No, I'm not retiring. Years ago I promised that if I won 8 ACPTs in a row, I'd hang it up. Since then, it's become clear that I don't have a lock on this thing: I've been thoroughly beaten in the finals by Howard and Erik, and nearly taken down twice by Tyler. It felt good to win the old-fashioned way this year. Now that I don't have any more records or goals to achieve, I'll feel better about it when Erik kicks my ass again in the future, and when Joon and David and others win their own much-deserved titles. I have no plans to stop competing, but the ACPT may be a lower priority going forward.
A few comments (no spoilers) on the puzzle action itself. I solved Puzzle 1 under two minutes, again without trying to - everything just broke the right way, I used the theme to work faster (not usually the case on easy puzzles), and never misread or had to erase anything. On the disappointing side, I failed to solve Puzzle 4 in under three minutes for the first time since my rookie year. It was a particularly tricky one, but I felt like I was on pace, until I checked the clock and saw three minutes had already elapsed!
After the hardest Puzzle 4 ever, we got one of the easiest Puzzles 5 ever, and when I grasped the theme quickly I felt a huge sense of relief - not because I was moving fast, but because it would likely keep Erik from making up too much ground after his error on Puzzle 1. Sure enough, Erik finished the preliminary puzzles essentially just one minute shy of the top 3. If he'd had a chance to obliterate the field on Puzzle 5 (having beaten everyone by three minutes last year), my chances of regaining the title would have diminished.
In the final round, I felt great almost all the way through. The top and left sections fell very quickly before I got stuck a few times. I knew my pace was good, but still worried that Joon or David would pass me while I was puttering around in the center and lower-right sections. Fortunately, even the three wrong answers I wrote in (at 31-Down, 35-Across, and 47-Down) didn't slow me down too much. I was telling people all weekend that I was more confident about this final puzzle than in recent years - not because we all assumed (and hoped) it was by Robyn Weintraub, but because it was a 70-worder instead of the 64, 62, 60-word constructions I'd had so much trouble with. More words means shorter words, and I've seen all the clues for shorter words. Case in point: 4-Down was a gimme, despite being fairly obscure, so it didn't matter that I never understood the impenetrable clue at 1-Across.
I know you're really here for the solving times, so I'll close with those. As always, these are approximate because I check the clock before finishing, not after:
Puzzle 1: 1:55
Puzzle 2: 3:50
Puzzle 3: 4:15
Puzzle 4: 3:10
Puzzle 5: 5:30
Puzzle 6: 3:50
Puzzle 7: 6:45
...And I never got around to posting times from 2018, so in the interest of completeness, here's last year's numbers:
Puzzle 1: 2:10
Puzzle 2: 3:40
Puzzle 3: 4:30
Puzzle 4: 2:55
Puzzle 5: 7:30
Puzzle 6: 5:00
Puzzle 7: 6:45
Showing posts with label ACPT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ACPT. Show all posts
ACPT 2017: Back in Business
Last
weekend was my 10th time at the ACPT and my 7th
championship. As always, I had a great time seeing friends, catching
up, playing games, and solving some outstanding crosswords.
Once
again I'm going to write this up in the cliched FAQ format. But this
time, most of these questions actually were frequently asked of me!
Where's
Gretchen?
My
lovely wife hadn't missed the ACPT since we started dating in 2009,
but the theater she runs had a big benefit performance last Friday.
(Next year's benefit will be scheduled around the tournament, I've been
assured.)
What
happened to your official nametag?
I
wasn't wearing my nametag for the finals on Sunday, not because
everybody should know me by now, but because I left it in the room in
my haste to pack up and check out.
Why
did you keep fiddling with the Walkman during the finals?
The
tape ran out! Four or five minutes into the finals, the cassette filled with delightful
white noise stopped playing. In retrospect, I should have ignored it
and kept solving, because the announcers' voices were not really
audible, more like the “wah wah” of “Peanuts” adults.
Instead, I quickly hit Rewind and then Play, but that only bought me
30 seconds or so before the tape ran out again. All told, I stopped
solving three separate times to deal with the technical difficulty.
It's a good thing I'm old enough to be very familiar with the Walkman
layout! And it's a very good thing that the final results were not
close, because if I'd lost by 10 or 15 seconds I wouldn't be laughing
about this.
Did
you think you'd lost when Tyler finished the puzzle so quickly?
No,
I suspected he had a mistake. I definitely heard a hubbub and saw
Tyler step away from the board. A moment later there was an ovation,
but it didn't sound like the “Yay, you won!” ovation I heard for
Howard last year – more like “That sucks, but we love you!” So
I figured I was still in it, but because I had so much of the puzzle
yet to solve, I was nervous that Joon was going to finish any second.
What
does the laser-engraved prize from Noteworthy Chocolates look like?
 |
| Click to enlarge (SPOILERS FOR PUZZLE 8) |
Are you going to eat that?
Haven't decided.
Did
you get any congratulatory emails that would impress your
Hamilton-loving puzzle friends?
What
were your solving times?
These
are approximate, because I tend to check the clock before I'm
finished, to see how much time I'm going to have to mop up and look
over the puzzle, or whether I need to race through the final corner.
For the second straight year, I was lucky to be far from the “:00”
delineator on any of the puzzles.
#1 - 2:25
#2 - 3:35
#3 - 5:25
#4 - 2:40
#5 - 6:45
#6 - 3:45
#7 - 6:15
#8 - 8:14
Wait,
did you ever post solving times last year?
No
I didn't, because I never wrote a wrap-up post, because I was a sore
loser and busy that week anyway. For the record, here are my times
from the 2016 ACPT:
#1 - 2:35
#2 - 3:15
#3 - 3:40
#4 - 2:50
#5 - 6:30
#6 - 4:30
#7 - 6:20
#8 - 8:44
See
you next year?
That's
the plan.
ACPT 2015: Eke!
It's been more than a week since the ACPT and we've all moved on. Still, there might be a few people interested in my play-by-play on the competition puzzles. You've seen the Instagram video of the final seconds – what can I say about that except holy crap.
I look forward to reading Oliver Roeder's FiveThirtyEight article about the tournament, which will be published next week. Because 538 is all about data-driven journalism, they are using this site's daily spreadsheets to come up with some charts and graphs. The whole reason I started posting my times six-plus years ago was so that somebody, someday, could run some sort of statistical analysis on them. And finally that day has arrived!
For the record, I really liked the Stamford Marriott and environs, and I was one of the people very disappointed with the move away from NYC. The hotel was great, and there seemed to be a better range of dining options within walking distance. The extra travel leg remains annoying, but my cousin Juli in Stamford helped mitigate the loss of “home-field advantage,” picking me up at the train and putting me up on Thursday night. Thanks, Juli!
(Spoilers starting here.)
Puzzle 1 – 1:55
I don't think I've been particularly close to a sub-two-minute solve before. The secret this year was that I wasn't even thinking about trying it. I knew I was going at a good pace and didn't get tangled up anywhere, and about halfway through when I hit the answer RETTA (which probably under 5% of the room would know cold, as I did), I was emboldened to keep pushing.
Part of my strategy is to glance at the clock when there's one more section to go, so I know whether I need to speed up or can relax. I looked up and was shocked to see 13:14 on the clock with only a few answers left in the southwest corner. When I finished I saw 13:05, took a glance at the grid, and raised my hand. And then for the next hour or two I was very nervous, because I wasn't sure that I didn't have a blank square – I was too stunned for my glance to be at all thorough.
Puzzle 2 – 4:02
I should probably ditch that strategy of checking the clock. With this puzzle I broke in near the middle, so I nailed the revealer and figured out the theme very early. I looked up with 21:14 on the timer and only the southeast corner empty, which meant that it was possible to get in under the minute if I hurried. Instead, I froze up a bit, had some trouble in that corner, and just missed it. If I'd just kept solving I could have broken four minutes – and it would have been awesome to beat the whole room on each of the first two puzzles.
Puzzle 3 – 5:15
I hadn't solved any of Merl's puzzles since the last ACPT, so I printed out a few of his recent ones for the “warmup” clipboard. Unfortunately I never looked at them, because I had Merl pegged for Puzzle 6. Oh well!
Puzzle 4 – 2:45
Picked up the theme pretty early once again, so that helped me through some of the crunchier spots in this harder-than-usual #4.
Puzzle 5 – 7:35
Did not pick up the theme early at all, which is why Joon and Anne beat me so handily on this puzzle. I had the top half basically finished and was rebooting somewhere in the bottom half when I finally figured out what was going on. I had fallen into the clever traps sprung by Jeff Chen in the first two theme answers: namely, ambiguous clues for 5- and 12-Down (SERB & HERB, but I had SERF & HERO) that kept me from seeing the “newbies” gimmick. After the “aha” I worked quite fast, and fixed my errors, but the damage was done.
Puzzle 6 – 4:40
Not much to say here – I tend to be good with proper names, but most of the theme answers didn't come very easily. I wish Lynn Lempel would make some Sunday puzzles for Will!
Puzzle 7 – 7:00ish
With a four-minute cushion over fourth place, I could afford to solve carefully, but the puzzle wasn't tricky enough to slow me down much. The solving time is approximate – I saw 38:15 when I checked the clock near the end, so I started writing more slowly and looked over the puzzle for a full extra minute, handing it in at the eight-minute mark. I don't know that I could have broken six minutes if I'd tried. As I said elsewhere, I think that Tyler's sub-six-minute solve here is a more impressive feat than my sub-two on Puzzle 1.
Puzzle 8 (Finals) – 7:13
Obviously, this was not my best performance on the whiteboards. I thought I would need to be extra-cautious with a scary, sciencey constructor and an extremely low word count. (For the laypeople: fewer words means more long answers and fewer short answers, which are usually the easiest to solve.) But then I saw two gimmes to get started with (RIPA and ASLAN) and made short work of the northeast corner. It seemed overall like Byron and Will were pulling their punches with the cluing – maybe they thought that the low word count (and many proper names) needed to be offset, but the upshot was that it played way too easy for an ACPT final.
I still had plenty of trouble, of course. Sometimes there will be two or three entries in a themeless grid that I've never seen. In this one, I was unfamiliar with LEMAITRE (LeMaster is a name, so I didn't hesitate too much); TEST GRADE (two words I'd never seen together); HARGREAVES (“Homeland” actress Amy would have actually been easier for me, and she is not famous); Messrs. WALSH and PETERSON as clued; and most especially, MANAMA.
