OP solved it, closing

@chrono79 Can you explain this a bit better to beginners like me? Thank you.

clever!!!

"Best practice solutions tend to be a good balance of performance, readability and maintainability."
"Clever solutions tend to be very creative or make use of obscure language features. They usually are not code that you would want to put into production."

Setting "a" value to 1, and so on.

sum += arr[i].charCodeAt(j) - 96; Whats the function of 96 in this code ?

Can someone please explain how this answer is 'better' per say than other solutions here, for example Arhigod's solution. While it's functional it is verbose, uses a plethora of unnecessary variables, has a console.log still stuck in it and as a result still has lots of room for refactoring. Genuinely wondering?

I have the same issues i think, have you managed to pass the tests since then?

I liked it, looks cool for small arrays

Somewhere in your code you're trying to do something with an undefiend variable.

Im trying to do it with js, my code works fine and passes all the test but it gives me back a type error like this: TypeError: Cannot read property 'toLowerCase' of undefined at getCount. If I change it to not use the toLowerCase function, it gives the same error with the .length property somewhere else.
I have no idea what's going on, scope issue? broken kata? Hope someone can shed some light on me