The urge to time your solve
Got up
Had shave
Did Times crossword
Had another shave
—ROGER MCGOUGH
The wonderful 2006 documentary about crosswords, Wordplay, shows us two very different worlds. There are the famous solvers—Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, Mike Mussina—and those who are not so renowned outside crosswording circles. Or you might think of the same two groups as the casual puzzle fans, who grab a crossword when they can, and the devotees, who see each puzzle as training for the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, in which they will race other super-solvers at the Marriott hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, each year.
I see them differently. I see the happy solvers and the damned.
Clinton, Stewart, Mussina, and the others smile as they describe their relationships with the grid—in these moments, it is a movie about pleasure. In invidious contrast are the faces of the time-obsessed entrants, in particular that of the astonishingly gifted Al Sanders.
The movie follows Sanders and other contestants as they prepare for and then attend the twenty-eighth tournament. The viewer might well wish that he or she were there, too. It’s a weekend away from everything except puzzles: collegiate, mutually supportive, occasionally silly, and always proud. Yes, it’s an alluring world—except for the actual business of the timed tournament puzzles.
Al Sanders makes it to the final. He looks every inch the winner. And, in fact, he finishes first—but after he announces “done,” he notices that he has omitted to fill in two squares. The shots of the moment of realization—Sanders hurling his noise-reduction headphones to the floor, then gasping, red-faced and bent double—are heartrending. But they are also evidence of the inevitable result of timing crosswords.
You see the same thing in a book by solver Marc Romano called Crossworld: One Man’s Journey into America’s Crossword Obsession. Romano enters the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and his is a tale of anxiety, apprehension, and anguish that ends with the competition wreaking psychological and physical havoc as he collapses at home, a broken man.
It’s the same at the British equivalent, the Times Crossword Championship. There, the winner is the same man every year, a finance director called Mark Goodliffe. His solving is enjoyable from afar—losing some valuable seconds considering whether RAISINY is a word before returning to his relentless decryption of cryptics. More enjoyable, though, is the annual response from perennial runner-up Peter Brooksbank.
Goodliffe skipped the 2007 final because his wife had given birth two days before. Brooksbank quipped: “If he could be persuaded to have another one, that would be useful.” A later wheeze, to create a distraction: “You could slip a mobile phone into his pocket and get someone to phone it.” In 2010 he was terser: “I’m going to have to kill him.”
These are gags, but ones delivered through gritted teeth. They are also a warning not to get involved. Usain Bolt might be able to run the 100 meters in 9.58 seconds, but that doesn’t mean there’s no point in the rest of us ever exercising. Indeed, since the constructor of a puzzle has slaved so long over its intricacies, it seems disrespectful to plow away, giving only the minimum possible attention to each clue. Sometimes, though, the temptation is there.
For one thing, if a solve is going fast, you feel smart. At this moment, it might be worth recalling the thoughts of the humorist Stephen Fry, often described as “a man with a brain the size of Kent.” (Kent is a county of approximately 923,000 acres.) “I don’t know many people who can do the Times crossword more quickly than me,” Fry notes in his first autobiography. “There again I do know dozens and dozens of people vastly more intelligent than me for whom the simplest cryptic clue is a mystery—and one they are not in the least interested in penetrating.”
So, horses for courses. But another temptation comes from the little clocks that accompany many newspapers’ puzzles in their online versions. Some are even set to time your solve by default, making speed seem an intrinsic part of the process. Again, though, there is something to bear in mind.
These digital versions of the puzzles typically provide leaderboards that purport to show which solvers have been especially speedy tackling each puzzle. The problem, though, is that the times at the top tend to be implausibly low. Not even implausible on the level of an Al Sanders or a Mark Goodliffe—these are times so low you wonder whether the solver has had time to read the clues. And, of course, they have not. These are people, you suspect, who, for reasons best known to themselves, have completed the puzzle in advance—perhaps on paper, or using another login—and then simply typed the answers in order to appear to be cruciverbally superhuman. And since their times are quite literally measures of nothing, what does yours mean in relation to them?
I concede, though, that the temptation is sometimes irresistible. Indeed, even the sight of the near-broken Sanders was no deterrent, and since the release of Wordplay, the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament has seen such an increase in attendance that it has moved to a larger Marriott, near Brooklyn Bridge.
If you must concentrate on speed, then, here are some tips.
Train yourself in a kind of automatic writing so that you can use those scribbling seconds to start reading the next clue.
Reshape your Es. In his book, Marc Romano reveals that Will Shortz advised him that modifying his handwriting has saved him “time both in solving and in life.” Restructure your script around fast strokes of the pencil.
Have someone tell you a joke before you start solving. Neuroscientist Mark Beeman found that college students performed better at word-association puzzles if they had been shown a video of stand-up comedy beforehand than if they had watched something boring or scary.
Use a pencil and an eraser. Times Championship winner Peter Biddlecombe adds: “If you think that a letter is unclear, be prepared to rub it out and write it again.” No pen.
Start in the bottom right-hand corner. Some champions swear by this technique, on the basis that the constructor may have written those clues last, in a more tired frame of mind.
Try to get the beginnings, not the ends, of words—beginnings have more variation and yield their secrets faster.
Check. As Will Shortz said in his welcome to the twenty-eighth American Crossword Puzzle Tournament: “If either you leave a letter out or you make a mistake, that will cost you 195 points. The champions generally spend a little extra time after they finish a puzzle, looking it over, making sure that every square is filled and that nothing silly has been put in a square.” And if you are merely timing yourself for fun, you haven’t finished at all if there’s a single misplaced letter. Your time is, sadly, infinity. Check again.
But be aware that you are making sacrifices. Not least among them is the potential crosswords offer to have the opposite effect to that of a stopwatch—to make you less aware of time. The moments you spend in a puzzle have the potential to shut out the outside world for a blessedly silent period. After a more leisurely solve, you return refreshed from a happier place where, unlike the rest of life, the day is not carved up into fifteen-minute segments, each of which must be accounted for. The other, realer problems in your life are easier to solve.
(Although any exhortation that you shut out the rest of your life while solving should come with a health warning . . .)