I kept getting stuck in the middle of the grid because I have just never seen MANAMA before. I didn't know if the “capital” of [Mideast capital] was a city or a currency; I even wondered if there was another way to interpret “Mideast”! This is entirely my fault, because a puzzle champion should absolutely recognize the capital of Bahrain when given six out of six letters. I might have been more confident if I had ever seen MANAMA in one of the tens of thousands of crosswords I've done, but somehow it's never been in a major puzzle. I don't study trivia, I don't play Sporcle, I never took geography – if it's not in crosswords, and The Amazing Race hasn't been there, I may not have heard of it.
So I was tentative because as much as you want to finish fast, you really don't want to have an error. That's why I spent a few extra seconds after finishing, first scanning for a blank, then looking one more time at the crossings of MANAMA. Obviously, this was not the best strategy either, because if I'd waited just one more second, I would have lost.
Much was made in the run-up to the ACPT about “six in a row” and breaking that record. I use the passive voice because I don't give a rap about having the most consecutive wins. The only record I'm shooting for is eight career titles, because to me that's the most meaningful. If I manage to get eight in a row, as I've said, I'll step away and give some other people a chance. (That doesn't mean that I'd never come back to compete – if Tyler were to reel off three more quick wins, which would not be at all surprising, I'm sure I'd be tempted to try to take back the career record.) Next year, though, the goal is just to make it a little less exciting.
I look forward to reading Oliver Roeder's FiveThirtyEight article about the tournament, which will be published next week. Because 538 is all about data-driven journalism, they are using this site's daily spreadsheets to come up with some charts and graphs. The whole reason I started posting my times six-plus years ago was so that somebody, someday, could run some sort of statistical analysis on them. And finally that day has arrived!
For the record, I really liked the Stamford Marriott and environs, and I was one of the people very disappointed with the move away from NYC. The hotel was great, and there seemed to be a better range of dining options within walking distance. The extra travel leg remains annoying, but my cousin Juli in Stamford helped mitigate the loss of “home-field advantage,” picking me up at the train and putting me up on Thursday night. Thanks, Juli!
(Spoilers starting here.)
Puzzle 1 – 1:55
I don't think I've been particularly close to a sub-two-minute solve before. The secret this year was that I wasn't even thinking about trying it. I knew I was going at a good pace and didn't get tangled up anywhere, and about halfway through when I hit the answer RETTA (which probably under 5% of the room would know cold, as I did), I was emboldened to keep pushing.
Part of my strategy is to glance at the clock when there's one more section to go, so I know whether I need to speed up or can relax. I looked up and was shocked to see 13:14 on the clock with only a few answers left in the southwest corner. When I finished I saw 13:05, took a glance at the grid, and raised my hand. And then for the next hour or two I was very nervous, because I wasn't sure that I didn't have a blank square – I was too stunned for my glance to be at all thorough.
Puzzle 2 – 4:02
I should probably ditch that strategy of checking the clock. With this puzzle I broke in near the middle, so I nailed the revealer and figured out the theme very early. I looked up with 21:14 on the timer and only the southeast corner empty, which meant that it was possible to get in under the minute if I hurried. Instead, I froze up a bit, had some trouble in that corner, and just missed it. If I'd just kept solving I could have broken four minutes – and it would have been awesome to beat the whole room on each of the first two puzzles.
Puzzle 3 – 5:15
I hadn't solved any of Merl's puzzles since the last ACPT, so I printed out a few of his recent ones for the “warmup” clipboard. Unfortunately I never looked at them, because I had Merl pegged for Puzzle 6. Oh well!
Puzzle 4 – 2:45
Picked up the theme pretty early once again, so that helped me through some of the crunchier spots in this harder-than-usual #4.
Puzzle 5 – 7:35
Did not pick up the theme early at all, which is why Joon and Anne beat me so handily on this puzzle. I had the top half basically finished and was rebooting somewhere in the bottom half when I finally figured out what was going on. I had fallen into the clever traps sprung by Jeff Chen in the first two theme answers: namely, ambiguous clues for 5- and 12-Down (SERB & HERB, but I had SERF & HERO) that kept me from seeing the “newbies” gimmick. After the “aha” I worked quite fast, and fixed my errors, but the damage was done.
Puzzle 6 – 4:40
Not much to say here – I tend to be good with proper names, but most of the theme answers didn't come very easily. I wish Lynn Lempel would make some Sunday puzzles for Will!
Puzzle 7 – 7:00ish
With a four-minute cushion over fourth place, I could afford to solve carefully, but the puzzle wasn't tricky enough to slow me down much. The solving time is approximate – I saw 38:15 when I checked the clock near the end, so I started writing more slowly and looked over the puzzle for a full extra minute, handing it in at the eight-minute mark. I don't know that I could have broken six minutes if I'd tried. As I said elsewhere, I think that Tyler's sub-six-minute solve here is a more impressive feat than my sub-two on Puzzle 1.
Puzzle 8 (Finals) – 7:13
Obviously, this was not my best performance on the whiteboards. I thought I would need to be extra-cautious with a scary, sciencey constructor and an extremely low word count. (For the laypeople: fewer words means more long answers and fewer short answers, which are usually the easiest to solve.) But then I saw two gimmes to get started with (RIPA and ASLAN) and made short work of the northeast corner. It seemed overall like Byron and Will were pulling their punches with the cluing – maybe they thought that the low word count (and many proper names) needed to be offset, but the upshot was that it played way too easy for an ACPT final.
I still had plenty of trouble, of course. Sometimes there will be two or three entries in a themeless grid that I've never seen. In this one, I was unfamiliar with LEMAITRE (LeMaster is a name, so I didn't hesitate too much); TEST GRADE (two words I'd never seen together); HARGREAVES (“Homeland” actress Amy would have actually been easier for me, and she is not famous); Messrs. WALSH and PETERSON as clued; and most especially, MANAMA.
I kept getting stuck in the middle of the grid because I have just never seen MANAMA before. I didn't know if the “capital” of [Mideast capital] was a city or a currency; I even wondered if there was another way to interpret “Mideast”! This is entirely my fault, because a puzzle champion should absolutely recognize the capital of Bahrain when given six out of six letters. I might have been more confident if I had ever seen MANAMA in one of the tens of thousands of crosswords I've done, but somehow it's never been in a major puzzle. I don't study trivia, I don't play Sporcle, I never took geography – if it's not in crosswords, and The Amazing Race hasn't been there, I may not have heard of it.
So I was tentative because as much as you want to finish fast, you really don't want to have an error. That's why I spent a few extra seconds after finishing, first scanning for a blank, then looking one more time at the crossings of MANAMA. Obviously, this was not the best strategy either, because if I'd waited just one more second, I would have lost.
Much was made in the run-up to the ACPT about “six in a row” and breaking that record. I use the passive voice because I don't give a rap about having the most consecutive wins. The only record I'm shooting for is eight career titles, because to me that's the most meaningful. If I manage to get eight in a row, as I've said, I'll step away and give some other people a chance. (That doesn't mean that I'd never come back to compete – if Tyler were to reel off three more quick wins, which would not be at all surprising, I'm sure I'd be tempted to try to take back the career record.) Next year, though, the goal is just to make it a little less exciting.
ACPT 2014: Fighting for Five
Five down, three to go? I've told people since last year that I would retire (to a farm upstate with David Rosen) if I kept on winning, because I wouldn't have any records left to break, and I imagine it's already getting less and less fun for everybody else. Since that hubristic pronouncement has now been published, I might have to stick to it.
Of course, I won't get to keep winning without a fight. Through Saturday's puzzles, I was ahead of Tyler by all of three seconds. And this year, Joon and Erik broke into the “top tier” with their excellent performances. It will certainly be more exciting if six solvers (rather than four) have a real shot at the finals. That's not even mentioning Francis, David, Stella, and other top-ten stalwarts, ready to pounce.
I managed to have more fun in the off-hours than usual, because I was staying at the hotel this year. I was particularly glad to finally meet Alex Boisvert, and played my first-ever games of unofficial Jeopardy!, both written and hosted by Mike Shenk. Not only that, I held my own against big-time game-show winners Jason Keller and Andy Kravis. My one game of Celebrity: Get a Clue! ended in an exact tie, which was pretty fun. Jet lag didn't turn out to be a big factor, since I flew in two days early, but I still never really caught up on sleep, and didn't feel like I solved at 100% effectiveness on Saturday.
Here are my approximate solving times, and some commentary, for the tournament puzzles. Slight SPOILERS, mostly for Puzzle 8.
Puzzle 1 – 2:25
Puzzle 2 – 3:30
As usual, Puzzle 2 is where I remember to look at the title and blurb. So I had the theme pegged 15 seconds in, and used it for an especially fast solve. I've been on Patrick Blindauer's wavelength since 2007, so I'm glad he keeps coming up with wacky ideas for Will to use in the tournament.
Puzzle 3 – 5:20
This was a perfect ACPT theme, dense and tricky. I haven't been doing Merl's puzzles since he stopped distributing .puz files, but I solved a few recent ones in my preparation, and didn't feel like I had any trouble locking into his style. The “Merliness” is always sanded down a bit for ACPT anyway.
LUNCHTIME – I went to my usual spot,
where I like to pick up some tasty food, bring it back to the hotel, and have a good hour to relax before the afternoon session. Sadly, this local establishment seems to have been forced out by gentrification or something. I got a chicken sandwich instead, but it took freakin' half an hour.
Puzzle 4 – 2:55
Puzzle 5 – 8:40
My strategy was to grok the theme early, because that often helps with a very hard puzzle. This turned out to be a bad strategy, since top solvers could (and did) finish the thing without totally understanding the theme. I spent extra time in the southwest corner (the first one I finished) making sure I “got it.” Knowing about the “clones” did provide me with some free letters during the rest of the solve, but in retrospect it wasn't worth it. Two other forehead-slapping moments on this one: not getting any of the music-related clues without a bunch of letters in place, and making a rookie mistake in the northeast corner (the last one I finished). I had the end of 12-Down (...ASIF) and wrote in ACTSASIF, which does not fit the tense of the clue. Thirty seconds later, when nothing else was working, I finally realized my error and erased it. This was the longest a Puzzle 5 has taken me since 2009, so I was worried that I would lose ground in the standings. But no – just like I was telling people in the hallway before Puzzle 5, if it's hard for you, it's hard for everybody else too.
Puzzle 6 – 4:15
Really enjoyed this, though I don't approve of the notorious Girls/backpack crossing. It was an easy enough puzzle that finishing under 4 minutes was possible, but I wasn't solving smoothly.
Puzzle 7 – 6:45
I was worried that there was some sort of meta answer, because Will Shortz had repeatedly announced that something weird and Dr. Fill-unfriendly was involved. Not too weird, fortunately – this theme also took all of 15 seconds to suss out. I took extra care with the numbers, and spent an extra minute at the end to look over the grid again.
