Hello! Amy here with a short update from the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. The preliminary standings are up at the ACPT site now, and Dan Feyer is currently in first place and I'm in ninth with the first four puzzles scored. Puzzle 5 was kinda wicked and apparently it's taking a while to score all the papers that are mostly wrong.
The cool new thing is that everyone's puzzles will eventually be posted online (by contestant number only), so if you're wondering where you messed up, you'll be able to look at the grids yourself rather than e-mailing Will to ask. The fancy-schmancy new scoring software being used this year is Matt Ginsberg's brainchild, and it's quite possible that he will be the ACPT judges' superhero forevermore by removing the most onerous part of the judging/scoring process. Judge Ashish Vengsarkar just walked up—he concurs.
Evad and I are heading out to dinner at Grocery this evening with assorted forumesque luminaries, and I hear the food is going to be transcendent. I'm definitely looking forward to that and hope I remember to save room for dessert. Chocolate, after all, is brain food.
A reminder: If you've seen the tournament puzzles, be sure not to post any spoilers in the comments because some folks will be doing the puzzles by mail and it'll muck things up if they run into details about the puzzles, their themes, the answers, and the gnarliest clues.
February 28, 2009
Dispatch from Brooklyn
