This morning’s NYT puzzle is from a March 11th event.
On that day, Mike Shenk took a theme from the audience at the annual crossword tournament in Stamford CT, and constructed the puzzle — with no computer assistance — in one hour.
Then, Trip Payne won the race to solve it — in three minutes. About 2/3 of the people in attendance solved it in less than 15 minutes.
Maybe some doper can provide a free link to this puzzle. (I just get the paper. I don’t suscribe to the online service.)
In 10 seconds I will start to solve it. Should be done in time tp watch World poker Tour, tonight at 9.
It took me about 10 minutes. I can get Monday-Wednesday every time. Thursday I’m up to 2 in 3, Friday I’m at about 25% and Saturday I’m down to around 10%. I don’t get it on Sunday, so I have no idea how I’d do on that one.
Well, waaaay back when, I usually solved the Monday-Wednesday NY Times puzzles in just about 3 minutes. The Thursday and Friday puzzles tended to take about 5-6 minutes. And the Saturday ones… about 10-11 minutes, assuming I finished it at all.
That’s good enough to impress casual puzzle solvers. But I went to the annual Stamford tournament several times, and learned very quickly that I was a piker. People like the aforementioned Trip Payne (and Doug Hoylman, Jon Delfin, Ellen Ripstein, and a few others) ROUTINELY did those puzzles in just over half the time it usually took me!
Taking the “if you can’t beat 'em, join em” approach, I actually constructed puzzles for a few years- and I regularly got my work published in major newspapers and magazines… but again, I learned that I’m a piker. It usually took me a few weeks (an hour here, an hour there) to complete a decent 15 x 15 puzzle. Even if I managed to sell a puzzle to the NY Times, I was probably working for minimum wage, considering how long it took me!
As Will Shortz put it, anyone who tries to make a living constructing puzzles has to be amazingly fast or he’ll starve to death. (Luckily, I regarded puzzle income as mere pizza and movie money.) Mike Shenk is one of those rare guys who makes a living at it, and yes, he IS amazingly fast.
Of course, the software available today makes it relatively easy to create a puzzle fast. With some packages, you don’t have to do much more than set up 3 or 4 theme entries, then let the computer fill in everything else.
So, nowadays, you needn’t be as brilliant or creative as Mike Shenk to create a good puzzle in an hour! But I’m almost completely out of that business now.
You’d do much better on Sunday than you do on Saturday or maybe even Friday.
Saturday is supposed to be the hardest of all, on the theory that you have all weekend to solve it. At least that’s what one of the editor’s said once upon a a time. It seems to hold true.
I hope you try it. As you will almost certainly discover, the cost of the paper (or the effort to go get it) is worth the price of the Sunday puzzle.
There’s a guy named Jim Savage who constructs difficult puzzles. At last count he has two books out, and I had both. His puzzles are so demanding it’s hard to believe he has a market that would enable him to make a decent living from them.
But in the intro (of one or both books), he says — if I have it right — that he spends several months a year at some tropical paradise which he finances through his puzzle earnings.
I would guess that some of our readers have a copy of one of those crossword books. Can you give us the full quote, please?
I’m not familiar with Mr. Savage, but if he’s prospering, clearly it is NOT as a freelancer! Those of us who were freelancers used to get $75 per NY Times puzzle (I think it was $40 for a USA Today or Newsday puzzle). So, one isn’t likely to make big bucks selling to publications like that unless one churns out several quality puzzles (puzzles that are SURE to be purchased) every day.
Me, I was lucky to produce a puzzle a week! Even when I did, there was no guarantee that the publications I’d send them to would buy them (and editors often take months to get around to your submissions with a yes or no).
I take it Mr. Savage cultivated a small but devoted fan base, one that liked his puzzles enough to buy his books faithfully. That fan base may be enough to earn him a nice chunk of change. If so, my hat’s off to him. It’s not easy to be that productive OR that popular.
But VERY few puzzle constructors are in a position to market their work directly to the public. THose that can’t must content themselves with mailing their work to various and sundry publications, and then hoping a check comes back in the mail.
For the hell of it, I pulled down my hated copy of Monster Crossword Puzzle Omnibus and selected a pristine 15 x 15 puzzle at random. With stopwatch in one hand and a ballpoint in the other, I timed how long it would take me to fill in all the white spaces (185 of them), simply by writing the the alphabet over and over, as fast as I could.
Note: I didn’t even look at the clues. Just scribbled away inanely. Took me 1 minute and 44 seconds. Okay, so I’m 71 and kinda slow.
You try it, please.
My point is it would seem that the physical act of writing the letters into a 15 x 15 grid would consume more than a minute of a solver’s time.
This doesn’t include the time required to look at the clues and back again at the grid, to say nothing of any seconds spent on thought — if any .
I’d sure like to see how you and others score on this speed test.
However, I don’t even go near the NY Times or London Guardian. I usually feel like a child left behind when I don’t even understand the damned question, let alone solve it.
I stick to the LA Times Sunday puzzles. They have clever themes and aren’t exactly easy.
I personally like to do the puzzle in my head first, and only start to write - in ink - once I have at least 75% of the puzzle already solved.
Probably similar to the way someone becomes a good pianist. Practice.
Buy puzzle books at your skill level. (Some grade the difficulty of the puzzles — Easy, Medium, Hard, Contemporary, Traditional, etc. — on the back cover). Do lots and lots of them until you feel you can move to the next level. Then repeat.
But puzzle solving IMHO is an antisocial, and almost worthless hobby. Sometimes I get upset with myself for bothering with it. It’s better than watching TV, but what isn’t?
So, I prefer to believe that you’re mediocre at crossword puzzle solving because you have better things to do with your time.
Depends on your memory. My trick is to build a good stock of the subset of words used in puzzles. You’ll soon learn that the stadium is shea, the arena is Omni, the lake is Erie and the author of Fables in slang is Ade. (And the cookie is Oreo.) Once you have a good idea of what the word is going to be given a reasonable clue, or an unreasonable clue and a letter or two, you’ll have enough letters filled in to do the harder words and the theme answers.
Also try some acrostics. Though the clues are very different, you’ll learn the talent of filling in words based ona few letters. That helps also.
My MIL is over 88, and in poor health, but is still sharp - possibly from doing puzzles. My FIL is also, at the same age, but that’s from still composing music.
Well, the most important “secret” to doing puzzles quickly is this: you have to be solving several clues in your head at the same time. If you read each clue and solve it, one at a time, you’ll take a lot longer. You have to learn to read and solve in your head while you’re writing.
Beyond that, you have to learn to use small letters exclusively. It’s a LOT faster. Think about this- the letter E is the most common letter in the English language, right? Well, a capital E requires 4 strokes. A small e can be done with one stroke.
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