The Finals (link to video)
What can I say? It was much easier than last year. There were no unusual words, and while the clues were typically creative and misdirective, they weren't difficult in a “fresh” way that would stump experts like us. I had a bit of an advantage in the proper-name clues; almost all were pieces of trivia that I recognized with a few letters down. The big exception was NELL'S, apparently a 1980s Manhattan nightclub, but I knew TOP GEAR, I AM LEGEND, KLAUS Baudelaire, the novel GILEAD, not to mention old crossword friends SAL Paradise (a Tuesday clue), KIM, and ESALEN (which could be the institute for the study of advanced crosswordese).
I consciously decided to ignore the top-left corner when I began, partly because it tends to be a little more intractable than other sections, and partly because there are more short answers in the top-right, which might make it easier to start in. Once I got past my DR PEPPER problem up there early on, I didn't run into any roadblocks. The only time I “jumped” away from the section I was working on was when I spotted an easy fill-in-the-blank, confirmed it with a crossing (ENEMY/DENY), wrote those in, and returned to where I'd been working.
The only other erasure I had was near the end, when I confused the obscure Cleopatra attendant for the obscure Argonaut, which might have made 2-Down LAUDER (a European name that can also have an easy clue). But once I figured out the awesome “stripper” clue at 26-Across, I fixed it, and it was over.
Thanks and congratulations to everybody involved, and all the top finishers, and all the new and old friends I got to see. Let's do it again next year!
Of course, I won't get to keep winning without a fight. Through Saturday's puzzles, I was ahead of Tyler by all of three seconds. And this year, Joon and Erik broke into the “top tier” with their excellent performances. It will certainly be more exciting if six solvers (rather than four) have a real shot at the finals. That's not even mentioning Francis, David, Stella, and other top-ten stalwarts, ready to pounce.
I managed to have more fun in the off-hours than usual, because I was staying at the hotel this year. I was particularly glad to finally meet Alex Boisvert, and played my first-ever games of unofficial Jeopardy!, both written and hosted by Mike Shenk. Not only that, I held my own against big-time game-show winners Jason Keller and Andy Kravis. My one game of Celebrity: Get a Clue! ended in an exact tie, which was pretty fun. Jet lag didn't turn out to be a big factor, since I flew in two days early, but I still never really caught up on sleep, and didn't feel like I solved at 100% effectiveness on Saturday.
Here are my approximate solving times, and some commentary, for the tournament puzzles. Slight SPOILERS, mostly for Puzzle 8.
Puzzle 1 – 2:25
Puzzle 2 – 3:30
As usual, Puzzle 2 is where I remember to look at the title and blurb. So I had the theme pegged 15 seconds in, and used it for an especially fast solve. I've been on Patrick Blindauer's wavelength since 2007, so I'm glad he keeps coming up with wacky ideas for Will to use in the tournament.
Puzzle 3 – 5:20
This was a perfect ACPT theme, dense and tricky. I haven't been doing Merl's puzzles since he stopped distributing .puz files, but I solved a few recent ones in my preparation, and didn't feel like I had any trouble locking into his style. The “Merliness” is always sanded down a bit for ACPT anyway.
LUNCHTIME – I went to my usual spot,
Puzzle 4 – 2:55
Puzzle 5 – 8:40
My strategy was to grok the theme early, because that often helps with a very hard puzzle. This turned out to be a bad strategy, since top solvers could (and did) finish the thing without totally understanding the theme. I spent extra time in the southwest corner (the first one I finished) making sure I “got it.” Knowing about the “clones” did provide me with some free letters during the rest of the solve, but in retrospect it wasn't worth it. Two other forehead-slapping moments on this one: not getting any of the music-related clues without a bunch of letters in place, and making a rookie mistake in the northeast corner (the last one I finished). I had the end of 12-Down (...ASIF) and wrote in ACTSASIF, which does not fit the tense of the clue. Thirty seconds later, when nothing else was working, I finally realized my error and erased it. This was the longest a Puzzle 5 has taken me since 2009, so I was worried that I would lose ground in the standings. But no – just like I was telling people in the hallway before Puzzle 5, if it's hard for you, it's hard for everybody else too.
Puzzle 6 – 4:15
Really enjoyed this, though I don't approve of the notorious Girls/backpack crossing. It was an easy enough puzzle that finishing under 4 minutes was possible, but I wasn't solving smoothly.
Puzzle 7 – 6:45
I was worried that there was some sort of meta answer, because Will Shortz had repeatedly announced that something weird and Dr. Fill-unfriendly was involved. Not too weird, fortunately – this theme also took all of 15 seconds to suss out. I took extra care with the numbers, and spent an extra minute at the end to look over the grid again.
The Finals (link to video)
What can I say? It was much easier than last year. There were no unusual words, and while the clues were typically creative and misdirective, they weren't difficult in a “fresh” way that would stump experts like us. I had a bit of an advantage in the proper-name clues; almost all were pieces of trivia that I recognized with a few letters down. The big exception was NELL'S, apparently a 1980s Manhattan nightclub, but I knew TOP GEAR, I AM LEGEND, KLAUS Baudelaire, the novel GILEAD, not to mention old crossword friends SAL Paradise (a Tuesday clue), KIM, and ESALEN (which could be the institute for the study of advanced crosswordese).
I consciously decided to ignore the top-left corner when I began, partly because it tends to be a little more intractable than other sections, and partly because there are more short answers in the top-right, which might make it easier to start in. Once I got past my DR PEPPER problem up there early on, I didn't run into any roadblocks. The only time I “jumped” away from the section I was working on was when I spotted an easy fill-in-the-blank, confirmed it with a crossing (ENEMY/DENY), wrote those in, and returned to where I'd been working.
The only other erasure I had was near the end, when I confused the obscure Cleopatra attendant for the obscure Argonaut, which might have made 2-Down LAUDER (a European name that can also have an easy clue). But once I figured out the awesome “stripper” clue at 26-Across, I fixed it, and it was over.
Thanks and congratulations to everybody involved, and all the top finishers, and all the new and old friends I got to see. Let's do it again next year!
ACPT 2014: Drive for Five
It's Sunday afternoon and this year's ACPT is over, perhaps never to return to New York City. This is a placeholder post for you to leave kudos and/or condolences; I will update with results when I have a chance, and as always, might add further insights in a separate post later in the week...
UPDATE 5:00 PM: Hooray! I won. Great to see everybody, as always!
UPDATE 5:00 PM: Hooray! I won. Great to see everybody, as always!
ACPT 2013: It Takes Me Four-Ever To Write Things
Surprise! I managed to finish this thing while delayed in Fort Lauderdale.
Nine days later, and another ACPT is in the books! Sorry I've totally punted on writing about it, but I didn't think I had too much to say. (And sorry that this is going to be long anyway.) This year, my story was far from the most interesting one: Anne had a birthday, Tyler had a DiMaggioesque streak end, Howard had another near miss, and Dr. Fill got smarter, I guess. Let me first thank Will, Helene, the constructors, the judges, my friends near and far, my A Division colleagues, my theatrical colleagues, my family, Gretchen, and the Almighty, from whom I'm told all blessings flow.
(I'll have some SPOILERS, but only for the final puzzle.)
I was expecting to have a tougher tournament than usual, because I spent the weeks leading up to the ACPT rehearsing, orchestrating, and opening a new musical. It's true that I didn't “train” nearly as much as I had in the past – maybe 5 hours over the last month solving extra puzzles beyond the daily spreadsheet fodder – but that was enough to keep up the chops. Good to know!
This was probably my favorite set of ACPT puzzles in the last six years. Not a weak theme entry or ugly bit of fill to be found. Starting with Puzzle 2, I remembered to read and consider all the titles and blurbs, which really helped me untangle some of the theme answers. On the downside, this seemed like a slightly easier set than usual – at least, there were very few errors among the top ranks, and (aside from the CSI actress in Puzzle 3) few really tricky spots for solvers in general. On the upside, fewer errors meant that the judges could get all the Saturday scores online by 7 p.m., and everybody's happy about that.
Here are my approximate solving times, because that's the point of this website, isn't it:
I started slowly, as you do on such a hard puzzle, but never really picked up the pace like I had in the past. The last area to finish was the southwest, where I was looking at those three long Downs for a while. Getting APHRODITE was helpful, but still didn't break it open. I was not trying to figure out APOLUNE, because I knew I wouldn't know the word. The other Acrosses all had unhelpful clues and not enough letters entered, and I couldn't break in from the bottom (having had an incorrect E in what turned out to be LIENOR – not LOANER or LENDER – for almost the entire solve).
I entered DDE using the “D” of APHRODITE, but (contrary to what commentator Greg Pliska and lots of other people watching thought) that wasn't my problem. I was aware of the FDR possibility, but statistically (based on letter frequency) it's more likely to be DDE. The real problem was a total brain freeze, the kind that happens when you're banging your head against insanely hard clues for eight minutes. Remember that none of the finalists are used to spending more than five or six minutes on a crossword! So there's a little bit of mental endurance involved, for which I may not have been prepared. Perhaps next winter I'll finally take a crack at speed-solving Frank Longo's "25-Foot-Long Crossword Puzzle"...
Anyway, I could not figure out -A-ATICS. And there's only one word that fits! Pattern recognition is supposed to be my strong suit, but I was letting the many possible interpretations of the clue [Ones bearing high interest?] throw me off. Finally I thought, “this shouldn't be so hard,” and started running the alphabet. (You can even see me on the video sort of pointing to the first letter of the word while mouthing, “A, B, C, D, E, F---ohhhhh!”) Once I got around that roadblock, I had enough letters in place to mop it up quickly.
Hopefully that little play-by-play was somewhat interesting! Thanks for reading, and special thanks to the solvers who visit here regularly and post their times. (Shout-out to Ken Crowell!) See you next year at the Drive For Five! (Okay, let's not call it that.)
Nine days later, and another ACPT is in the books! Sorry I've totally punted on writing about it, but I didn't think I had too much to say. (And sorry that this is going to be long anyway.) This year, my story was far from the most interesting one: Anne had a birthday, Tyler had a DiMaggioesque streak end, Howard had another near miss, and Dr. Fill got smarter, I guess. Let me first thank Will, Helene, the constructors, the judges, my friends near and far, my A Division colleagues, my theatrical colleagues, my family, Gretchen, and the Almighty, from whom I'm told all blessings flow.
(I'll have some SPOILERS, but only for the final puzzle.)
I was expecting to have a tougher tournament than usual, because I spent the weeks leading up to the ACPT rehearsing, orchestrating, and opening a new musical. It's true that I didn't “train” nearly as much as I had in the past – maybe 5 hours over the last month solving extra puzzles beyond the daily spreadsheet fodder – but that was enough to keep up the chops. Good to know!
