Andy Lee’s weblog

This morning I finished what I started yesterday and played along with the finals of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. I’m pooped and slightly bummed.

I did fine on the final competition puzzle, which I solved with no errors in 17 minutes.

I didn’t do nearly so well on the just-for-fun puzzle that was used to end the tournament. We had a choice of three sets of clues for the same puzzle: easiest, less easy, and hardest. I chose the hardest, and boy was it hard. The suggested time limit was 15 minutes. Instead of finishing in under half the time, like I did for all seven previous puzzles, I needed one hour of solid head-scratching — from a minute after noon to a couple of minutes after 1:00 — and there were times I thought I might never solve it. And when I was done, even after checking my answers, I had one incorrect square.

There was one nice pitfall in that puzzle that had me going in circles for a large amount of the time, but that wasn’t where I made the mistake. My mistake was in a square where the Across clue was a fact I just plain didn’t know, so I had to guess based on the Down clue. Unfortunately there were two reasonable guesses for the Down clue, and I chose the wrong one. The right one never even occurred to me.

That puzzle is why I’m pooped, but it’s not why I’m bummed. The thing I’m bummed about is an error in the tournament data. For some reason the web site shows I have a 0 score for yesterday’s second puzzle, and that drops me significantly in the rankings. I sent an email about it, but knowing how these things are, I make no assumptions that the data can ever be recovered.

Anyway, the whole thing was great fun and I have high hopes that I’ll attend the tournament in person, finally, next year.

I’ve been a New York Times crossword puzzle addict for as long as I can remember — at least since high school, and maybe before that. For the past few years, I’ve been tempted to enter the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, CT, which you might know from last year’s movie Word Play. Not that I’m a competitive puzzler; it would just be fun to be around other crossword nerds. It would have been especially fun this year to see faces I knew from the movie, and to watch the finals in person.

I didn’t have time to go to Stamford this year, but for the first time I am playing informally online. I entered in the “rookie” category, which is for people who have never participated in person. For twenty bucks you get access to the same puzzles as the real participants, at the same time they do, which today was six puzzles, once an hour. You solve the puzzles in your web browser, and it tells you your score based on how quickly and accurately you filled out the puzzle.

Here’s how I did:

My times ranged from 7 to 15 minutes. I solved each puzzle perfectly until the last one, in which I made one mistake. I’m kicking myself, because I knew the answer. I had simply mistyped one letter.

From what I saw in the movie, conventional wisdom is that you should check every letter of every answer. One year, one of the top contenders blew his chance at a victory because he missed a square. I knew this, but I was too lazy to take the extra five minutes to be that thorough. All I did was skim each puzzle to make sure I hadn’t left any blank squares.

The finals will be tomorrow, Sunday. I’m looking forward to playing along with the finalists. After the final competitive round, there will be a just-for-fun round that everybody can play in. That strikes me as a very nice way to end the tournament.