Puzzle #3 6:30
If you're planning to do this year's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament puzzles at home, either by mail or online, don't read on! There will be ACPT SPOILERS in this post. (I highly recommend doing either at-home option. Only $20! And fun! These terrific crosswords won't be showing up in the New York Times, and you can get an idea of how you'd stack up at the ACPT.)
Merl Reagle's puzzle #3 is a 19x19 called "Lipstick on a Pig." Before telling the tournament competitors to begin this puzzle, Will Shortz said that Merl had asked him to instructed us to read the title. So when we flipped it over, we read the title and laughed. Merl's intent was that we should read the title and the blurb that follows it: "Seven puns that will make you snort." Why? Because there are six theme entries—and the last one contained two pig-related puns while the first five each had a single pun. —No, wait. There are seven theme answers with eight puns, so the blurb isn't remotely helpful about the two-pun answer. Anyway, plenty of folks missed the second pun in 75-Across and lost big points on an otherwise easy puzzle.
Here are the theme entries, all of them centered on cosmetic enhancements ("lipstick") on a pig:
4D also snared a lot of solvers. [Constance of Norma of the silents] is TALMADGE. I'm not sure which crossings people had trouble with. 24A is ELEM., abbreviation for element, clued as [Au, Cu or PB]. The first two theme entries also intersected TALMADGE. 31A is DIEN [___ Bien Phu, Vietnam], and 35A is the TROGGS, ["Wild Thing" group], 1966.
The other problem square I heard a lot of people mention was the U in FRAGRUNT OINKMENTS. The crossing, OPULENT, is clued as [Sumptuous], and it's an ordinary enough word. But I think a lot of folks had the OINKMENTS part and put in the plausible FRAGRANT with the help of all but one of the crossings. With the clock ticking, it's easy to accede to time pressure and skip checking every crossing along the way. Believe me, I know this first-hand—I've had mistakes in three of my five ACPT appearances, and the only one I can remember well was the first one, a clearcut case of failing to check that a letter worked for both the Across and Down answers.
Up next: the easiest puzzle of the 2009 tournament, Andrea Carla Michaels and Myles Callum's #4.
March 20, 2009
2009 ACPT Puzzle #3
March 15, 2009
2009 ACPT Puzzle #2
Puzzle #2 7:13
If you're planning to do this year's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament puzzles at home, either by mail or online, don't read on! There will be ACPT SPOILERS in this post. (I highly recommend doing either at-home option. Only $20! And fun! These terrific crosswords won't be showing up in the New York Times, and you can get an idea of how you'd stack up at the ACPT.)
Crossword constructor Karen Tracey (whose themeless stylings would make a first-rate ACPT finals puzzle someday) has created a cool tool for past tournament attendees. If you've hankered for a way to crunch the score data to see how you did against your competition by year or by puzzle, to see how the years' puzzle #5's stack up against one another, to see if there's one particular puzzle number that knocks you back in the standing—now Karen's site has a gadget that generates graphs for all that stuff. I liked Mel Rosen's graphs for the 2005 ACPT scores (including solving-division distinctions), and I'm grateful to Karen for filling in the blanks for the years since (and before—though I wasn't there 1996–2004) and adding the ability to highlight an individual's place in the graph.
Okay, moving on to Brendan Emmett Quigley's puzzle #2, which Karen Tracey's graphapalooza tells us was tougher than most puzzle #2's. Boy, I sure erased a lot of letters en route to finishing this puzzle! You'd think that doing about 40 BEQ puzzles via Brendan's blog and proofing 50 of his book puzzles—all since December—would have had me channeling his brain waves and zipping through fluidly, but no. I made it through without errors, but only after catching a zillion problems on the way.
The 17x17 puzzle's title and blurb are "Allow Me To Introduce Myself: And if you didn't hear me the first time..." Each of the theme answers incorporates two extra I's ("myself") to reorient a phrase:
I loved seeing the AXOLOTL, a [Salamander known as the Mexican walking fish], smack-dab in the middle of the grid at 31D. It's no ESNE or ERNE, and yet it's a word I learned from crosswords. On Facebook, I am officially a fan of the axolotl, and if you scroll down here, you can read a poem about it.
Brendan assures us that Will did not ask him to market the KEN-KEN puzzle by including it in his puzzle, clued as [Puzzle whose name means "cleverness squared"]. The night before, we'd all learned all about Ken-Ken from the puzzle's inventor, so that answer was pretty much a gimme for most attendees. Hey, KEN-KEN was still fresh crossword fill.
After I was done with the puzzle, my main mystery was 75A, [Virginia's ___ Caverns]. The crossings gave me LURAY, but I'd never heard of the Luray Caverns. (The website shows fearsome stalagmites and stalactites.) Hooray! It was correct.