This was probably my favorite set of ACPT puzzles in the last six years. Not a weak theme entry or ugly bit of fill to be found. Starting with Puzzle 2, I remembered to read and consider all the titles and blurbs, which really helped me untangle some of the theme answers. On the downside, this seemed like a slightly easier set than usual – at least, there were very few errors among the top ranks, and (aside from the CSI actress in Puzzle 3) few really tricky spots for solvers in general. On the upside, fewer errors meant that the judges could get all the Saturday scores online by 7 p.m., and everybody's happy about that.
Here are my approximate solving times, because that's the point of this website, isn't it:
- Puzzle 1 (2:20) – every year, I start really fast and think “maybe this is the year for a two-minute solve.” And every year I'm reminded halfway through that it's a Tuesday puzzle, not a Monday puzzle, and I ease off the gas pedal.
- Puzzle 2 (3:30)
- Puzzle 3 (5:05) – I'm going to blame my cheap Bic mechanical pencil, which broke twice during this puzzle, for keeping me from a two-minute win. I'd predicted BEQ for the playoff puzzle, with the logic that he's fully qualified, has paid his dues, and hasn't done it yet. (Correct logic, wrong answer. I only got one correct in the prediction game: Liz Gorski on #6.) Now I'm really rooting for BEQ to have the playoff grid the next time I'm up there, because this Puzzle 3 and 2010's Puzzle 5 have been my best performances relative to the rest of the field.
- Puzzle 4 (2:35)
- Puzzle 5 (6:50) – Funny moment in the aftermath here: David Plotkin bursting out into the hallway, “Give a taxonomist a clue about primates...!” Guess it took him longer than the rest of us to stop thinking about monkeys. A couple minutes earlier I'd been chatting with Howard Barkin, because the two of us were the first finishers. Howard was psyched about having smoked Puzzle 5, and hadn't felt that good of a solving groove in years. Sadly, I was with Howard a couple hours later, when the afternoon scores were appearing online, and we looked at his Puzzle 4 scan with its inadvertent blank square. Heartbreaking. But even without much training, and even with a small child in his house, Howard is clearly in the top tier and will be solving for all the marbles again soon.
- Puzzle 6 (3:58) – Pure hubris, but fortunately not hamartia. I often check the clock when I'm down to the last corner. On Puzzle 6 I saw 26:08 left, and instead of playing it safe (knowing that I was still in the pole position), I stepped on the gas (sorry for all the racing metaphors) and raised my hand right at the minute mark. I gather that nobody had ever solved an ACPT 19x19 in under 4 minutes, but the fun of setting an apparent record surely wasn't worth the risk of having a blank square. With the relative lack of errors among the top ranks, I wouldn't have been able to make up for such a mistake like I did last year. (And I'd even spotted a blank on Puzzle 4 before turning it in. Stupid Dan.)
- Puzzle 7 (7:50, at 90% speed)
I started slowly, as you do on such a hard puzzle, but never really picked up the pace like I had in the past. The last area to finish was the southwest, where I was looking at those three long Downs for a while. Getting APHRODITE was helpful, but still didn't break it open. I was not trying to figure out APOLUNE, because I knew I wouldn't know the word. The other Acrosses all had unhelpful clues and not enough letters entered, and I couldn't break in from the bottom (having had an incorrect E in what turned out to be LIENOR – not LOANER or LENDER – for almost the entire solve).
I entered DDE using the “D” of APHRODITE, but (contrary to what commentator Greg Pliska and lots of other people watching thought) that wasn't my problem. I was aware of the FDR possibility, but statistically (based on letter frequency) it's more likely to be DDE. The real problem was a total brain freeze, the kind that happens when you're banging your head against insanely hard clues for eight minutes. Remember that none of the finalists are used to spending more than five or six minutes on a crossword! So there's a little bit of mental endurance involved, for which I may not have been prepared. Perhaps next winter I'll finally take a crack at speed-solving Frank Longo's "25-Foot-Long Crossword Puzzle"...
Anyway, I could not figure out -A-ATICS. And there's only one word that fits! Pattern recognition is supposed to be my strong suit, but I was letting the many possible interpretations of the clue [Ones bearing high interest?] throw me off. Finally I thought, “this shouldn't be so hard,” and started running the alphabet. (You can even see me on the video sort of pointing to the first letter of the word while mouthing, “A, B, C, D, E, F---ohhhhh!”) Once I got around that roadblock, I had enough letters in place to mop it up quickly.
Hopefully that little play-by-play was somewhat interesting! Thanks for reading, and special thanks to the solvers who visit here regularly and post their times. (Shout-out to Ken Crowell!) See you next year at the Drive For Five! (Okay, let's not call it that.)
ACPT 2013: Not a Recap
Yup, I won. It was the best Saturday I've ever had at the ACPT, and the worst Sunday -- the playoff puzzle put up a bigger fight than it ever had before. Luckily, I finished just ahead of Anne Erdmann and took home a fourth trophy. More to come tomorrow or later in the week...
Saturday, 3/9/13
Add your times here.
It's ACPT time! This weekend I'm gunning for my fourth consecutive championship, but the competition is stronger than ever. It wouldn't be surprising to see David and Joon as first-time finalists -- in fact, based on the spreadsheets here, it would be surprising for David not to make the top 3. But what about Tyler and Anne and Howard? Could we be headed for another nightmare four-(or more-)way tie scenario like in 2009? I'm confident that I can win again if I'm up on the big boards, but the road to the finals keeps getting more and more crowded. Let's not leave any squares empty this year, huh? Good luck to everybody and see you in Brooklyn!
It's ACPT time! This weekend I'm gunning for my fourth consecutive championship, but the competition is stronger than ever. It wouldn't be surprising to see David and Joon as first-time finalists -- in fact, based on the spreadsheets here, it would be surprising for David not to make the top 3. But what about Tyler and Anne and Howard? Could we be headed for another nightmare four-(or more-)way tie scenario like in 2009? I'm confident that I can win again if I'm up on the big boards, but the road to the finals keeps getting more and more crowded. Let's not leave any squares empty this year, huh? Good luck to everybody and see you in Brooklyn!
ACPT 2012: Wrapping It Up
Another March, another ACPT, another whirlwind weekend, and another trophy. I've decided to adopt the super-hackneyed "fake Q&A" format in order to get my main points down with a minimum of effort. Sorry!
There are minor spoilers below -- nothing that will ruin your solving experience if you're still planning to do the puzzles sometime, like, let's say, my parents.
So what happened on Puzzle 3?
I had a blank square and an incorrect square, the second and third letters of 1-Across. The incorrect square was 3-Down, [Lohengrin's bride] -- usually I'll throw down a crosswordesey answer like that in about half a second, but somehow I picked the wrong one, ILSA instead of ELSA. Confidently. So that whole northwest corner was giving me fits, and I guess I moved on without finishing it. (Unlike #5, when I was able to throw down a half-dozen gimmes to get started, and #7, when I started writing and never stopped, #2 and #3 started out very slow. And we know why #2 was so tricky to break into.)
But that wasn't the real problem. I was preoccupied with the middle section, where I was one of the many fooled by [Pitcher's successes]. I had to abandon that area with an empty square and come back to it at the end. After a terrifying 10-20 seconds where I thought I was going to be stumped by a moderately hard puzzle, I realized what was going on, fixed SALES, figured out HOLE, exhaled, and handed in my puzzle.
Except I still had the hole in the NW corner. I don't remember if I even glanced over the grid to check for blanks -- if I'd spotted it, I'm sure I would have fixed that wrong square. Thank goodness ILSA/ELSA didn't cost me a shot at the finals, because the ten points for that second incorrect letter almost made a real difference (I was five points behind David Plotkin going into #7). And if I had to cringe every time I saw ILSA or ELSA in a puzzle, I wouldn't have much fun solving.
Did you have fun over the weekend?
Of course! It was not fun when I found out about my mistake at the dinner break, but after the queasiness went away and I resigned myself to a likely out-of-the-money finish, I could relax and enjoy the evening more than last year, when I was sure I'd be in the finals. It helped that I went ahead and had a couple beers, which is a couple more than I usually have. By the time I tried going to sleep at 2am, I knew I was back in contention. At that point, it appeared that I'd have to beat David by a minute on #7 to leapfrog into third place. That would have been a fun payoff for followers of our little rivalry -- but instead, Anne dropped down and got her own opportunity to try to pass David. (He'll be back, don't you worry... I remember what happened after I got tantalizingly close to the finals and finished fourth.)
So how did that "strategy" work out?
Not well. I was trying to play a little conservatively, since I should be able to make the top 3 if I solve at 90% speed and take extra care checking crossings. By #5, I thought I was in first place, so when I finished with only a few seconds left in the minute, I wussed out and took an extra minute to check my grid. An hour later, I was reeeaaally wishing I could have those 25 points back.
Aren't you just humblebragging now?
Sorry.
How awesome are Anne and Tyler?
I know, right? Anne's grace and skill are well-documented, and Tyler is just a beast. I was happy that Tyler could relax on Sunday morning, after so many years having to sweat Puzzle 7. Building up a five-minute lead (four officially, but he gave one up for extra caution) is pretty damn impressive. This is long enough already, so I won't list the other great people that I got to hang with over the weekend, for the first or fiftieth time.
Can I compare my solving times to yours?
That's why we're here, isn't it?
#1 - 2:20
#2 - 5:15
#3 - 5:50
#4 - 2:30
#5 - 5:55 (turned in at 6:55)
#6 - 4:05
#7 - 5:55
Wanna talk about the finals?
Two gimmes got me started in the middle section: [Longtime TV Guide columnist Matt], whom I haven't read in years but whose name I know well, and [Orsino's lover in "Twelfth Night"], which is the basis of a musical that I know really well. Those two crazy kids don't get together until the very end of the play, but I guess the clue is OK.
Not surprisingly, constructor Merl Reagle used a lot of fresh phrases with interesting letter patterns. I had -VE-ECS and couldn't make heads or tails of it, so I ended up erasing some correct letters. Early on, I saw the clue [Repeat offender] for an 8-letter answer, H-R-----. And I wrote in HARD CASE. Isn't that almost a better answer than the right one? Fortunately I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't working and took it back out. I had to jump around the grid a lot, which isn't usually recommended, and erased good and bad letters alike when I hit dead ends. But I made it through with only one scary moment at the end.
I was really confused with the 9-Down clue, [They help keep people amused]. It had to be IDS based on the crossings, but even when I thought about the psychological "id", I didn't feel confident. So when I finished the puzzle I had to spend some more time making sure that IDS was kosher (though I never got that "aha" click), and some time checking for blanks, natch. I didn't realize how long I took to signal "done" -- according to the video it was 35 seconds, which is not recommended either.
