letters and those hundreds of thousands of words. Burke’s strategy, her puzzles-within-puzzles way of thinking, is designed to narrow the range. That’s why she started with the smallest words first.

– Chris Jones, Esquire.com.

This is mean, but growing up, we used to watch Wheel of Fortune kind of just to rag on the contestants. I always joked that if you passed the test, you got on Jeopardy!, and if you failed you got on Wheel of Fortune. Joke was always on us and our fellow nerds, though, since Wheel of Fortune contestants can win a lot more money and prizes (though champions no longer return).

Anyway, kudos to Caitlyn Burke for taking an analytical approach to the game. I saw this clip when it went viral and wondered why, if she knew it, she wouldn’t have at least taken another spin for a G or a T, since there were three of each on the board and only a 1-in-8 chance she’d hit Bankrupt or Lose a Turn.

But, as Jones points out, that wouldn’t have looked nearly as impressive.

Pretty awesome, but clearly no one will ever top Michael Larson for game-show manipulation. Hat tip to Deadspin.