2023 ACPT Recap

Oh ACPT 2023, so many ups and downs you had! So many twists and turns!

Overall, it was a great weekend. I made some new friends; caught up with old friends; enjoyed as always the pro-puzzling, positive, welcoming community spirit; was the fastest solver on one of the Friday night "fun puzzles" (and won a crossword book!); had a great time with my trivia team partners on Saturday night; and just overall had a mighty good time. 

I felt a little cautious/nervous about being back in a crowded place post-COVID -- I've been traveling some, and eating out, but generally not going to big public events, especially in the post-masking phase.  (I was glad when the BSO was requiring vaccines and masks, but now that's all gone.) I wore a mask most of the time, other than when I was actively solving. Especially since there were so many solvers this year, trying to avoid crowds and disease meant that I spent less time hanging out in the public spaces, and as a result, missed out on seeing some folks who were there but we never even ran into each other. 

But that caution didn't pay off in the end  -- COVID finally caught up with me; after two years of "novid" status, I tested positive on Monday night after the tournament. I'm fairly certain I caught it on Friday night or maybe Saturday morning; that's a bit short but not atypical for omicron, and I have barely been out of the house otherwise for the previous week or so. At least one other solver also tested positive after the weekend, but there doesn't seem to have been a big outbreak. (I'm doing fine now; thanks for asking! 😊 I spent Tuesday in bed with fever/chills, headache, pretty bad congestion, and fatigue, but was on the mend by Wednesday and completely symptom-free by Saturday.)

Now to the results. 

tl;dr I came in 45th overall, out of the (largest ever) field of 770 solvers. #8 for solvers in their 50s, #4 in Other New England. 

That's really pretty good -- top 6%. But it didn't meet my own expectations for myself. I was aiming for the top 20, or at least top 25. And my stretch goal, which I know I am theoretically capable of, is coming in the top 10, if I have a really good year. So I am disappointed but such is life, and I'm trying to avoid the pointlessness of regret.

Here's the blow-by-blow, together with my usual "if I hadn't screwed up..." commentary.

• P1 - under-4-minute solve, but I missed the 3-minute cutoff by literally 1 second. So bummed. Only 13 people solved this faster than I did, and nobody solved it in under 3 minutes, so I would have been tied for 1st if I had solved this puzzle 1 second faster.
• P2 - 8 minutes, again barely missing the 7-minute cutoff, this time by 4 seconds. At this point, I was tied for 22nd but would have been in a 6-way tie for 10th place if I had been just a few seconds faster on each of the first two puzzles. (See what I mean about the possibility that I could have a top-10 finish?) 24 people were faster than me, but only 11 people were 2 minutes faster.
• P3 - 7 minutes, a little slower than I would have liked but very respectable, pulling me up to 15th place. Only 8 people were faster than me.
• P4 - 4 minutes, blazingly fast (only 7 people were faster) and inching me up again, to 14th place.
• P5 - 21 minutes. Sigh. I'm glad I finished this puzzle cleanly -- it was a bit of a slog (and I didn't really think the theme worked as well as it could have) but mostly I just got bogged down, in a negative mind-set, and jumped around too much. I was very, very disappointed with my time. I should have been at least 8 minutes faster, and I think I could have solved it in 12 minutes in a good year. Now don't get me wrong, this is a very hard puzzle and most solvers don't finish it at all, much less finishing it cleanly. But 51 people were faster than me, and I know I could do way better. C'est la vie. This dropped my standing to 35th place. It was not going to be easy coming back from there.
• P6 - 6 minutes. Only 9 solvers were faster than this (and even the folks who were in the A finals were only 1 minute faster; there was just one person (David Plotkin; ended up 4th overall) who solved this puzzle in under 4 minutes). This really helped -- now I was 26th and in the top few in both 50s and New England. I had a good shot at those prize categories. 
• P7 - 9 minutes. Only 10 people were faster than me on this puzzle. This is one of my fastest times ever, if not my very fastest time, on P7, which is Sunday-sized (21x21). I am damn proud of that time on this puzzle, since I have been working diligently to improve my speed and smoothness on these larger puzzles. I am damn proud of not making any actual mistakes -- I knew every single word in this puzzle with 100% certainty, and was careful enough throughout that I really didn't even need a final check, though I took a quick scan for empty squares.
  