One interesting bit of symmetry: it was Merl who collected my Puzzle 3. I gave him a goofy look on my way out of the ballroom, like, "I hope I didn't screw anything up!" as he was staring at the empty square on my paper.
There are minor spoilers below -- nothing that will ruin your solving experience if you're still planning to do the puzzles sometime, like, let's say, my parents.
So what happened on Puzzle 3?
I had a blank square and an incorrect square, the second and third letters of 1-Across. The incorrect square was 3-Down, [Lohengrin's bride] -- usually I'll throw down a crosswordesey answer like that in about half a second, but somehow I picked the wrong one, ILSA instead of ELSA. Confidently. So that whole northwest corner was giving me fits, and I guess I moved on without finishing it. (Unlike #5, when I was able to throw down a half-dozen gimmes to get started, and #7, when I started writing and never stopped, #2 and #3 started out very slow. And we know why #2 was so tricky to break into.)
But that wasn't the real problem. I was preoccupied with the middle section, where I was one of the many fooled by [Pitcher's successes]. I had to abandon that area with an empty square and come back to it at the end. After a terrifying 10-20 seconds where I thought I was going to be stumped by a moderately hard puzzle, I realized what was going on, fixed SALES, figured out HOLE, exhaled, and handed in my puzzle.
Except I still had the hole in the NW corner. I don't remember if I even glanced over the grid to check for blanks -- if I'd spotted it, I'm sure I would have fixed that wrong square. Thank goodness ILSA/ELSA didn't cost me a shot at the finals, because the ten points for that second incorrect letter almost made a real difference (I was five points behind David Plotkin going into #7). And if I had to cringe every time I saw ILSA or ELSA in a puzzle, I wouldn't have much fun solving.
Did you have fun over the weekend?
Of course! It was not fun when I found out about my mistake at the dinner break, but after the queasiness went away and I resigned myself to a likely out-of-the-money finish, I could relax and enjoy the evening more than last year, when I was sure I'd be in the finals. It helped that I went ahead and had a couple beers, which is a couple more than I usually have. By the time I tried going to sleep at 2am, I knew I was back in contention. At that point, it appeared that I'd have to beat David by a minute on #7 to leapfrog into third place. That would have been a fun payoff for followers of our little rivalry -- but instead, Anne dropped down and got her own opportunity to try to pass David. (He'll be back, don't you worry... I remember what happened after I got tantalizingly close to the finals and finished fourth.)
So how did that "strategy" work out?
Not well. I was trying to play a little conservatively, since I should be able to make the top 3 if I solve at 90% speed and take extra care checking crossings. By #5, I thought I was in first place, so when I finished with only a few seconds left in the minute, I wussed out and took an extra minute to check my grid. An hour later, I was reeeaaally wishing I could have those 25 points back.
Aren't you just humblebragging now?
Sorry.
How awesome are Anne and Tyler?
I know, right? Anne's grace and skill are well-documented, and Tyler is just a beast. I was happy that Tyler could relax on Sunday morning, after so many years having to sweat Puzzle 7. Building up a five-minute lead (four officially, but he gave one up for extra caution) is pretty damn impressive. This is long enough already, so I won't list the other great people that I got to hang with over the weekend, for the first or fiftieth time.
Can I compare my solving times to yours?
That's why we're here, isn't it?
#1 - 2:20
#2 - 5:15
#3 - 5:50
#4 - 2:30
#5 - 5:55 (turned in at 6:55)
#6 - 4:05
#7 - 5:55
Wanna talk about the finals?
Two gimmes got me started in the middle section: [Longtime TV Guide columnist Matt], whom I haven't read in years but whose name I know well, and [Orsino's lover in "Twelfth Night"], which is the basis of a musical that I know really well. Those two crazy kids don't get together until the very end of the play, but I guess the clue is OK.
Not surprisingly, constructor Merl Reagle used a lot of fresh phrases with interesting letter patterns. I had -VE-ECS and couldn't make heads or tails of it, so I ended up erasing some correct letters. Early on, I saw the clue [Repeat offender] for an 8-letter answer, H-R-----. And I wrote in HARD CASE. Isn't that almost a better answer than the right one? Fortunately I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't working and took it back out. I had to jump around the grid a lot, which isn't usually recommended, and erased good and bad letters alike when I hit dead ends. But I made it through with only one scary moment at the end.
I was really confused with the 9-Down clue, [They help keep people amused]. It had to be IDS based on the crossings, but even when I thought about the psychological "id", I didn't feel confident. So when I finished the puzzle I had to spend some more time making sure that IDS was kosher (though I never got that "aha" click), and some time checking for blanks, natch. I didn't realize how long I took to signal "done" -- according to the video it was 35 seconds, which is not recommended either.
One interesting bit of symmetry: it was Merl who collected my Puzzle 3. I gave him a goofy look on my way out of the ballroom, like, "I hope I didn't screw anything up!" as he was staring at the empty square on my paper.
ACPT 2012: Day Two
Six puzzles down, one (or two) to go... It's Sunday at the ACPT.
I'll update this post after the tournament.
I'll update this post after the tournament.
ACPT 2012: Day One
Here's an open thread for ACPT talk. I'll update here, or in the comments, when we get Day 1 results this evening. Good luck to everyone competing!
ACPT Preview!
Since I've got something more substantial to say than "Add your times here," let's make this a separate entry and everything else will auto-post as usual. I'll schedule a couple ACPT posts for Saturday and Sunday, as well. For now, I thought we could dedicate a thread to ACPT plans, strategies, predictions, and trash-talk.
Why don't we take those in order... Can't make Friday night plans, because I've got a family dinner. It's my mom's birthday! Which will be great, but then my whole family is staying the weekend in hopes of seeing me win the ACPT. So that's inadvertently piling on a whole bunch more pressure, at least to make the finals.
(Win or lose, I'm definitely not blogging a long wrap-up this year. Super busy next week, in part because I'm leaving soon for a three-month job in Michigan.)
I don't think I'm actually going to share my strategy, since most of my closest competitors will be reading this... But rest assured, I do have a strategy. Oh yes. And it's different from my usual strategy, which is "solve until your fingers ache". I've probably done about 50% of the training this year compared to the last few years, and even this week, I haven't felt like I'm in tip-top shape. Fortunately, my not-quite-tip-top is still pretty good.
More interestingly, "strategy"-wise: the constructor list, leaked by Will to BEQ, includes Patrick Blindauer (puzzle 2 or 5, right? surely something that will stump Dr. Fill) but doesn't include Maura Jacobson (so Merl will surely give us a breezy, punny puzzle 6, right?). Even money on Patrick Berry for the finals? Lynn Lempel's gotta have #1 or #4? It's fun to speculate, but I wouldn't put anything past Will after he hit us with Byron Walden on puzzle 1 a couple years ago.
Predictions! Not including myself, I'll say the top three are Anne, Tyler, and Plot. Bold, right? As for trash-talk, I think Plot and I have had that fairly well-covered here and on Facebook. It seems so out of character to jaw about the ACPT, because of how freaking nice all the top contenders are, right? (Wrong! You have no idea how nasty it gets in the finalists' sequestration room -- it's like an NHL game in there! Katie Hamill spit in some dude's face a couple years ago! Anne took a swing at me with one of her braids! Not really, but wouldn't that be awesome?) I hope nobody's put off by the lack of traditional decorum. I'm just having some fun when I remind Plot that he can beat me on all the easy puzzles he wants, but he has no chance to take me down in the finals.
Anyway! I kid because I love, and also because I am threatened. Please come say hello this weekend - I want to hang with as many people as possible, especially if they actually visit this site. Safe travels to the out-of-towners, and I look forward to seeing everyone on Saturday morning!
Why don't we take those in order... Can't make Friday night plans, because I've got a family dinner. It's my mom's birthday! Which will be great, but then my whole family is staying the weekend in hopes of seeing me win the ACPT. So that's inadvertently piling on a whole bunch more pressure, at least to make the finals.
(Win or lose, I'm definitely not blogging a long wrap-up this year. Super busy next week, in part because I'm leaving soon for a three-month job in Michigan.)
I don't think I'm actually going to share my strategy, since most of my closest competitors will be reading this... But rest assured, I do have a strategy. Oh yes. And it's different from my usual strategy, which is "solve until your fingers ache". I've probably done about 50% of the training this year compared to the last few years, and even this week, I haven't felt like I'm in tip-top shape. Fortunately, my not-quite-tip-top is still pretty good.
More interestingly, "strategy"-wise: the constructor list, leaked by Will to BEQ, includes Patrick Blindauer (puzzle 2 or 5, right? surely something that will stump Dr. Fill) but doesn't include Maura Jacobson (so Merl will surely give us a breezy, punny puzzle 6, right?). Even money on Patrick Berry for the finals? Lynn Lempel's gotta have #1 or #4? It's fun to speculate, but I wouldn't put anything past Will after he hit us with Byron Walden on puzzle 1 a couple years ago.
Predictions! Not including myself, I'll say the top three are Anne, Tyler, and Plot. Bold, right? As for trash-talk, I think Plot and I have had that fairly well-covered here and on Facebook. It seems so out of character to jaw about the ACPT, because of how freaking nice all the top contenders are, right? (Wrong! You have no idea how nasty it gets in the finalists' sequestration room -- it's like an NHL game in there! Katie Hamill spit in some dude's face a couple years ago! Anne took a swing at me with one of her braids! Not really, but wouldn't that be awesome?) I hope nobody's put off by the lack of traditional decorum. I'm just having some fun when I remind Plot that he can beat me on all the easy puzzles he wants, but he has no chance to take me down in the finals.
Anyway! I kid because I love, and also because I am threatened. Please come say hello this weekend - I want to hang with as many people as possible, especially if they actually visit this site. Safe travels to the out-of-towners, and I look forward to seeing everyone on Saturday morning!
ACPT 2011: Bi-Winning!
Yeah, the Charlie Sheen jokes are played out and won’t age well at all, but I’m not going to come up with something cleverer on my own. This loooong post is spoiler-free until the very end, at which point you will be warned.
Where to start? I already talked a little bit about the Friday night fun, where I had a small serving of humble pie in the cryptic crossword contest. I did well, but was hoping for better than 10th place on the British puzzle and maybe 15th-20th on the American (and that’s without the dozens of top solvers who skipped the event). Retired to my hotel room around 12:30, thus breaking my promise last year to hang out more. I’ve finally realized two things: getting into bed relatively early does not get me more sleep, and none of my competitors are getting much sleep either.