Other tough bits:
Thanks to Karen's data gizmo, I now know that I did comparatively worse on puzzle #2 than on any other this year. There were 14 troublemakers who finished correctly one or two minutes ahead of me. Must've been all that erasing I was doing, eh? I don't like to let 14 people finish before me. I'm just glad that I made it through all seven puzzles without a mistake, and that I squeaked back into the top 10.
By the way, the ACPT page now lists (scroll halfway down) the 49 competitors who finished all seven puzzles correctly. Take a bow, y'all:
John Beck, Janet Bradlow, Adam Cohen, Marisa Cohen, Frank Colangelo, Stella Daily, Jon Delfin, Len Elliott, Dan Feyer, Leslie Frates, Howard Friedman, Thomas Gazzola, Amy Goldstein, Peter Gordon, Rolf Hamburger, Brent Hartzell, Francis Heaney, Patricia Heath, Tyler Hinman, Doug Hoylman, Will Johnston, Richard Kalustian, Dan Katz, Stephen Kawalek, Joshua Kosman, John LaMattina, Andrew Laurence, Brian Levinson, Elaine Lippman, Frank Longo, Eric Maddy, Phoebe McBee, John McNeill, Bill Michaels, Jan O'Sullivan, Trip Payne, Bob Petitto, Arnold Reich, Amy Reynaldo, Al Sanders, Suzanne Saunders, Ken Stern, Roberta Strauss, Steve Tice, Jennifer Turney, Mary Ann Wamsley, Larry Wasser, Thomas Weisswange, John Wilson.
March 11, 2009
2009 ACPT Puzzle #1
Puzzle #1 3:10
If you're planning to do this year's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament puzzles at home, either by mail or online, don't read on! There will be ACPT SPOILERS in this post. (I highly recommend doing either at-home option. Only $20! And fun! These terrific crosswords won't be showing up in the New York Times, and you can get an idea of how you'd stack up at the ACPT.)
When I arrived at the Brooklyn Marriott on February 27 and picked up my registration folder, I checked out the list of tournament constructors. Why, look! Byron Walden is on the list. I began hoping for a wicked puzzle #5 by Byron, because I like his really challenging crosswords, and I especially like it when those puzzles give other people fits.
The next morning, when the crowd of nearly 700 contestants heard that easy puzzle #1 was the one by Byron, there were two sounds: gasps of relief for those who dread a Walden #5, and groans of dismay from tough-crossword fans who were hoping for a repeat of Byron's #5 in '06.
Puzzle #1 was called "Arms Race: Starting off with a bang!" The theme was a fairly basic one: three phrases that include firearm-related words. [Really on a roll] clued GOING GREAT GUNS, which is not the sort of phrase I've ever used. [Extremely nervous] clued SWEATING BULLETS, an apt description of many ACPT entrants' state of mind that Saturday morning. ["Without a doubt!"] and "SURE AS SHOOTING," another phrase I don't say.
The fill started off with a bang at 1-Across: [44th U.S. president], 5 letters. Like many people, my first impulse was HAYES. I imagine others were thinking GRANT or maybe NIXON. But then we saw the number: 44? Oh, yes! That'd be OBAMA. 13-Down featured a puzzling luminary, [Liane of NPR]. Ms. HANSEN hosts the Sunday morning puzzle on NPR with Puzzlemaster Will Shortz. Liane's husband Neal Conan did color commentary on the A and B finals on Sunday, as he so often has done, and this year Liane was at the ACPT too. Byron showed me a copy of puzzle #1, autographed by HANSEN herself. (I think Trip Payne got an autograph from Phil Donahue at another recent ACPT, having had PHILDONAHUE as a theme entry in his academic-degrees puzzle. Donahue, of course, was the Ph.D. answer.)
None of the clues were too hard, this being puzzle #1, but there was some high-test fill:
February 28, 2009
Dispatch from Brooklyn
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.
January 07, 2009
2009 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament
It's coming! At the end of next month! ACPT weekend is a good time for anyone who likes puzzles, unless they freak out in crowds. Me, I find the crowds of word nerds invigorating, so I love going. (Memo to Seth G: You gotta go. You'll love it!)
The program and registration info are here. The first thing to do is to book your travel. That link includes the group code you'll need to reserve your Brooklyn Bridge Marriott room (scroll down to the Accommodations section). If you're flying in to Brooklyn, buy your tickets now—airfares go up and up, they don't come down.
Will Shortz tends to tap one or two new-to-the-ACPT constructors each year, filling the other slots with tried-and-true constructing veterans. The marquee puzzle is the themeless one used in the A, B, and C divisional finals. Themelesses are my favorite puzzles in general, so I really wish I could play in the A finals every year and get to solve that puzzle competitively. You know what? That puzzle has been conquered by women finalists, but I don't think the finals puzzle has ever been constructed by a woman. I love Karen Tracey's themeless puzzles and am grateful that she's so prolific. It's been too long since Sherry Blackard had one of her killer NYT Saturdays, so I'd love to see one of her beastly grids in the finals. Then there's Paula Gamache, who is equally good at making themeless puzzles and easy themed ones—not a common combination. Will we see one of their puzzles gracing the finals this year? That will be a closely guarded secret until the tournament weekend. In any event, all eight puzzles are likely to be terrific and fun (though I hope Puzzle #5 will be wickedly challenging, because that's its own kind of fun).
