NYT 1:59 ... LAT 1:38 ... CS 2:06 ... ND 1:28 ... JON 2:28
BEQ's offering today is his Lollapuzzoola construction, which I finished right around 6 minutes (iirc). Lolla puzzle PDFs and full standings are now up, with Howard again demonstrating that he's a step faster than the pack when not forced to use a dry-erase marker... :)
Hey, new comments while I was writing this! My favorite gimmick was #1 (Todd McClary), closely followed by #5 (Doug Peterson, one-upping my contribution from last year). But they were all great - Brian continues to impress as a constructor, Peter Gordon had some knotty sections that gave me more trouble (relative to the field) than anything else, BEQ always rocks, and Nothnagel's final themeless was outstanding.
I like BEQ's proposal to revisit the Guinness world record, still claimed by Stan Newman at 2:14 for a Monday NYT. I actually mentioned the idea to Brendan on Saturday, inspired by seeing Stan in competition for the first time in 20+ years. Wouldn't that be a good ACPT Saturday night activity? At least eight of us could top that record...
8 comments:
Hi Dan, congrats on your win. I've only done the BEQ puzzle so far, but I had mistakes in the NW, so that's the score that would have got dropped for me. I'll do the others tonight. Just curious, what was the scoring method? Did they keep track of the order that people finished and gave 2100 for 1, 2095 for 2, etc? How much did they take off for errors? Did you employ a different strategy since you didn't have the luxury of taking the whole minute to check?
first to finish got 2000 bonus points, then 1995, 1990, etc. there was a 100 bonus for a perfect puzzle, and -10 for each wrong square.
so howard's 2095 2100 2100 2100 2095 meant he finish 2nd, 1st, 1st, 1st, and 2nd with no errors. my 2060, 2075, 1950, 2070, 2055 meant i finished 9th, 6th, 9th, 7th, and 10th with one mistake on the 3rd puzzle. but i knew i could afford a mistake due to the drop-the-lowest rule, so i wasn't that upset.
important lesson learned, though. my mistake was actually a blank square! i check for blanks, but i had written and erased a letter in that square because i had accidentally entered it there when i was "aiming" for the next square over. (hey, this pencil-and-paper stuff is hard!) so when i finished the puzzle and looked over my paper i didn't notice that there was still a blank...
i do believe they wrote down the solving times and maybe recorded them in the spreadsheet, but they haven't posted them. i can ask brian. i suspect howard and dan were untouchable, but if you put together a fast set you might be able to "catch" francis for the 3rd spot in the finals. the fact that howard dropped a 2095 as his lowest score is totally absurd.
Hi Joon, thanks for the explanation. Yes, it would be interesting to see the times, just for grins. FYI, my times on the puzzles were
1 - 3:22
2 - 4:21
3 - 6:22, 8:15 if you include getting the title
4 - 9ish with 2 mistakes (don't have an exact time due to a phone call, but probably doesn't matter as this one would have got dropped)
5 - 5:36 without movie clues, but that really wasn't a hindrance.
Al, you probably would have finished Puzzle 5 quite a bit faster with the movie clues. They were super super gettable and I think most people flipped over the paper and immediately filled in all five theme answers.
Thanks Al! I really like the "finishing order" system, though there's more room for error (judges looked up at the big analog clock to write down an exact time). Didn't do any checking except for blanks. IIRC, I was around 3:00, 4:30, 6:00, 6:00, 5:00. Brian apparently is claiming #1 is Monday-level, but nobody broke 3:00, so we agreed it was Wednesday. (Oh, there's another fun difference from ACPT - not knowing exactly what kind of difficulty we were in for! Except when BEQ's was introduced as the "bastard puzzle"...)
Indeed, #5 provided the unique experience of filling in all 5 themers immediately! Except I (and others) wanted #3 to be SNAKES ON A PLANE, because the enacted scene involved a dislike of snakes...
So they enacted the movie scenes before the crossword? I bet I can guess what the scene for #5 was :-)! How did they enact the other ones?
Dan, you thought of SoaP too for #3? That was my first instinct, though I couldn't place the quote!
Then once I filled in a couple crosses, the whole scene came back to me and I did a mental head-slap, complete with "D'oh!", then filled in the correct movie.
i think it was common. i started to fill in SNAKESONA... wait, that doesn't fit at all. and they mentioned snakes explicitly in the "clue," which they usually don't.
1. "there's no crying in baseball!"
2. somebody repeatedly mangling axel foley's name over the phone
4. "frankly my dear, i don't give a damn."
i like the "finishing order" system, too, although you can see why it would not scale well from 70 to 700 contestants.
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