ACPT 2022 Recap

There were lots of good things about the tournament this year!! It was great to be back in Stamford again and see many of my crossword-loving friends after two years of COVID preventing an in-person tournament. It was wonderful that my sister Susan was able to come up and go to the tournament with me again (she's only made it there once before). And my solving speeds reassured me that I am not, in fact, slowing down at all, so in some ways I'm still in my puzzle-solving prime!

But.

I had two, count 'em, two stupid mistakes -- one wrong letter on each of two different puzzles (P4 and P7). And they were the exact same type of stupid mistake, so the first mistake was annoying but the second mistake was really unforgivable, because wouldn't you think I woulda learned and woulda been more careful? In both cases, I filled in an answer that I thought I knew -- without thinking about it enough or checking the clue properly -- and completely failed to look at the crossing answer or clue. So in P4, instead of SERAPH crossing HELPER, I had SERAPE crossing EELPER; and in P7, instead of RUBY DEE crossing TIDAL POOL, I had RUBY LEE (who's that?!?) crossing TILAL POOL. Just plain dumb and sloppy and I deserved to lose standing.

But.

As is my wont, I can't help but go through the "if only" reconstruction.

• P1: 5 minutes (2 minutes behind the fastest solvers; tied for 17th place on this puzzle)
• P2: 6 minutes (2 minutes back; tied for 15th place on this puzzle; missed the 5-minute mark by only 2 seconds, which would have made me tied for 5th place)
• P3: 10 minutes (5 minutes back; tied for 18th place on this puzzle; this felt very slow and I should have been faster for sure -- part of the problem is that two judges sat down along the wall right next to me and talked for the entire puzzle, which was absolutely infuriating and extremely distracting)
• P4: 4 minutes but with one mistake (1 minute back; tied for 289th place on this puzzle; without the mistake, I would have been tied for 5th place)
• P5: 17 minutes (10 full minutes back; tied for 22nd; I really should have been faster but this was a hard puzzle, and I just got bogged down trying to figure out the theme/trick and staring at some of the answers that I simply could not figure out)
• P6: 7 minutes (2 minutes back; tied for 15th place)
• P7: 10 minutes but with one mistake (2 minutes back; tied for 89th place; without the mistake, I would have been tied for 14th place; the big distraction during this puzzle is that there was incredibly loud, weird music playing the whole time outside of the solving room -- I don't know *what* the hell was going on with that!)
• Overall: 11250, 33rd place, 6th of solvers in their 50s, 4th in "Other New England" (Connecticut has their own category) -- really not bad at all for somebody with mistakes on two of the puzzles!

If I hadn't made the error on P4:

• 11445, 22nd place, 2nd in 50s, 3rd in New England

If I hadn't made either of the errors:

• 11640, 11th place, 1st in 50s, 2nd in New England

And if I had been -- let's say -- 1 minute faster on P2, 3 minutes faster on P3, and 4 minutes faster on P5 -- all of which were perfectly within my abilities:

• 11840, 7th place!!!!, 1st in 50s, 1st in New England

My aspirational / "stretch" goal going into the tournament was to be in the top 20, with a fallback / "if I don't, I'll be disappointed" goal of being in the top 40. So I didn't make my aspirational goal, but I did make the fallback goal. Still, it's hard not to be disappointed about the stupid mistakes, given that they were so totally avoidable -- and would have given me my top finish ever(*) if I had been just a little more careful.

Now I just need to manage to be more careful without slowing down at all...

(*) Caveated by the fact that this was a noticeably smaller tournament than the most recent in-person tournaments (475 active solvers) and some of the top solvers who pretty much always beat me weren't there this year...