I'm looking forward to the Friday night blogging panel at the tournament, too. Secretly, I don't mind being a center of attention at all. Shh, don't tell anyone.
March 14, 2008
2008 ACPT Final Puzzle
Puzzle 8, Division A clues—12ish minutes (time limit, 20 minutes)
This is the post where Puzzle 8, the crossword used in the A, B, and C finals, will be discussed in some detail, and comments may also contain spoilers. If you're going to solve the puzzles at home at some point (on paper or online), do not continue reading this post!
When I found out that Bob Klahn had constructed a puzzle again for this year's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, I hoped that it would be Puzzle 5. I really dig his cluing style and can often tune into his mental wavelength, so I feel like I can show off a little on Klahn's puzzles. I wanted Puzzle 5 to be his work so it would count for me, points-wise. Instead, it was the final puzzle, which counts for only the nine people in the A, B, and C division finals. This meant a direct challenge to Tyler Hinman's crosswordy dominance, as Klahn's the one constructor he struggles with.
Because the puzzle was such a difficult one, the usual 15-minute time limit was extended to 20 minutes. Trip Payne whizzed through the puzzle in less than 10 minutes, but with a couple incorrect squares. As Trip describes the experience, he was nervous that Tyler Hinman was about to finish (competitors can't see their rivals' whiteboards), and his "something must be wrong" sense wasn't strong enough for his errors to jump out at him. (He says Tyler's got a phenomenal sense about that.) Tyler assumed Trip had taken first place and kept plugging away, finishing after the usual 15-minute mark but within 20, and with no errors, giving him the four-peat. Howard Barkin kept going right up to the buzzer and still had some blanks. (Howard, I'd like to make a trade: You give me some of your overall super-speed on themed puzzles, and I'll give you a soupçon of my themeless and proper-names mojo. We'll dominate!)
Sitting in the audience, I worked on the puzzle during the silent C finals. When the C finalists finished, the clock stopped at about the 10-minute mark, so I noted the time on my numberless Merv Griffin's Crosswords watch and guesstimated about 12 minutes for my solving time, with no errors. Damn! I need to get faster at all the other puzzles so I can get myself into the finals! (Don't be shy if you've got tips for how I can cut my solving times on the easier puzzles. Let's hear 'em!)
I circled the clues I liked in Klahn's puzzle. There are a lot, starting with 1-Across and 1- through 6-Down. Singling out a few favorites (if it is, in fact, possible to single out multiple things): [Get a line on] sounds like "get a grip on" or something to do with a line of odds, but it's the verb LEASH. [Flipper] is an ACROBAT, while the unrelated adjacent [Flipper holder] is a SEAL. (Technically, the seal has flippers rather than holds them, I suppose.) [Mozart or Haydn?] means a WIENER, or a Viennese person; I think Bob was particularly fond of that one. [Snake carving?] isn't a totem pole or anything like that—the Snake River carved HELLS CANYON. [Tendrils, in botany] was CIRRI, which many of us know only as wispy clouds. [Caused bad blood at the clinic?] means MISTYPED a unit of blood. I love the archaic word yclept, so I liked [Once yclept] as the clue for staid ol' NEE. [1: Abbr.] is JAN, as in January, the first month. [Links locale] is a DELI and not a golf course. [Persian] is an ORIENTAL RUG, not just a cat. [Assamese or Cantonese] wanted to be ASIAN, but they're also DIALECTs. [African families] are PRIDES of lions, which are native to Africa. Ooh! [Horatio or Claudius] had me thinking of Roman emperors, but each is a DANE in Hamlet.
Tricky spots included ULTRA-NICE, where many of us tried EXTRA-NICE first. The LEFT JAB at 1-Down was tricky (except for Trip, who showed off by scrawling it in there without any crossings written in). The ["Peer Gynt" character] couldn't be ASE or ANITRA, the usual suspects for such a clue, because the answer had 5 letters. Eventually the crossings suggested a TROLL; technically, I should've had a hint of familiarity with that because the same clue and answer appeared in a 2000 Manny Nosowsky NYT crossword I must've done during my archived-Thursday-NYTs binge a few years ago. The crazy [Two-leaved pedestal table] was TIP-UP; some antique tip-up tables seem to have no extra leaf. And did any of us know that the [Bass role in "Fidelio"] was ROCCO? I had a wrong turn at 56-Across, [Apt to blow at any time]; the THE worked for ON THE EDGE, but the correct answer proved to be HOT-HEADED. That erroneous G made it so hard to figure out DIALECT! I know that a [Bit of paronomasia] would be a pun, but didn't know the word EQUIVOQUE.
