Quote from: DaveBrown74 on Today at 04:51:25 PMNot too dissimilar from me.I do that sometimes too but I do get caught with the wrong theme and burn lives. I will also leave it and comeback as I do with Strands and then something becomes clear.
I read through the whole thing once ideally without rushing - sometimes twice - and try to spend a few seconds thinking about each word and potential multiple meanings it might have. Once I've gone through that, on most days, I can usually get one right away. Obviously some days are harder than others. Once I get that first one it's generally a process of finding pairs or possibly sets of three that I feel pretty good about and then finding the best candidate(s) for the last word(s).
I think I've mentioned this before, but one thing I try to do is when I think I have one dead right, and then it's wrong, and it's early in the puzzle, I try to move away from that category altogether and find something else. Too many times when I first started doing Connections I'd get stuck on one idea, and then it turned out the whole idea was wrong. By cutting my losses with a given theme when I get it wrong once, I have found the results seem to be better than when I keep using up guesses by just swapping out one word for another. Obviously if it's later in the puzzle you may not have any other option, but I try to avoid that when it's early.