Lots more puzzles for me
I attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament over the weekend. This year, due to the Wordplay movie, the attendance increased 40% to nearly 700 participants. We strained the limits of the Stamford Marriott, using essentially all available meeting space and all the hotel rooms, with late registrants forced to stay at the Holiday Inn nearby. Next year the tournament will move to a larger Marriott hotel in Brooklyn. The hotel room cost will be higher, which may turn some people away, but the difference will be small enough ($75 per person for the typical tournament solver who stays two nights in the hotel and shares a room with one other person) that it will probably not keep too many people away, and Will Shortz hopes to draw in enough more New York City locals to make up the difference.
I continued my string of finishing just below the cutoff of getting thrust into the B division. This year there were 698 participants and I finished 141st, ever so close to that 20% mark that defines B solvers.
The new P&A Magazine is out. I showed off my colored pencils Thursday and Friday at Stamford while solving the color paint-by-numbers. I have solved or made great progress on many of the puzzles but only found the final answers on a couple. The busy environment at Stamford was not conducive to the concentration that I need to work on these puzzles, so after completing a first pass through the puzzle set I set it aside and worked on other puzzles the rest of the weekend, including a Ucaoimhu cryptic, some NYTimes and NYSun puzzles that were distributed on various handouts, and the first few puzzles in Frank Longo's sequel to the cranium crushing crosswords book.
The MUMS hunt starts tonight. I am going to join with some combination of the team I've been doing various hunts with in the past year, so on a bigger team than last year's two-man effort with Corey Plover which placed 21st.
I continued my string of finishing just below the cutoff of getting thrust into the B division. This year there were 698 participants and I finished 141st, ever so close to that 20% mark that defines B solvers.
The new P&A Magazine is out. I showed off my colored pencils Thursday and Friday at Stamford while solving the color paint-by-numbers. I have solved or made great progress on many of the puzzles but only found the final answers on a couple. The busy environment at Stamford was not conducive to the concentration that I need to work on these puzzles, so after completing a first pass through the puzzle set I set it aside and worked on other puzzles the rest of the weekend, including a Ucaoimhu cryptic, some NYTimes and NYSun puzzles that were distributed on various handouts, and the first few puzzles in Frank Longo's sequel to the cranium crushing crosswords book.
The MUMS hunt starts tonight. I am going to join with some combination of the team I've been doing various hunts with in the past year, so on a bigger team than last year's two-man effort with Corey Plover which placed 21st.