This is the sort of themeless puzzle I like best—it has a few obscure things to piece together, but is marked mainly by a wealth of twisty clues that amuse you and make you feel so clever when you suss out the correct meaning. And it's hard! Full of wrong turns and missteps and false starts, but eminently fair so that everything can fall into place eventually.
Will Shortz, for 2009, feel free to commission a Puzzle 5 from Bob Klahn, okay? Or his younger cruciverbal doppelgänger, Byron Walden. Both have that knack for the twistiest of clues.
March 10, 2008
2008 ACPT Puzzle 7
Puzzle 7—9:38 (time limit, 45 minutes)
This is the post where Puzzle 7 will be discussed in some detail, and comments may also contain spoilers. If you're going to solve the puzzles at home at some point (on paper or online), do not continue reading this post!
Puzzle 7: Oliver Hill, who is 17 years old and lives in Will Shortz's neighborhood, is presumably the youngest ACPT constructor to date. His "Where Oh Where?" crossword is a Sunday-sized 21x21 puzzle with a rebus theme. I voted for this one when the Munro Memorial Prize ballots came around because I just plain enjoyed it the most (though if the finals puzzle had been in the running, my heart always belongs to the wicked themeless).
Howard Barkin, Al Sanders, and Kiran Kedlaya flew through this puzzle 2 minutes ahead of my cohort, and several others were just a minute behind them. My goal was to not make an error and to be fast enough to pull into the top 15 (I was 16th after the first six puzzles). It worked! Yay for small victories.
The rebus theme called on solvers to enter [LEFT] [RIGHT], [UP], or [DOWN] into the 10 rebus squares. I suspect most of us started to enter MR RIGHT at 1-Across before the Down clues contradicted that and pointed the way towards MISTER ⇒. In the opposite corner was ⇓STREAM. The second rebused entry from the top was GET ⇓ for PUSH-⇑S, which it has been argued isn't so much an "in the language" phrase. In the sphere of this puzzle, with the likelihood that up and down action could be involved, it was all right with me. Its opposite spot was filled by ⇐ FOR THE WOLVES. Next came EXIT STAGE ⇐, which had a 50/50 chance of being correct; the crossing clue, [Extreme liberal], dictated LEFT rather than RIGHT, however. Opposite that was a two-fer, ⇑⇒ CITIZENS. Spanning the middle was ⇑ A CREEK WITHOUT A PADDLE. Muddling things for some solvers was the presence of another rebus entry, going stag without a mate on the opposite side of the puzzle (plain old I SAID SO lurked there). Even trickier, the [Antiabortion] clue had a perfect 7-letter answer, PRO-LIFE—but the answer was ⇒-TO-LIFE, crossing ⇒IES (right-handed folks). I sure didn't know that there was a sometime-Stooge named Joe BESSER, but fortunately the crossings were reasonable. A tougher crossing, for many, was the junction between [Former San Francisco mayor Joseph] ALIOTO and [[Foul-smelling], or OLID. According to Wiktionary's usage note for the latter word, this rare word is "apparently used only in dictionaries and crossword puzzles." The etymology is Latin olidus from olēre, to smell—I'd seen the word before (crosswords!) and knew the name Alioto, but Tyler Hinman pieced it together by reasoning that olfactory and oloroso were smell-related, and thus OLID was a safe bet. That's the sort of thinking that propels him to the championship, eh?
I was going to write about the finals puzzle in this post too, but it's time for the Tuesday NYT puzzle to hatch, so I'll stop here for now.
March 07, 2008
2008 ACPT Puzzles 4–6
Puzzle 4—3:05 (time limit, 15 minutes)
Puzzle 5—15:34 (time limit, 30 minutes)
Puzzle 6—5:49 (time limit, 30 minutes)
This is the post where Puzzles 4, 5, and 6 will be discussed in some detail, and comments may also contain spoilers. If you're going to solve the puzzles at home at some point (on paper or online), do not continue reading this post!
Puzzle 4: Paula Gamache created an easy 15x15 puzzle called "Can You Dig It?" The four theme entries were all clued [Digs], and they covered four of the 20 definitions of the word: two noun phrases, LIVING QUARTERS and CUTTING REMARKS, and two verb phrases, GETS THE PICTURE and LIKES IN A BIG WAY. I finished this one amid a pack of other solvers, but a speed quartet (Tyler Hinman, Trip Payne, Kiran Kedlaya, and Francis Heaney) were in the sub-3:00 range.
Puzzle 5: This isn't the first time David Kahn has tormented the tournament masses with a beastly Puzzle 5. This one, a 17x17, was called "Up-Scale: Whose theme will be revealed one step at a time." That title turned out to be a helpful hint regarding the theme, which involved the DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, TI, and (again) DO notes of the scale moving up one step in each theme entry. For example, [Physician who treats weightlifters?] is a MUSCLE DOC (muscle tic), and [Contract for actress Russo?] is RENE DEAL (done deal), and so on through the scale.