Next year I really will socialize more. I got to at least chat a little with most of my pals from tournaments past, but I regret not getting more than brief hellos with Matt Gaffney, who was one of my favorites even before he started serving up free weekly genius. What I do not regret is bringing a small stack of puzzles from home (NYTs from 2005 and Saturday Stumpers from 2006) and polishing them off before and between tournament rounds. “Readers” of this “blog” may not know that before solving the day’s puzzles, I almost always warm up with some old puzzles (between 2 and 12, depending on how cobwebby the brain is that day). After all, I have a reputation to uphold, so I want those times to be optimal. Anyway, this was most useful on Sunday morning. During the less absorbing talent show acts, I solved BEQ’s Sunday Times puzzle, two Stumpers (one of which had me stuck in a corner for quite a while), and two NYT freestyles. I finished by flying through a Saturday by Patrick Berry, which gave me confidence for Puzzle 8, and cracked me up when I saw this answer (Puzzle 2 spoiler!).
Going back to Saturday morning. I didn’t get to the ballroom early enough to have my pick of seats, so in order to be in my usual position (last row, right half) I had to sit next to Stella Zawistowski -- who of course is delightful, but she wasn’t thrilled about the situation at first. Stella ended up handing in two puzzles before me (when we were in the same minute), so I think it worked out OK.
Puzzle 1 started out Monday-easy, and for the first half I was actually considering a sub-2-minute solve. But I lost the groove a bit in the bottom half, and mis-wrote some letters in 46-Down, finishing at 2:20. Puzzle 2 wasn’t as hard (or outside-the-box) as I’d expected from Pete Muller, and I was somewhat familiar with the theme. Solved in 4:05, and if only I’d done that Berry puzzle earlier, I wouldn’t have spent time wondering about 3-Down, and might have broken 4 minutes and beaten the room. Apparently I did beat the room on Puzzle 3 (4:50), which surprised me, because it was typical Merl and didn’t have much in the way of weirdness or traps. Except for those short theme answers, I guess -- when I filled in 57-Across I just assumed it was someone I hadn’t heard of with a Merl-y clue.
Lunch, like last year, was a Wendy’s meal back in my room. The restaurants get overwhelmed at the lunch break, and I wanted to decompress alone for a few minutes. Puzzle 4 was a Wednesday theme with Tuesday clues, and I didn’t have to push too hard to get in under 3 minutes (2:45). And then there was Puzzle 5, by Mike Shenk, whom I’d considered the least likely of the viable candidates for that slot. I found the overall cluing harder than last year (as did most people, I assume), and didn’t grasp what was going on with the theme until about halfway through. Spent a lot of time looking at 81-Across, which I’d never seen before (not thinking of the common French word that adds a prefix to it!), but I was satisfied with the crosses and finished up around 8:40. Out in the hallway, every A Division contender except for me and Francis was leaving the ballroom with head in hands, claiming to be out of the running. I kept pointing out that if everyone tanked the puzzle, everyone was still alive! Puzzle 6 (4:15) was typically unexciting, but I totally laughed at the pun at 81-Across.
My girlfriend Gretchen came over at dinner break, and we joined Eric Berlin and Katherine Bryant for a reprise of our meal last year, when we'd happened upon a great Mexican restaurant on Pacific Street. Peter Gordon, Kiran Kedlaya, Thomas Weisswange, David Moulton, and Kevin Wald came along to make it a nice big-but-not-too-big group. Back in the ballroom later, the one-act play exceeded expectations, and the “ACPTzing Race” extravaganza by Greg Pliska and John Chaneski was pretty brilliant, though maybe a little too difficult overall (I think about 20 groups out of 100 were able to finish). Gretchen and I roped in Michael Smith and Patrick Merrell to solve with us, and we gave up with aching brains and a couple puzzles left. Late in the game I went to beg a hint from Pliska, and apparently I was the first person to claim I was holding a Fast Forward pass. Went to bed earlyish again, and couldn’t fall asleep for way too long again.
By Saturday night I knew I had a four-minute lead on Anne, and wasn’t in any danger of missing the finals unless I turned in an error. So I took it easy on Puzzle 7, finished in around 8:35, and double-checked theme answers and thorny spots for another minute and a half. Checked out of the hotel, grabbed (more) coffee and a sandwich from Starbucks, and chilled out until it was time to pile into the ballroom for the marquee events.
AND HERE COME THE SPOILERS FOR PUZZLE #8. BEWARE!
Let’s just fast-forward to the A finals, since this is too long and Tyler has already spoken of the brick-pooping in the back room and the craziness of the B finals. I wasn’t too nervous, though I was more afraid of Tyler next to me this year than I was of Howard last year. I mean, dude won five in a row and hasn’t missed a letter in competition since, what, 2002?
I got started, and my five-second “head start” was immediately erased by Nancy Schuster, who accidentally tapped Anne on the shoulder right away. (Gretchen was ready to file a complaint if the finish was close, which… didn’t turn out to be a problem.) I scanned the clues like the proverbial headless chicken before settling on “dysphonia” as a concern for ENTS, but couldn’t get anything to cross it. (Why haven’t I learned the elementary skill of looking for fill-in-the-blank toeholds? Then again, none of these FITBs would have been gimmes.) I kept coming back to [Figure in “The Greatest Game Ever Played”] because I knew I’d heard of said game, but couldn’t pull it up until I had a few letters in UNITAS.
So I jumped down to STINE crossing ITALIC and then KHAN -- never saw that movie, but 1982 + sci-fi was enough -- which was enough of a chunk to get me going. I ran into a wall after completing that center-right section, and putzed around for a bit (putting in that all-important E at the end of [Chemical suffix]!) before completing the top right and dropping ETERNAL OPTIMIST into the bottom section. I’m thinking those 15s helped make this grid easier than many finals, because all those free letters were there when moving into a new quadrant.
I really started feeling good when I put in LEAD A DOUBLE LIFE with only two letters on the board -- though I had SO FEW in mind, which provided that tell-tale “-IF-”. (Didn’t even think of LIVE as the first word; Tyler was wise to wait on that.) (Also, seems to me like the A-level clue for SO FEW was the easiest of the three.) From there it was pretty smooth sailing. No idea how I’d heard of DIGITALIS, but that helped a lot with the bottom left. The only scary moment was the clue for GUN IT, [Charge when a job is done?]. I knew that had to be the answer, but the “aha” never clicked into place. Afterwards I talked with constructor Mike Nothnagel about it, and told him (as I’d still argue) that I thought that clue was too much of a stretch. The last letter I put in was the “U” in SHOUT. I didn’t even notice this coincidence until afterwards: next week I’m going to Michigan to work on a production of… Shout!
And that was that, the second win of my anticipated eight in a row before retiring to a farm upstate with David Rosen. (Kidding, of course. Despite my performance this year, I hardly think I'm unbeatable, but you're all welcome to your opinions otherwise. Note that in 2004, one Trip Payne completed a tough Bob Klahn final in 5:16, while noted slouches Al Sanders and Jon Delfin were over 10 minutes, and I recently managed 6:11 on paper.)
I was glad to have defeated Tyler head-to-head, which I didn’t get to do last year. I was glad that Anne finished perfectly, which she didn’t get to do last year. And of course I had a marvelous time hobnobbing with old and new friends for a weekend. I wonder if the same five or six people are going to monopolize the A finals for a little while, like that period when it was always Ellen/Jon/Doug/Trip/Al. I also wonder if I will manage to solve fewer crosswords in 2011. After last year I thought for sure I’d slow down, but that didn’t pan out -- I still feel like I want to catch up on all those years I wasn’t doing puzzles. And because I’m posting times here every day, my pride may not allow me to slack off. Oh well.
Four years, nine trophies... I’m coming for ya, Mimi Raphael!
Where to start? I already talked a little bit about the Friday night fun, where I had a small serving of humble pie in the cryptic crossword contest. I did well, but was hoping for better than 10th place on the British puzzle and maybe 15th-20th on the American (and that’s without the dozens of top solvers who skipped the event). Retired to my hotel room around 12:30, thus breaking my promise last year to hang out more. I’ve finally realized two things: getting into bed relatively early does not get me more sleep, and none of my competitors are getting much sleep either.
Next year I really will socialize more. I got to at least chat a little with most of my pals from tournaments past, but I regret not getting more than brief hellos with Matt Gaffney, who was one of my favorites even before he started serving up free weekly genius. What I do not regret is bringing a small stack of puzzles from home (NYTs from 2005 and Saturday Stumpers from 2006) and polishing them off before and between tournament rounds. “Readers” of this “blog” may not know that before solving the day’s puzzles, I almost always warm up with some old puzzles (between 2 and 12, depending on how cobwebby the brain is that day). After all, I have a reputation to uphold, so I want those times to be optimal. Anyway, this was most useful on Sunday morning. During the less absorbing talent show acts, I solved BEQ’s Sunday Times puzzle, two Stumpers (one of which had me stuck in a corner for quite a while), and two NYT freestyles. I finished by flying through a Saturday by Patrick Berry, which gave me confidence for Puzzle 8, and cracked me up when I saw this answer (Puzzle 2 spoiler!).
Going back to Saturday morning. I didn’t get to the ballroom early enough to have my pick of seats, so in order to be in my usual position (last row, right half) I had to sit next to Stella Zawistowski -- who of course is delightful, but she wasn’t thrilled about the situation at first. Stella ended up handing in two puzzles before me (when we were in the same minute), so I think it worked out OK.
Puzzle 1 started out Monday-easy, and for the first half I was actually considering a sub-2-minute solve. But I lost the groove a bit in the bottom half, and mis-wrote some letters in 46-Down, finishing at 2:20. Puzzle 2 wasn’t as hard (or outside-the-box) as I’d expected from Pete Muller, and I was somewhat familiar with the theme. Solved in 4:05, and if only I’d done that Berry puzzle earlier, I wouldn’t have spent time wondering about 3-Down, and might have broken 4 minutes and beaten the room. Apparently I did beat the room on Puzzle 3 (4:50), which surprised me, because it was typical Merl and didn’t have much in the way of weirdness or traps. Except for those short theme answers, I guess -- when I filled in 57-Across I just assumed it was someone I hadn’t heard of with a Merl-y clue.
Lunch, like last year, was a Wendy’s meal back in my room. The restaurants get overwhelmed at the lunch break, and I wanted to decompress alone for a few minutes. Puzzle 4 was a Wednesday theme with Tuesday clues, and I didn’t have to push too hard to get in under 3 minutes (2:45). And then there was Puzzle 5, by Mike Shenk, whom I’d considered the least likely of the viable candidates for that slot. I found the overall cluing harder than last year (as did most people, I assume), and didn’t grasp what was going on with the theme until about halfway through. Spent a lot of time looking at 81-Across, which I’d never seen before (not thinking of the common French word that adds a prefix to it!), but I was satisfied with the crosses and finished up around 8:40. Out in the hallway, every A Division contender except for me and Francis was leaving the ballroom with head in hands, claiming to be out of the running. I kept pointing out that if everyone tanked the puzzle, everyone was still alive! Puzzle 6 (4:15) was typically unexciting, but I totally laughed at the pun at 81-Across.
