NYT Connections today hints and answers — Saturday, January 11 (#580)

Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on January 11 for puzzle #580 is a tad harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.6 out of 5.

Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.

Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #579, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #580. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.

Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.

Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it

Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category's difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you've made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.

Today's Connections words are: Converse, Supreme, Food, Network, Surfing, Kangaroo, Table, Tennis, Matrix, Breaking, Trampoline, Grid, Circulate, Taekwondo, Array, and Mingle.

If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:

• 🟨 Yellow: Display of rows and columns
• 🟩 Green: Things to do at a work event
• 🟦 Blue: Olympic events since 2000
• 🟪 Purple: ____ court

These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.

Here's a larger hint: Take in some sports, mingle with a coworker and enjoy the grids of the court.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #580?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Display of rows and columns: Array, grid, matrix, table
• 🟩 Things to do at a work event: Circulate, converse, mingle, network
• 🟦 Olympic events since 2000: Breaking, surfing, taekwondo, trampoline
• 🟪 ____ Court: Food, Kangaroo, Supreme, Tennis

I kicked today off with a strike seeing taekwondo, trampoline, surfing and tennis and noting them as Olympic sports. One away. So I moved on.

So, we quickly knocked out yellow category having seen matrix, grid and table. Took a moment to find array but we got there.

I saw kangaroo and immediately thought, "Court." Looking for food court, supreme court and tennis court made sense to me.

Now, I returned to the Olympics and was able to see breaking, which only just became an Olympic sport at the 2024 Summer games.

Which left networking as my last one. We had circulate, converse, mingle and network.

Yesterday's Connections answers

• 🟨 Be contingent (on): Depend, hinge, rely, rest
• 🟩 "Calm down": Chill, easy, enough, relax
• 🟦 Ingredients in an old fashioned: Bitters, orange, rye, sugar
• 🟪 Featured in the Monty Hall Problem: Car, door, goat, host

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #579, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

This writer is based in Los Angeles, and it's been a stressful week what with the multiple fires across the city. So, seeing bitters and rye made me immediately think of the drink I needed. Led right away to orange and sugar for an old fashioned.

From there, we wanted to relax and I saw easy and chill. I didn't think enough worked with this group but it doesn't work any other category.

I saw the yellow category of depend, hinge, rely and rest but was totally blanking on what the purple category may be.

The Monty Hall problem is a probability question based around three prize doors with a car behind one of them and goats behind the others. You pick a door, say No. 1 and the host opens another one, say No. 3. Then the hosts asks if you want to switch your choice. The probability is that actually yes, you should. Here's some reading if you're curious about the problem and the math behind it.