Wow, was I really that far behind Tyler on this one? A full 7 minutes? Yep. This puzzle, termed the "bastard puzzle" by Will Shortz, shook up a lot of people. Only Howard Barkin came close to Tyler's time, a couple top-15ers were slower than I was, and two had errors. Only about 100 people completed this puzzle, so that left about 600 who were stymied by it. I got mired in the southwest corner, where I jotted DO at the beginning of the [Igloo features?] theme answer, having failed to notice that the notes didn't always fall at the beginning of the entry. (HARD DOMES plays on hard times.) Eventually it fell together for me, though. I never did notice that Kahn used SOL rather than SO in SOLD (fad) DIETS and as the note dropped out of LAO (solo) CONCERT. I walked out of that room still not sure what a soo concert was!
There were plenty of tough clues. [Transition between different plant communities] was the not-often-seen ECOTONE. The answer to [Its name comes from a native word for hippopotamus] was MALI. The [Copper-zinc alloy] was the I've-never-seen-it-before TOMBAC (what??). [Water surrounding South Bass Island] was Lake ERIE. Many solvers were undone by an intersection of names and a could-go-either-way letter choice. The I in ["Get Shorty" actor Delroy] LINDO crossed ["London Field" novelist] Martin AMIS, and if you didn't know the author you could be forgiven for guessing AMOS or AMES. The N in LINDO crossed [Lick], for which TAN and TAR are equally plausible. The M in TOMBAC intersected EMT, which had the sidelong clue [Participant in a revival: Abbr.]. Its B crossed WEB, [Kind of designer], which got its W from WOODED, clued deviously as [Not clear] (as in a clearing in the woods vs. the area that's not the clearing). Between the TOMBAC/WOODED zone and mucking up the southwest section for a while, it's no wonder I finished so far behind Tyler. And it's no wonder the solution eluded the majority of those who attempted it.
Even though this crossword spanked me, I'd still love it if there were a second killer puzzle in the mix for the tournament (in addition to the finals puzzle). I can't make up a ton of speed on the easy puzzles (or at least, I haven't yet), but I believe I might distinguish myself on a killer puzzle. So I didn't do it on the Kahn puzzle, not compared with Tyler, anyway—maybe next year I will.
Puzzle 6: Maura Jacobson's Puzzle 6 traditionally takes the bloodied and bowed Puzzle 5 crowd and shores up their self-esteem before dinner time—only one of the top 65 competitors had an error on this one, and solving times tended to be speedy. Three people (Howard, Francis, and Al Sanders) blazed through this 19x19 in less than 5 minutes, with 10 more people nipping at their heels. The "Elmer Fuddisms" theme is a familiar one, in which an R sound in each theme entry was changed into a W sound and the spelling adjusted as needed. For example, [Underside of a pan?] is WOK BOTTOM (rock bottom), and [Clamor heard on an Asian river?] is HUE AND KWAI. (Did you know the hue part of hue and cry comes from a word meaning "outcry, clamor"? I didn't.)
There was a little tough fill in this one—[Home of ancient Sparta] was LACONIA; [Writer Santha Rama ___] is RAU; [Markham's "The Man With the ___"] is HOE; [Taradiddle] is FIB; [Louisville's ___ Center] is named after Muhammad ALI; and [Rend] for RIVE. Cutest clue: [Good day to get married?: Abbr.] for WED.
Up next: Stay tuned for Puzzle 7 and the final puzzle, my two favorites from the weekend.
March 06, 2008
2008 ACPT Puzzles 1–3
Puzzle 1—2:54 (time limit, 15 minutes)
Puzzle 2—6:40 (time limit, 25 minutes)
Puzzle 3—8:06, one error (time limit, 30 minutes)
This is the post where Puzzles 1, 2, and 3 will be discussed in some detail, and comments may also contain spoilers. If you're going to solve the puzzles at home at some point (on paper or online), do not continue reading this post!
If I wait until I have time to blog about all eight tournament puzzles at once, I'll never get started. (Procrastination!) So let me tackle the first three, from the Saturday-morning solving session last weekend.
Puzzle 1: Andrea Carla Michaels made her ACPT debut as a constructor and attendee with Puzzle 1, "Encouraging Words." An easy themed 15x15 puzzle, it was completed in under 3 minutes by 19 contestants, and nobody cracked the 2:00 mark. The theme entries were four conversational phrases meaning CONGRATULATIONS. My favorite of the well-wishers was DON'T THAT BEAT ALL. Regular crossword answer ELI got an updated clue, ["___ Stone," ABC drama]—I think the show began airing only a few weeks ago, so I wonder if that slowed down any contestants who weren't up on their German numbers (VIER, or "four," crossed at the I).
