Stamford Crossword Tournament report

[tahnan]

I've never tried to use the "LJ Cut" before, but I'm going to give it a shot here, because what follows is going to be awfully long. It's a report on the 25th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and probably contains more details of more crosswords than most people could possibly care about. Read it if you want to. If you've already read my passworded journal, you can probably skip this, since it's cut and paste from there.

But just to be cruel, I'm not going to summarize it before the cut, either.

(Warning: the following entry will contain a number of odd names in it. Those are noms from the National Puzzlers' League. It's just how we talk.)

Stamford was, of course, wonderful. We drove down Thursday uneventfully (well, except for a slight incident near the beginning, but no one was hurt), and spent Thursday night meeting up with people, playing the odd game, staying up because we could. I sat and did crosswords while some people played Pass the Chicken, since I just didn't feel up to participating. Which was fine; I was quite entertained by it.

Friday we got to watch people filter in through the afternoon, and hung out chatting, playing games, entertaining Story's son, that sort of thing. Friday evening's entertainment was an audio quiz (I did all right, not terrific), followed by the usual "Pick Your Poison." I did manage to finish one puzzle faster than Kray, which was cool, considering how much faster he was than I was at the puzzles at last year's convention (to say nothing of how much faster he was on this year's crosswords, since he finished seventh overall). The cryptic crossword, alas, was a disaster for me; I couldn't come up with three of the entries at all, which is unusual when you consider that I usually find Patrick Berry's puzzles not easy but quite doable.

Well, so be it, and on to the schmoozing of the wine and cheese party, which wasn't too exciting. Met Joe DiPietro, an excellent constructor, but nothing much else of note. After, Squonk ran a truly excellent mini-extravaganza, eight puzzles that were not too taxing but were all quite clever. Following that, I stayed up too late playing Cluesome, went up to the room, chatted a bit with Tivol, and finally fell asleep.

Saturday was the puzzles, of course. The first one wasn't too bad, finished perfectly with time to spare. The second shouldn't have been hard--I knew the hard crossings for the obscure German river OSTSEE, in particular 'Children's classic Winnie _____ Pu,' which is ILLE, and 'Month preceding Adar,' which is SHEBAT. However, I was sure that "Dagwood's cousin" was HERB, who I remembered so distinctly from the comic strip, and ignored that it made the crossing nonsensical. In fact, the cousin of a dagwood sandwich is a HERO. Sigh.

Three was no trouble; I did get lucky on a pair of crossings I didn't know, all involving names. Having -AR-EM crossed by two names I didn't know, and knowing it needed to be a name (but not realizing it would be related to the 'LEW' earlier in the theme entry), I took a guess and filled in KAREEM. Of course, that's right (Lew Alcindor being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's original name), which saved me on that puzzle. After lunch came an easy, rabbit-pun-themed puzzle on which Weldon, along for good luck, was quite helpful, followed by puzzle five. This one gave a lot of people trouble, because the clues were given out of order in a one-page story, and what was worse involved a lot of terrible animal puns. Not catching the puns slowed people down (and occasionally led to mistakes; if you didn't know that a "hawse" is part of a ship, it was easy to miss the pun in "This is another fine ______ I've gotten into," said by a bird caught in a net: MESH, not MESS). I was lucky, skipping past the answer-dense first section (and thus avoiding filling in MAMASAID for the monkey's quip, "My _______ there'd be days like this," which should be MARMOSET) and directly to a much easier section. As a result, I ended up tied for twelfth on the puzzle, finishing at exactly the same time as Tyger, who ended up winning the B division finals. Not too bad.

Puzzle six, as always, was a more relaxing and simple puzzle, which took me relatively less time than any of the others. And with that done, we had a break for dinner. I was feeling dizzy, unfortunately, and exhausted, but I wouldn't nap, for fear I'd never get to sleep if I did. I ducked out of a few large groups and instead found myself with Sprout, QED, Cazique, G Natural, and the aforementioned Joe DiPietro, which was not only the perfect size group to eat with, it was an excellent group to eat with.

Saturday evening's official entertainment were What's My Line? and Pyramid, which were somewhat dull, and a few videotapes of media coverage and one contestant's documentary, which weren't any more exciting. After that, there were the usual games, including more charades, at which I alternated being psychic and amusingly lost before giving up and sleeping. (From "fries," I was able to guess "Non-French French things," and for Ucaoimhu's clue "Starting a fire and not starting a fire"--actually for the category "Alternate uses for bifocals"--my guess "Zen arson?" seemed awfully amusing for that hour.)

Sunday started with a bit of a shock. Unlike last year's finish at 132nd, which had put me in the D division for this year, I was currently at 48th. 48th! It didn't seem possible. And it was a little too good to be true--not because it was wrong, but because Sunday's puzzle was so grueling. It took me a long time to find a single word to fill in, much longer to get the theme, and what seemed like forever to finish. Worse, I made a stupid filling error: having -O-E for the clue "Zip," I filled in NOEE instead of NONE (and the crossing, an author's name which came out AEYA for ANYA, was no help), which knocked me down at least eleven places. But even so, this is notably ahead of where I was last year!

I had been holding off on posting the results at all, until I was sure where I had finished. Apparently they forgot to enter about 70 scores for the last puzzle into the computer, and one of those belonged to someone who was fourth in the D division going into the last puzzle. His score could have affected the standings, indeed would have if he had made no mistake...but he did, which means that I did, in fact, take first in the D division. First! With a trophy and everything! Sure, it's the D division, which means "was nothing to write home about last year," but it puts me firmly in the B's for next year, and I'm determined to train myself up. Watch your back, B winners.

The full results (not yet corrected as of this writing) are at http://www.crosswordtournament.com/2002/index.htm, if anyone wants to go stare at them. I've stared enough, enough to learn that, for instance, my times were good enough to get me into the C finals if I had made no mistakes, but only 15th in the B division, which means I have my work cut out for me if I plan to make the B finals next year, since I have to improve my time by something like thirty minutes total, or about 5 minutes per puzzle. (Well, that takes into account two mistakes. If I can learn not to make mistakes, 16 minutes total, or about 2 minutes per puzzle.) And the unconventional puzzle 5 helped a great deal this year; last year's puzzle 5 did me in. I didn't even finish it, my score on it was half what my score on puzzle 5 this year was, and if there's another like it next year, I'll be right back down to the D division again.

Practice, practice, practice.

Comments

Not quite that simple

[(Anonymous)]

You'll have to get stymied by puzzle 5 for three years to fall back to the D's. :)

Still, it's nice having a trophy on the other end of the mantel!

your roommate

[spenceraloysius.livejournal.com]

I saw the championships on the news. I don't know how people can solve the crosswords so fast. I didn't understand the linkages between the word and the clues in any of the samples announced by the commentators.

[jadelennox]

does Weldon share your ranking, since he helped?

-your faithful Coke-buyig friend