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As this posts, I'm about to get on a flight back to New York...
Today's NYT puzzle was the championship puzzle at the Napa Valley Puzzle Challenge last weekend. Below is a short write-up about the exciting final round and the tournament in general.
SPOILERS for today's Times puzzle below!
SPOILERS!
Spoilers.
Okay.
Will Shortz was good enough to provide this week's Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday puzzles for the tournament, and we commissioned an original, appropriately themed puzzle from Andrea Carla Michaels and her friend Gregory Cameron. (I can send that to you if you'd like to solve it.) We had about 25 competitors, which could have been better, but it was the first time and if (when) the Napa Library decides to do it again next year, people will know about it, both inside and outside our puzzle world.
Because the Monday puzzle was pretty hard, we essentially ended up with three Tuesday puzzles as the qualifying rounds. Eric Maddy was the first to finish each round, in around 3:15-3:30. The most incorrect papers were on the Monday puzzle, with that HEC/AMORES crossing.
When he sent me the puzzles, Will warned that the Thursday final was on the very hard side, and offered to prepare next Thursday's instead -- but we had to get the grid enlarged and copied onto foamcore, so we didn't have time to wait. (He figured the Wednesday puzzle wasn't appropriate because of its specialized movie theme.) Will was kind enough to ease up a handful of clues for our final, so that it wouldn't be too crazy hard.
We needn't have worried, because all three finalists finished in 12 minutes or so, well under the 20 I'd allotted. But it was exciting nonetheless. Finishing in third place, 22-year-old Google employee Jeff Davidson only wrote numbers in the rebus squares. He said he had the gimmick in his head, but obviously we couldn't give him credit.
First place was yet another photo finish -- after last year's ACPT B finals and this year's Crosswords LA -- with Jon Berman raising his hand less than a second before Eric Maddy. But they both had one half-wrong rebus square! Jon had HDTV instead of 3DTV in the top-right, because that was the first corner he finished, when he didn't have the theme totally grasped. Eric Maddy didn't remember his computer keyboard well enough, and put down SAND * (star) instead of SAND $ along with the "4". Eric had actually called me over during the final (they weren't wearing iPods or headphones) and whispered, "Do we need to have both elements in the square?" I had to tell him that I couldn't answer. Specifying such a thing beforehand would have given too much away, we all agreed, and none of the finalists were annoyed afterwards. (And it's not like there was a lot of cash at stake.)
For first place, Jon won a dinner package on the Napa Valley Wine Train, a bottle of wine, the alphabet in cookies from ABC Bakery, and a cute little trophy. About half the contestants came away with prizes, because we had a lot of donations from local businesses. Overall the day was a success, and the Napa Valley Library Foundation was thrilled. Thanks again to everyone who came out, and especially Evy Warshawski and Gretchen Margaroli for making it happen.
P.S. I don't think I'm going to post the NPR-Puzzlemaster-style quiz I wrote, because a certain collaborative constructor suggested we try to make it into a Sunday theme. So why not, we're going to see if that works. Sorry!
13 comments:
i'm looking below, but i don't see any spoilers... or anything else, for that matter. but yeah, i can see why using that puzzle for a final might have made things extra-exciting.
Whoops - forgot to finish that today. Good thing I have a few minutes here before my flight...
Ditto what Joon said. I'll be interested to hear what the rules were for correctly filling in the theme squares. With AL I was able to get the happy pencil without using 68-across, but I'm thinking that was considered insufficient at the tournament, since Dan said earlier that all the finalists had made errors.
Full post should be up now. We required both answers to be in each theme square, since otherwise one of the answers wouldn't be technically correct...
That makes sense; the corresponding rebus entry is obvious when solving on a computer, but on paper you definitely need to prove that you've fully grokked the theme.
I'd like a copy of puzzle 3, but I'm sure that I'm not the only one, so I'm happy to wait until you hear from all the interested people so that you can send it out in a single mass email.
Typically one of the nice qualities of a crossword tournament is that the answers are unambiguous. You either have the correct letter in the square or you don't. Rebus puzzles throw that all off, which is why they should never be used in a tournament setting. The contestants simply don't know what to put in the square to have their answer counted as correct. Man, especially for a finals puzzle. That's brutal.
Ironically, I could have won the thing if only we'd been solving in AcrossLite. I(I spent a lot of time figuring out what was above the 5 and started _AGES as well).
It's a little disconcerting to lose on an error when my across and down entries are BOTH correct (but there's a rebus fail). Nonetheless, everyone was playing under the same set of constraints, and I shall study my top row for future reference....
I never understood why acceptable rebus answers aren't listed in the rules at the ACPT, just in case. Veterans get a distinct advantage otherwise.
Alex, I'm not sure why you say that rebus puzzles are ambiguous. This particular one was not ideal for a tournament, but for many if not most rebus grids, the correct answers are crystal clear and the only confusion might be how to notate them (and ACPT will always give the benefit of the doubt to the solver). Do you think the ACPT shouldn't have rebus puzzles even in the seven qualifing rounds?
I wouldn't call this one "brutal" but certainly "rough" -- especially for Eric! Sorry! :)
IMO, a straightforward rebus should definitely be fair game, so e.g. [IN] in one square, going both ways, would be ok. For this kind of two-way rebus, it's trickier. Assuming you're placing both symbols in a square, does there need to be consistency as to which symbol/numeral needs to be top and bottom? Say you had 2/@ but then #/3 -- is that incorrect? What if you spelled out CARET instead of writing [^] but used symbols for the others? Seems difficult to judge. But on the other hand, it was probably better to judge this than if it were a non-final puzzle, because *that* would have been a bear to judge going through how everyone would have notated the squares:)
FWIW, I thought the puzzle was great!
can't remember if i've done the BEQ before. i certainly didn't do it 5 years ago, but it feels like maybe this is not the first time it's been re-run.
Thanks for the write-up - wish I could have attended!
It is ambiguous because, what do you accept? Just the first letter a la across lite? A circled letter? A symbol meaning "something goes here"? I would rather not see them at all.
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