Puzzle 2: Mike Shenk's 17x17 crossword was called "Change of Venue" because it featured a word ladder beginning with VENUE. The theme entries were essentially clues for the words in the word ladder (which is a puzzle in which one letter is changed to make a new word, and that word is changed again to make another new word, and so on), so solvers either had to get the Down answers easily or work back and forth with the word ladder grid printed beside the crossword. [Second word in the ladder] was VENUS, so 20-Across's answer was LOVE GODDESS. [Third word in the ladder] was MENUS, so 22-Across was BILLS OF FARE. The subsequent six steps in the word ladder (MINUS, MINES, DINES, DIVES, DOVES, DOVER) had their clues in the grid as theme entries. The final rung was to be derived from the word ladder and the Down clues. [Person responsible (last word in the ladder)] is MOVER, which also means the person responsible for a "change in venue," presumably a person driving a moving van and not someone related to a trial's change in venue.
Trip Payne finished this one 2 minutes ahead of me, and there were about eight people 1 minute behind Trip. After all seven puzzles, Tyler Hinman and Howard Barkin were 5 minutes ahead of Trip—so the battle to qualify for the finals is super-competitive. And two puzzles in, I was already 2 minutes back. Speed, speed, speed. And accuracy. I'd love to make the finals one year and think I'd be competitive on a gnarly themeless final puzzle, but I need to pick up both speed and accuracy (a mistake three years out of four is not a great track record!).
Some of the clues and fill were rather tough here. Not just having to surmise COAL PITS as a theme entry, but also the straightforward stuff. [Proportionate, as a duty] is the Latin phrase AD VALOREM, which I learned from another crossword puzzle. [Grab greedily, in slang] is the indeed-slangy SNARF, crossing SLAB clued as [Paving piece]. Baywatch's TRACI Bingham, U2's THE EDGE, BOSLEY from Charlie's Angels—anti-TV snobs who don't follow rock music could have been bogged down by such names. Favorite clue: [Unable to pass the bar?] for THIRSTY.
Puzzle 3: Merl Reagle's 19x19 puzzle, a bit smaller than a Sunday puzzle, was titled "If I Wrote the Dictionary." The theme entries were clued with Merl's definitions for answer words that sound like they could mean something else. [n. the act of tying shoestrings] was LACERATION, and [n. an all-male function; stag party] was a MANIFEST. This was a funny theme, particularly NECROMANCY as [n. the practice of kissing in parked cars]—necking, romance, necromancy!
The lead pack blazed through this one 4 minutes ahead of me as I sat there struggling with one last square that wasn't making sense. That square wasn't really the problem, though—it was spelling SCATOLOGICAL as SCATALOGICAL for whatever reason, and not questioning the A that put at the end of 9-Down. ["It's Impossible" singer], *OMA, looked plausible enough for a last name. I'm not up on my Perry COMO songbook, so I spent those vexed minutes contemplating whether there was a singer named COMA. And that's what I turned in, alas. #$@* error! My new plan is to reconsider every square in a word that looks wrong rather than getting hung up on a single square. After learning that no, there's no famous singer named COMA, I could relax for the rest of the competition. I wasn't vying for a spot in the finals, so I was now just shooting to scratch my way back from 46th to the top 15 (my goal on entering the weekend).
1-Across hit us up with an iota of crosswordese, [Raillike bird] or SORA. A gimme! Longish fill included BULGARIAN, OENOPHILE, COZIEST, MONACAN (not Monegasque), ANODYNE ([Pain reliever]), and SPLASHY. Most mysterious theme answer: KEDGE, [n. muddy buildup on the soles of sneakers]. I know what Keds are and what sludge is, but what's a KEDGE? It's a light anchor, and much less familiar a word than the other theme answers. Other vaguely interesting answers: NEOCON, CROCS clued as [Plastic-shoe brand], KUDZU. Shouldn't the guitar-related theme entry be FRETFUL rather than INSTRUMENTAL?
March 03, 2008
ACPT Wrapup, Part I
Note: Absolutely no ACPT puzzle spoilers appear in this post, and please please please don’t add any in the comments on this post. We don’t want to ruin the fun for the at-home solvers who haven’t seen the crosswords yet. I will write another post about the tournament puzzles, and that'll be the place to write comments that touch on puzzle specifics.)
I will sacrifice organization at the altar of expediency (XPDNC, Ashish!) and post something incomplete. And then I need to get back to daily puzzle blogging! Sheesh, I haven't done that since Thursday night, and I've heard that the Newsday Saturday Stumper was a killer, and Tuesday will bring the Onion and Tausig puzzles, so time's a-wastin'.
It was wonderful to meet so many readers (some of whom, I think, are Rex readers who know me from my comments there more than from Crossword Fiend) at the tournament in Brooklyn, and to see old friends. And by "old," I mean that I've known them since, oh, 2005 or after. But if you've been to the tournament and you're not terribly shy, you know how it is—you're among your crossword-loving tribe, a hotel full of congenial kindred spirits.
