Good analysis.

I would rebut that I pulled the information from a list of English words, and not the frequency of use in sentences. But that’s really just a side note. Removing ‘jato’ would not be necessary to remove the assured victory if you have one less guess, having already eliminated it before.

The real meat of it is showing that there are at least 8 words that could be chosen that have distinct letters which can not be differentiated using process of elimination alone, even if you have 2 of the 4 bits of information already available at your disposal.

It may or may not become more difficult with longer words. And I’m sure there are much more technical ways to break down the necessary burn-letters. But I feel that the 8-word answer is sufficient to answer the question.