My girlfriend Gretchen came over at dinner break, and we joined Eric Berlin and Katherine Bryant for a reprise of our meal last year, when we'd happened upon a great Mexican restaurant on Pacific Street. Peter Gordon, Kiran Kedlaya, Thomas Weisswange, David Moulton, and Kevin Wald came along to make it a nice big-but-not-too-big group. Back in the ballroom later, the one-act play exceeded expectations, and the “ACPTzing Race” extravaganza by Greg Pliska and John Chaneski was pretty brilliant, though maybe a little too difficult overall (I think about 20 groups out of 100 were able to finish). Gretchen and I roped in Michael Smith and Patrick Merrell to solve with us, and we gave up with aching brains and a couple puzzles left. Late in the game I went to beg a hint from Pliska, and apparently I was the first person to claim I was holding a Fast Forward pass. Went to bed earlyish again, and couldn’t fall asleep for way too long again.
By Saturday night I knew I had a four-minute lead on Anne, and wasn’t in any danger of missing the finals unless I turned in an error. So I took it easy on Puzzle 7, finished in around 8:35, and double-checked theme answers and thorny spots for another minute and a half. Checked out of the hotel, grabbed (more) coffee and a sandwich from Starbucks, and chilled out until it was time to pile into the ballroom for the marquee events.
AND HERE COME THE SPOILERS FOR PUZZLE #8. BEWARE!
Let’s just fast-forward to the A finals, since this is too long and Tyler has already spoken of the brick-pooping in the back room and the craziness of the B finals. I wasn’t too nervous, though I was more afraid of Tyler next to me this year than I was of Howard last year. I mean, dude won five in a row and hasn’t missed a letter in competition since, what, 2002?
I got started, and my five-second “head start” was immediately erased by Nancy Schuster, who accidentally tapped Anne on the shoulder right away. (Gretchen was ready to file a complaint if the finish was close, which… didn’t turn out to be a problem.) I scanned the clues like the proverbial headless chicken before settling on “dysphonia” as a concern for ENTS, but couldn’t get anything to cross it. (Why haven’t I learned the elementary skill of looking for fill-in-the-blank toeholds? Then again, none of these FITBs would have been gimmes.) I kept coming back to [Figure in “The Greatest Game Ever Played”] because I knew I’d heard of said game, but couldn’t pull it up until I had a few letters in UNITAS.
So I jumped down to STINE crossing ITALIC and then KHAN -- never saw that movie, but 1982 + sci-fi was enough -- which was enough of a chunk to get me going. I ran into a wall after completing that center-right section, and putzed around for a bit (putting in that all-important E at the end of [Chemical suffix]!) before completing the top right and dropping ETERNAL OPTIMIST into the bottom section. I’m thinking those 15s helped make this grid easier than many finals, because all those free letters were there when moving into a new quadrant.
I really started feeling good when I put in LEAD A DOUBLE LIFE with only two letters on the board -- though I had SO FEW in mind, which provided that tell-tale “-IF-”. (Didn’t even think of LIVE as the first word; Tyler was wise to wait on that.) (Also, seems to me like the A-level clue for SO FEW was the easiest of the three.) From there it was pretty smooth sailing. No idea how I’d heard of DIGITALIS, but that helped a lot with the bottom left. The only scary moment was the clue for GUN IT, [Charge when a job is done?]. I knew that had to be the answer, but the “aha” never clicked into place. Afterwards I talked with constructor Mike Nothnagel about it, and told him (as I’d still argue) that I thought that clue was too much of a stretch. The last letter I put in was the “U” in SHOUT. I didn’t even notice this coincidence until afterwards: next week I’m going to Michigan to work on a production of… Shout!
And that was that, the second win of my anticipated eight in a row before retiring to a farm upstate with David Rosen. (Kidding, of course. Despite my performance this year, I hardly think I'm unbeatable, but you're all welcome to your opinions otherwise. Note that in 2004, one Trip Payne completed a tough Bob Klahn final in 5:16, while noted slouches Al Sanders and Jon Delfin were over 10 minutes, and I recently managed 6:11 on paper.)
I was glad to have defeated Tyler head-to-head, which I didn’t get to do last year. I was glad that Anne finished perfectly, which she didn’t get to do last year. And of course I had a marvelous time hobnobbing with old and new friends for a weekend. I wonder if the same five or six people are going to monopolize the A finals for a little while, like that period when it was always Ellen/Jon/Doug/Trip/Al. I also wonder if I will manage to solve fewer crosswords in 2011. After last year I thought for sure I’d slow down, but that didn’t pan out -- I still feel like I want to catch up on all those years I wasn’t doing puzzles. And because I’m posting times here every day, my pride may not allow me to slack off. Oh well.
Four years, nine trophies... I’m coming for ya, Mimi Raphael!
Monday, 3/21/11
NYT (downs only) 2:08 ... LAT (d.o.) 2:20 ... CS (d.o.) 2:43 ... ND (d.o.) 2:03 ... JON 2:19
Don't feel like doing puzzles this morning... I'll probably get to them later today so I can see what commenters everywhere are saying about me. God forbid I get spoiled on a Monday puzzle!
Ben Zimmer's videos of the A finals are embedded in the BEQ recap here. And Nancy Shack has the B and C finals.
Don't feel like doing puzzles this morning... I'll probably get to them later today so I can see what commenters everywhere are saying about me. God forbid I get spoiled on a Monday puzzle!
Ben Zimmer's videos of the A finals are embedded in the BEQ recap here. And Nancy Shack has the B and C finals.
Sunday, 3/20/11
NYT untimed ... LAT 4:25 ... MR 3:51 ... BG 4:50 ... ND 3:15 ... CS 2:37 ... WP 4:43 ... Crossword Sudoku no thanks
So Saturday went pretty well. I'm all but assured of a finals spot, and I just have to hope for good mojo on that last freestyle puzzle by Mike Nothnagel (on whose LP2 final I once beat Francis by all of 8 seconds). See you afterwards, and hit up the Puzzle Brothers for a live-blog of the festivities.
**EVENING UPDATE**
So Sunday went pretty well too. Once again, I intend to write about the tournament here this week, and this time I'll really do it. Thanks to everyone who makes the ACPT happen, hellos to friends old and new, and congratulations to all the other winners -- I'll note that we've had three consecutive B Division champs who are "readers" of this "blog". Of course, you can read all the coverage at the website, where the links section should resume updating tomorrow.
So Saturday went pretty well. I'm all but assured of a finals spot, and I just have to hope for good mojo on that last freestyle puzzle by Mike Nothnagel (on whose LP2 final I once beat Francis by all of 8 seconds). See you afterwards, and hit up the Puzzle Brothers for a live-blog of the festivities.
**EVENING UPDATE**
So Sunday went pretty well too. Once again, I intend to write about the tournament here this week, and this time I'll really do it. Thanks to everyone who makes the ACPT happen, hellos to friends old and new, and congratulations to all the other winners -- I'll note that we've had three consecutive B Division champs who are "readers" of this "blog". Of course, you can read all the coverage at the website, where the links section should resume updating tomorrow.
Saturday, 3/19/11
NYT 5:18 ... LAT 2:47 ... CS 2:09 ... ND 5:25 ... Boxing Rings (p) 10:55
To any new readers who followed the link on the ACPT page: Hello! This is not a blog, where people do not write interesting things for you to read.
Highlights from yesterday: good news about Lollapuzzoola 4; winning a couple rounds of Peter Gordon's "Celebrity" iPhone app; dinner with Brian, Amanda, Neville & Emily; getting crushed in the cryptic competition by Jeffrey Harris, Doug Hoylman, Al Sanders, and several others; meeting Andrew Ries, Bruce Sutphin, Bonnie Gentry, and many others; chatting with old friends (including good news from Doug Peterson); discovering a "small world" moment with ACPT regular Kent Brody, whose nephew was a friend of mind in high school; and getting called out by Merl Reagle for a comment here. Huh, that seems pretty mild for a blog criticism. (His point was that the "meta" find was much more fortuitous than I realized...)
Here we go with ACPT Day 1, I'm off to warm up my pencil. Standings will be updated here throughout the day.
To any new readers who followed the link on the ACPT page: Hello! This is not a blog, where people do not write interesting things for you to read.
Highlights from yesterday: good news about Lollapuzzoola 4; winning a couple rounds of Peter Gordon's "Celebrity" iPhone app; dinner with Brian, Amanda, Neville & Emily; getting crushed in the cryptic competition by Jeffrey Harris, Doug Hoylman, Al Sanders, and several others; meeting Andrew Ries, Bruce Sutphin, Bonnie Gentry, and many others; chatting with old friends (including good news from Doug Peterson); discovering a "small world" moment with ACPT regular Kent Brody, whose nephew was a friend of mind in high school; and getting called out by Merl Reagle for a comment here. Huh, that seems pretty mild for a blog criticism. (His point was that the "meta" find was much more fortuitous than I realized...)
Here we go with ACPT Day 1, I'm off to warm up my pencil. Standings will be updated here throughout the day.
Catching up with the ACPT
You may know that I like to collect crossword books. Nowadays, Peter Gordon's Puzzlewright Press is pretty much the only game in town, publishing outstanding new collections by Berry, Longo, Quigley, et al., as well as reprints of LA Times and CrosSynergy puzzles. And the Simon & Schuster series provides many, many hours of solid (if usually unexciting) entertainment. But to make up for years of lost time, I go looking on Amazon.com for out-of-print volumes, which is how I found gems like this collection of GAMES Magazine puzzles and this Henry Hook extravaganza.
The Holy Grail of my search was Will Shortz's Tournament Crosswords, Volume 2. It was published in 2005, but not a single copy has been available from a reseller since I added it to my Wish List two years ago. Volume 1 was available, but cost more than $50, so I held off.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, when all of a sudden I saw a copy of Volume 2 for sale. (No thanks to Amazon, whose "Sign up to be notified when this item becomes available" feature clearly doesn't work.) And it was only $10 including shipping! So I bit the bullet and bought both volumes, which arrived in the mail last week.
Now I can play along with every ACPT from 1990-2004, and pretend that I would have taken some championships away from Delfin and Hoylman if I'd been competing back then. (Of course, solving pressure-free on my kitchen table is a little different from the Stamford ballroom, not to mention the lack of a whiteboard for the final.) Both books provide a "percentile" guide with the answers, showing how many competitors finished in 3 minutes, 4 minutes, etc. And starting with 1996, the tournament website has the detailed stats for comparison.