By now, you probably know how everything ended. Tyler Hinman won a grueling A final with a gnarly Bob Klahn puzzle. Neither Trip Payne nor Howard Barkin (making an impressive A-finals debut—congrats, Howard! I think Howard will have to concede that his crossword skills kick butt and quit being so darned modest and self-effacing) managed to complete the puzzle correctly, while Tyler had a perfect solution after about 16 minutes. Usually the time limit for the finals puzzle is 15 minutes, but this year’s tough nut was granted 20. I couldn’t have been more proud of Tyler, quite honestly. Hometown Boy does good! I got all misty-eyed when he won.
At the start of the weekend, I sensed that a top-10 finish wasn’t in the cards for me this year, but I hoped the top 15 was achievable. I almost blew my shot at that with an error in puzzle 3, but managed to eke out exactly a 15th-place finish. (Which is good for…exactly nothing. No trophies. Not even the 2nd place regional prize for the Midwest—that went to Anne Erdmann, who blazed to a victory in the B final and placed 13th overall.) But yay! I eked.
During the C finals, I worked on the finals puzzle with the set of tough A clues. I think it took me about 12 minutes or so to finish, though I had no accurate timer to rely on. (My shiny new Merv Griffin’s Crosswords watch lacks numbers or any markings at all between 12, 3, 6, and 9, so….) I thought it was a great crossword, harder than about 98% of Saturday New York Times puzzles and packed with clever and devious clues. (Those aren't spoilers. It's a Klahn—it has to be devious.)
Seeing that my performance on the finals puzzle, sitting in a chair while the C finalists strutted their stuff on stage, would’ve been pretty competitive puts a little fire in my belly for next year. Must train harder! Must get faster! Must qualify for A finals one of these years! It remains to be seen if I’ll still feel that way come next winter, but right now, I'm craving competitive crossword glory in '09.
At one point during the weekend, Will Shortz wore a pair of glasses. I suspect he doesn't need to wear them all the time, but they looked great. Some people had their doubts about the tournament's move to Brooklyn—Would it be too expensive for too many people? Would the hotel accommodate the ACPT as well as the Stamford Marriott? How would everything work? Would we all miss Stamford?—but Will and the heroic Helene Hovanec did manage to pull it off with style. It's a logistically complex event, what with the 700 people who need to sit together, the 4900 papers that need scoring, the database that needs to accept those scores, the efficient movement of crowds. The only real woes, I thought, were the waits outside the ballroom for the finals and the awards luncheon, but given the massive amount of furniture that needed moving, I suppose we should all have gone elsewhere for 20 minutes instead of milling obsessively in a herd. And the Marriott could improve by keeping the bar or other social areas open a little later. The hotel rooms were nicer, though, and the restaurant options were expanded beyond the Marriott—and the elevator service was faster, and the location was so much closer to LaGuardia. I will definitely return next year. (Though the awards banquet food could've been better, the conversation was top-notch.) Ideally, the tournament could move to springtime—maybe April—to cut down on the risk of snowy or icy weather interfering with people's travel. (The 2009 tournament will be February 27–March 1.)
There was a woman from Crosswords milling about during the weekend, asking people if they had suggestions for improving the game show. Boy, did we ever! I believe Tyler had a few small ideas.
Let's take it chronologically for a bit: Saturday morning: The wake-up call roused me at 7, and without it, I might well have slept 'til 10. I'd invited a bunch of women constructors to breakfast at 8, so I had to get a move on. Alphabetically, the attendees were Deb Amlen, Stella Daily, Paula Gamache, Bonnie Gentry, Sarah Keller, Andrea Carla Michaels, Nancy Schuster, and Karen Tracey. (Yes, I recognize that I don't belong in the same category as these seasoned constructors, but hey, the estrogenic fiesta was my idea.) It would be a lovely annual tradition, though maybe 9:00 would be better if it doesn't interfere with judges' duties. Poor Randy Ross. He came into the hotel restaurant and tried to join Nancy at the end of the table, but his Y chromosome barred him. Why have a women-only get-together? Well, the elite levels of crossworddom tend to be weighted heavily toward a boys' club—in general, most crossword editors, constructors, and top solvers are male. So it's nice to carve out a little space every so often.
Then came the morning puzzle-solving competition, with an easy puzzle 1 by Andrea Carla Michaels, a twisty puzzle 2 by Mike Shenk, and a fun puzzle 3 by Merl Reagle, which I mucked up with a dim error (more on the puzzles in a subsequent post). Saturday afternoon, I took Dave Sullivan (aka "Evad") to lunch at Heights Cafe on Montague Street. Super-cute restaurant, good food, and a pleasant walk from the Marriott. We barely made it back in time for the afternoon competition because the restaurant was bustling—so don't all go there next year and make it too crowded, all right? Before puzzle 4 was handed out, Will introduced all the bloggers in attendance who pay attention to the Times puzzle every day—me, Michael Sharp aka Rex Parker, and Jim Horne. He also introduced Emily Cureton, the adorable artist behind the Daily Crossword Drawings blog, but Emily was out in the hallway selling her wares. (Funky-fresh crossword-themed t-shirts! Cards!)
