"Wheel of Fortune": When should you buy a vowel?

If you watch "Wheel of Fortune," you may have wondered about the right time to buy a vowel. Some contestants do it at the first opportunity, while others wait, trying to earn money by guessing consonants first.

There are pros and cons to each strategy. Guessing consonants correctly wins you money (or prizes), while buying vowels cost you $250 each time. But when buying vowels you can't end up with a "Bankrupt" and lose all your money, as you could if you're spinning the wheel to guess consonants. Vowels are also easier to guess, since there are fewer of them, so you're less likely to be wrong and lose your turn.

(For this article, I'm assuming people know how "Wheel" is played. If you don't, check out this page.)

I've often wondered if contestants jump too quickly to start buying vowels. In many cases, a player buys a lot of vowels, then loses his or her turn, and another contestant swoops in to solve the puzzle. It seems like the first player did the work, the other reaped the rewards. I decided that if I was ever on the show I would try to get as many as four consonants on the board before buying vowels.

But what way is really right? To find out, I monitored the first 100 "spin" games of Wheel's 42nd season, which started Sept. 9 with new host Ryan Seacrest.

My question was simple: Does buying a vowel early make it more likely you will win? Here's what I found:

Out of those 100 games, the first player to buy a vowel won 44 of them. If it was random, you would expect each player to win 33.3.  So that seems a clear vote for buying vowels early. 

Breaking this down further, I looked at how well players did if they bought vowels on their first opportunity, versus if they waited one more turn and bought on their second. (To be clear, you can't buy vowels until you've won some money, so your first opportunity to buy a vowel would come on your second play.)

Here's how it worked out. Players who bought a vowel on their opportunity won 43% of the time (28 of 65), while those who waited one more turn won just 32% of the time (8 of 25). This further supports the strategy of buying vowels early.

Still, there was another factor to consider. Could it be that the advantage I found comes just from being the first player to play? That is, since the first player to play is often the first player to buy a vowel, is it simply the former element that gives the advantage?

To find out, I tracked 34 of the spin puzzles to see how the first player did. That player, it turns out, won 11 of 34 — in other words, just a hair less than a random distribution. This suggests that going first gives no advantage in itself.

To be certain, a larger sample size for all of these elements would be great. But based on what I have, I'm revising my plan: Buy vowels as soon as you can.