For instance, my performance at the 1998 ACPT "would have been" nine minutes faster than winner Trip Payne (with the asterisk that I was already familiar with the crazy Puzzle 5 gimmick thanks to BEQ having blogged about it). More important than the ego boost: just like with the SAT, there's no better way to train for the ACPT than with actual practice tests. What I'm saying is, I'm really going to be unbeatable this year. Kidding!
(I can't find this in my archives, though I thought I'd mentioned it once -- there's an earlier volume of tournament puzzles, American Championship Crosswords, which I bought years ago and used to train for the 2009 tournament. That one covers 1978-1989, but only includes 75 selected puzzles from those first 12 tourneys. On the positive side, unlike the latter two books, it's got a detailed points breakdown for scoring and comparison.)
Some notes about tournaments past, for those like me who weren't there:
The Holy Grail of my search was Will Shortz's Tournament Crosswords, Volume 2. It was published in 2005, but not a single copy has been available from a reseller since I added it to my Wish List two years ago. Volume 1 was available, but cost more than $50, so I held off.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, when all of a sudden I saw a copy of Volume 2 for sale. (No thanks to Amazon, whose "Sign up to be notified when this item becomes available" feature clearly doesn't work.) And it was only $10 including shipping! So I bit the bullet and bought both volumes, which arrived in the mail last week.
Now I can play along with every ACPT from 1990-2004, and pretend that I would have taken some championships away from Delfin and Hoylman if I'd been competing back then. (Of course, solving pressure-free on my kitchen table is a little different from the Stamford ballroom, not to mention the lack of a whiteboard for the final.) Both books provide a "percentile" guide with the answers, showing how many competitors finished in 3 minutes, 4 minutes, etc. And starting with 1996, the tournament website has the detailed stats for comparison.
For instance, my performance at the 1998 ACPT "would have been" nine minutes faster than winner Trip Payne (with the asterisk that I was already familiar with the crazy Puzzle 5 gimmick thanks to BEQ having blogged about it). More important than the ego boost: just like with the SAT, there's no better way to train for the ACPT than with actual practice tests. What I'm saying is, I'm really going to be unbeatable this year. Kidding!
(I can't find this in my archives, though I thought I'd mentioned it once -- there's an earlier volume of tournament puzzles, American Championship Crosswords, which I bought years ago and used to train for the 2009 tournament. That one covers 1978-1989, but only includes 75 selected puzzles from those first 12 tourneys. On the positive side, unlike the latter two books, it's got a detailed points breakdown for scoring and comparison.)
Some notes about tournaments past, for those like me who weren't there:
- Of course, Maura Jacobson constructed each Puzzle #6. Merl Reagle is also represented every year, covering every other puzzle from #1 to #8. I wish Henry Hook would come back, not least because I'm often on his wavelength in the Boston Globe. (Peter Gordon too, but that's probably less likely...)
- The style in the early '90s is slightly jarring, though I've solved enough old crosswords to be used to it. I was most surprised to see a couple "cryptic" clues that don't involve any kind of definition -- something like [Time's up?] for EMIT. I wasn't surprised by the occasional "numeral-for-letter" convention where I's and O's can do double duty.
- Similarly, while I've seen some great gimmicks already in the four sets of puzzles I've done, there were also some boring themes back in the day. 1991 alone has a quip in the 21x21 and two "free association" themes where the long answers all have to do with an arbitrary word (American Red CROSS founder; Christopher CROSS song; "CROSS of God" orator; you get the idea).
- The craziest theme is 2002's Puzzle 5 by Cox & Rathvon: a short story containing each fill word represented by its clue! (We were standing near the 14D in the bow of my 47A, the "62D," ...) I haven't done that one yet, but I can already imagine how discombobulating it will be to speed-solve.
- I hadn't realized that Merl's self-professed favorite puzzle, "Gridlock", was from the 1990 ACPT. I think I've solved it before, but it still took me almost 10 minutes.
- 1992's final puzzle by Eric Albert was entitled "Wow!" and billed as the first computer-generated crossword in tournament history. (Albert, as you may know, was the first real innovator in grid-filling software.) The 62-worder (in the shape of Manny Nosowsky's last puzzle) is just fine, but of course lacks any cool seed entries, and probably wouldn't pass muster in today's NYT.
Sunday, 2/21/10: Dan Does Not Lose
NYT 5:15 ... LAT 5:36 ... MR 5:02 ... BG 5:38 ... ND 3:33 ... LATB 4:52 ... CS 2:33 ... Cryptic untimed
It's over, and I won. Yay! Of course, I'll work on a writeup, and of course, it'll take me a couple days. Thanks for your support...
It's over, and I won. Yay! Of course, I'll work on a writeup, and of course, it'll take me a couple days. Thanks for your support...
Saturday, 2/20/10: ACPT Begins
NYT 3:20 ... LAT 2:44 ... CS 1:23 ... ND 5:37 ... Traveling Cases untimed
Day one and I'm in first place! Where have I heard that before? At least I have a larger cushion, and it would take a lot for me to blow a chance at the finals. Feeling good about the final stumper, because my lead today came entirely from the hardest puzzle. So I guess I'm more optimistic than yesterday...
Day one and I'm in first place! Where have I heard that before? At least I have a larger cushion, and it would take a lot for me to blow a chance at the finals. Feeling good about the final stumper, because my lead today came entirely from the hardest puzzle. So I guess I'm more optimistic than yesterday...
Nine Thousand?
Yes, I really solved about 9,000 crosswords last year. I counted. Contrary to what may be popular belief, I didn’t set a goal of solving 25 puzzles a day in order to try and win the ACPT. I just happened to spend a lot of free time on my new hobby! (Well, sure... once I realized I was approaching top-ten-level speed, I stepped it up. But that wasn't until October.) I've only been doing crosswords on a daily basis for a year and a half -– for a couple years before that, it was a much smaller portion of my free time.
So at the end of 2008, I decided to try tallying up my total, literally on the back of an envelope. I shared the result on Facebook, Amy Reynaldo mentioned it on her blog, and I guess word spread, because everyone was asking me about it at the ACPT. I don't know if anybody was impressed, or just frightened. If I solve that many puzzles this year -- and dear Lord I hope I don't -- you're not going to hear about it.
Anyway, I recently found that envelope with numbers scribbled on it, so if you’re curious about the breakdown:
Start with all the daily puzzles, i.e. the ones blogged by Amy in 2008. That's nearly 2,000 (we’ll round up). Seven-plus years of archived New York Times puzzles, for a total of about 2,700 (1996-2000, ’04, ’06, ’07). Exactly 875 delicious Sun crosswords. One to three years’ worth each of old Puzzle Pointers-pointed puzzles: Reagle, WSJ, CHE, Inkwell, Onion, etc., totaling about 900. Another 300 miscellaneous online puzzles, Second Sunday and variety crosswords.
And I bought a LOT of books. These are the ones I finished in 2008:
Humorous (Millhauser), …Dummies (Berry), Really Clever 2 (Levinson Wilk), Crasswords (ed. Heaney), A-to-Z (Norris), Mensa (Longo), Challenging (CrosSynergy), Two-Step (Hook), Strain Your Brain (Payne), Super Saturday (NYT ’03-’05), Sports and Movie (ed. Gaffney), Ultrahard Vol. 3 (ed. Newman), and World’s Longest (Longo), which I’m only counting as one.
Partly/Mostly Finished Books: Cranium-Crushing (Longo), Really Clever (Levinson Wilk), Rainy Day (Estes), 10-Minute (Ashwood-Smith), Pop Culture (Payne), Baseball (Kahn), Twisted (Hook), Savage #1 (Savage), Cranium Crackers (ed. Newman), NYT Saturdays (ed. Maleska, surprisingly fun), Masterpiece Collection (ed. Newman), Mega #1 (Simon & Schuster), and several Omnibuses (Boston Globe Vol. 3, NY Mag Vol. 1, WashPost Vol. 3). And a couple of Dell “Crosswords Crosswords” magazines.
That’s about 2,000 in the “bound” category. Adding up all those numbers doesn’t quite make 9,000, so I guess I rounded up. Would the reaction have been much different if I had claimed 20 puzzles a day and 7,500 for the year? Probably not. Ah well... everyone needs a claim to fame!
So at the end of 2008, I decided to try tallying up my total, literally on the back of an envelope. I shared the result on Facebook, Amy Reynaldo mentioned it on her blog, and I guess word spread, because everyone was asking me about it at the ACPT. I don't know if anybody was impressed, or just frightened. If I solve that many puzzles this year -- and dear Lord I hope I don't -- you're not going to hear about it.
Anyway, I recently found that envelope with numbers scribbled on it, so if you’re curious about the breakdown:
Start with all the daily puzzles, i.e. the ones blogged by Amy in 2008. That's nearly 2,000 (we’ll round up). Seven-plus years of archived New York Times puzzles, for a total of about 2,700 (1996-2000, ’04, ’06, ’07). Exactly 875 delicious Sun crosswords. One to three years’ worth each of old Puzzle Pointers-pointed puzzles: Reagle, WSJ, CHE, Inkwell, Onion, etc., totaling about 900. Another 300 miscellaneous online puzzles, Second Sunday and variety crosswords.
And I bought a LOT of books. These are the ones I finished in 2008:
Humorous (Millhauser), …Dummies (Berry), Really Clever 2 (Levinson Wilk), Crasswords (ed. Heaney), A-to-Z (Norris), Mensa (Longo), Challenging (CrosSynergy), Two-Step (Hook), Strain Your Brain (Payne), Super Saturday (NYT ’03-’05), Sports and Movie (ed. Gaffney), Ultrahard Vol. 3 (ed. Newman), and World’s Longest (Longo), which I’m only counting as one.
Partly/Mostly Finished Books: Cranium-Crushing (Longo), Really Clever (Levinson Wilk), Rainy Day (Estes), 10-Minute (Ashwood-Smith), Pop Culture (Payne), Baseball (Kahn), Twisted (Hook), Savage #1 (Savage), Cranium Crackers (ed. Newman), NYT Saturdays (ed. Maleska, surprisingly fun), Masterpiece Collection (ed. Newman), Mega #1 (Simon & Schuster), and several Omnibuses (Boston Globe Vol. 3, NY Mag Vol. 1, WashPost Vol. 3). And a couple of Dell “Crosswords Crosswords” magazines.
That’s about 2,000 in the “bound” category. Adding up all those numbers doesn’t quite make 9,000, so I guess I rounded up. Would the reaction have been much different if I had claimed 20 puzzles a day and 7,500 for the year? Probably not. Ah well... everyone needs a claim to fame!
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