A Case for RSTLNE

When Wheel of Fortune goes to the bonus round, they automatically give the contestant the letters R, S, T, L, N, and E as a "gimme", and then ask the contestant for three more consonants and a vowel.

So it got me thinking, are they really the most frequent letters? I remember, when I was growing up, that almost all contestants guessed RSTLNE for their letters. I also remember an episode of The A-Team where H.M. goes on Wheel of Fortune for some reason, and I remember that he studied letter frequency charts to gain an advantage. I decided to make my own letter frequency charts off that Boggle program that I have laying about. 26 nicely-formatted lines of code later, the results are in!

The top five occurring consonants are: S (140948), R, (105133), N (101329), T (99367), and L (78503). So, that's OK. The highest-frequency vowel is far and away E (170788) -- so that's OK, too.

Now comes the tricky part. What should the next three consonants be? If memory serves me correctly, most contestants currently pick C, D, and G. Is that just following a pattern, or is that based on frequency? According to my chart, the three next-most occurring letters are C (59257), D (50962), and M (41840). In fairness, G is next in line, and I think people pick M frequently, too. Vowels at this point are a toss-up, as long as you don't pick U (this assumes that you have no idea what the word is when picking letters -- one puzzle about a month or so ago was URUGUAY, which obviously was picked to blow the letter-frequency charts out of the water).

I think I've had way too much time on my hands to think about this sort of thing...