  But. Sigh. So disappointing. I had made a mistake very early on (written OAHU instead of MAUI). That was sloppy of me -- I don't normally write non-confirmed answers that have any ambiguity, and this was one of those cases. I quickly erased OAHU and wrote MAUI, but I failed to erase the right-hand part of the original U. So that box had two vertical lines in it, and they marked it wrong. I can't blame them -- it certainly doesn't look like a nice clean I; but it doesn't actually look like any other letter, either. (It's maybe closest to an N, but there's no connecting diagonal line.) Here it is for posterity:
  
  
  
  

  I did send a request for judge review, and they said they'd look at it, but I haven't heard anything. I don't really expect them to change the results but thought I'd regret it if I didn't at least ask. Anyway, what happens if you have one letter marked wrong is that you lose 195 points: 150 for the perfect-puzzle bonus; 25 points for the wrong letter [technically you lose 1 minute of time bonus]; and 20 points for the two incorrect words formed by that letter. That dropped my score on this puzzle from what would have been 2450 to 2255. At that point, I plummeted to 45th place.
  
  

Here's the woulda-coulda analysis. I really should have gotten P7 right. I don't know when I'll stop kicking myself for not completely erasing that freakin' U -- maybe never. If I had just erased that one tiny line, I would have ended up in 24th place: 3rd in Fifties and 4th in New England. (This was the first year with cash prizes for the top three finishers in each age category, so I would have also won $300!)

I also really should have been faster on P5. That's a more complicated set of mental controls, though, but in a decent year, I could entirely plausibly have been 8 minutes faster on that puzzle, which would have put me in 9th place overall (as long as I still avoided the P7 fiasco) -- 1st in 50s and 2nd in New England. Even with only 4 additional minutes of speed, I would have ended up in 14th place (still 1st in 50s but 3rd in New England). 

And just imagine if I had erased that square on P7, been 8 minutes faster on P5, and been just a few seconds faster on P1 and P2. I would have been in 8th place overall -- 1st in 50s and 1st in New England (the tie-breaker for New England putting me in 1st place, having been 1 minute faster on P7).

But now comes the perennial reminder for everyone about the long tail of the bell curve of performance. Even with all of those improvements, what would it take for me to end up in 7th place instead of 8th? I would have had to shave off another four minutes of solving time (from what would have been a total solving time of 48 minutes) -- i.e., to be almost 10% faster. To end up in the A finals (top three solvers)? Take those four minutes, and lose another eight minutes. To end up as the fastest solver overall? Take those 12 minutes, and and lose another four minutes. Yes, that's right, the fastest solver solved all 7 puzzles in a mind-blowing 32 minutes, i.e., in two-thirds of that hypothetical time of 48 minutes (and just over half of my actual total solving time of 57 minutes). So again, just to be clear, I am not in contention for the A finals. But in a few more years, I'll "time out" of the A category and be a B solver again, and then watch out! I know a few people who have been in the B finals two or three times, and maybe I'll make it there. We'll see!

Side musings -- I had a lot of really great and interesting conversations with other solvers, especially rookies, about gaining speed and establishing the right mental mindset to maximize performance in the competition. From this perspective, crossword puzzle solving really is a sport -- an intellectual one, to be sure, but very comparable with emerging less-physical sports like chess and e-games. You need skills, practice, discipline, persistence, and resilience. You need to care about winning at some level, but not care so much about it that it ruins the fun -- or gets inside your head in such a way that it actually makes you perform worse. You can get "the yips" and you can "the twisties" and you can just have a bad puzzle or a bad year. But there is a "competitor's high" that comes from being in the flow state; solving a puzzle fast, and cleanly, and to the very best of your ability; and feeling like your brain is a well-tuned machine that ran through its paces (metaphorically) just as you knew it could.

I also really like thinking about performance and talking about the various adjustments/improvements I've made over the years (like writing answers while reading the next clues; writing in some answers backwards in easier puzzles to avoid wasted motion; strategies for where to start and where to move when stuck; strategies for avoiding "guesses" and confirming crossing answers before writing anything down). I think I'm more explicitly and consciously analytical about those kinds of things than most solvers, but hey, that's the way my brain works. (Same with piano playing; I used to drive my piano teacher nuts, because I needed to analyze the chords and note progressions so explicitly in order to make sense of the music and fingering.)

One interesting thing that happened this year is that a friend observed, "You don't point while you're solving" -- meaning that I don't use my free (left) hand to point to / track where I am in the clues while I'm solving. I thought about it, and asked a few other speed solvers, and most of them don't point either, but a few do, so I'm thinking I might experiment with that a bit, especially on the larger puzzles. I do notice that I'm sometimes wasting a bit of time (and mental focus) scanning through the clues to retrieve my place. One competitor said he has a way of using his thumb and index finger to track his current place in the Across and Down clues separately, which I find intriguing.

I'm hoping to make it to both Boswords (Boston area) and Lollapuzzoola (NY) this summer, so I'll have a few more chances to "redeem" myself (and spend time with the puzzling community, which is actually the best part anyway). Hope to see you there!