Saturday evening: Had a casual dinner with Ben Tausig and Michael Sharp at Junior's, famous for its cheesecake. The dessert menu includes "diabetic friendly" cheesecake, with that phrase in quotation marks (scroll to the last page of the PDF to see for yourself). Is it ironic? Is it actually hostile to diabetics? Inquiring minds wanted to know. I believe Michael and his wife Penelope returned there later for second dinner, a meal Michael invented. (I am a fan of second breakfast myself.)
After dinner, I checked out the beginning of Ed Stein's Wordploy, a short parodic film. Then I realized that, unlike the original Wordplay, I surely did not appear in the movie. As a raging egomaniac, I debarked for the hotel bar, where Dean Olsher made good on his debt by buying me a drink. He owed me for the 10 minutes of research I'd done for his book...which is about crosswords, in some fashion or another, but I don't know its title. Hopefully it will be published before the 2009 ACPT so we can all buy it there and get our copies signed by Dean. Before I knew it, there was so much convivial socializing going on at the bar, I completely forgot to go back to the ballroom for the 1 Vs. 100 game (with 700 instead of 100 in the mob). Too bad—I hear it was a ton of fun. But so was the chitchat and gossip in the bar, and the people are a huge reason I go to the tournament. At the bar, a party, the lounge, the lobby, and the hallway, the chitchat took me right up to about 3 a.m. and bedtime.
Sunday: In short, puzzle 7, finals, awards luncheon, airport, home.
More tomorrow on the ACPT crosswords!
Quick links
I am too brain-dead to write and edit a big post right now, and my mother's coming for lunch in a few. It'll be my treat, because she's the one who stole a Wordplay poster from my local indie cinema, and now I've got a movie poster signed by director Patrick Creadon, Will Shortz, Merl Reagle, Tyler Hinman, Al Sanders, Ellen Ripstein, Trip Payne, and Jon Delfin. Frameable! (Thanks to all of you Hollywood swells who signed the poster for me. It's a helluva keepsake now!)
Here are a few links for now:
• Eric Berlin's Friday night puzzle event was a suite of interlinked puzzles, some crosswords and some variety puzzles. My team (Susan Hoffman, her husband Ed, and me) finished 11th, and we had a blast. The puzzles are terrific, as I said before, and now you can buy 'em from Eric for the low, low price of $1.99. See here for details.
• Lorinne Lampert (who is one of those people who seems to be smiling all the time—charming!) was one of the people taking pictures of the Trogdor troupe—a bunch of us tried to psych Tyler out by all wearing the lucky Trogdor t-shirt that he keeps winning championships in. Here we are. Some local TV channel also filmed the Trogdor group and interviewed Evil Genius at Large Trip Payne, who cooked up the plan. The plan failed miserably, as it amused and honored Tyler rather than stealing so much of his mojo that one of us would win instead of him. (The Klahn final puzzle also ought to have vexed Tyler mightily, and yet he won again with little diminution of mojo. The young man has some mad crossword skillz, it must be said.)
• I don't see any photos at the ACPT site yet—Nancy Shack took a ton, but her laptop died during the weekend so she didn't get a chance to upload them along the way. And the official photographer, Don Christensen, is presumably still getting his photos together for the site. But Pete Mitchell, an affable constructor, posted his pictures here. I took my camera but never turned it on. Am terrible photographer.
• If you're hankering for detailed color commentary of the weekend's events and the divisional finals, visit The Puzzle Brothers, Dave and Bob Mackey. I spent less than a half hour at my laptop the whole weekend—am social butterfly and was only in my room from, like, 3 to 8 a.m., and I kinda needed to sleep then. But Bob and Dave teamed up and kept the information flowing. Also: No puzzle spoilers! You can safely read all of their coverage without mucking things up if you're planning to solve at home.
Type rest of the post here
November 30, 2007
Time to start thinking about the tournament
The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is three months off and the registration forms aren't available yet, but you can start making your travel plans.
The host hotel is the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott. The special rate for the tournament is $169 a night. Yes, that rate is considerably steeper than the Stamford Marriott's. But this hotel has the advantage of being in Brooklyn—closer to the NYC airports and many miles from the wan restaurant offerings of Stamford. Call the Marriott reservations line at 1-800-228-9290 (U.S. and Canada).
Which airport is best? What's the best way to get from the airport to the Marriott? What are the train options? See Stella Daily's blog for that discussion. The last two years, Nancy Shack found some great airfares from Chicago far in advance—in December, I think—so it may behoove you to start checking for fares now. (Last spring, I think I paid about $140 round-trip.) You could save a ton, even if you end up changing your flight later and paying a change fee.
Stella, Francis Heaney, and Ken Stern have compiled a wealth of Brooklyn info—mainly about travel and restaurants, I think. At some point, their Brooklyn ACPT guide will be posted at the ACPT site. I'm champing at the bit to explore some of those Brooklyn eateries—aren't you?
