This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.
I made a bit of a mistake…
This morning, I woke up excited to take on today's Saturday puzzle on video.
To ensure the best possible solve, I decided to warm up with a Friday puzzle from 2016. In 17 minutes, I finished the Friday (with one mistake), which is probably my best performance all month.
Surprised, I decided to see how crossword blogger Rex Parker rated the puzzle's difficulty. And this is where the mistake happened…
Out of habit, I typed "rex" into my browser, rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com autofilled, and I clicked enter.
As soon as the page loaded, I realized my mistake, but it was too late: The answers to today's Saturday puzzle were rendered right in front of me.
I quickly looked away, but my brain had already registered some of the answers.
As a result, I couldn't fairly solve today's puzzle on video, which is particularly frustrating given that the puzzle is apparently "suuuuper-easy".
Nevertheless, I had to opt for Plan B: The 2017 Saturday puzzles.
So far this month, I haven't solved a single 2017 Saturday puzzle, saving them for this last week of this month's challenge.
Today, I decided to start at the beginning with the January 14 puzzle. (The first Saturday of the year is from January 7, but I had previously started that puzzle, so the 1/14 was the first completely clean crossword).
In 28 minutes, I completed the entire puzzle perfectly with the exception of two squares. Upon entering in the last letter, I actually thought there was a 50% chance that the entire puzzle was correct (thereby officially completing this month's challenge). I was wrong, but still — I surprised myself once again with this week's performance.
Something about being on camera pushes me to perform at my highest level, so I plan to film all puzzles moving forward.
Here's the timelapse of today's solve…
And here's the full video, if you're interested in watching me um and hmm my way through the puzzle…
To be fair, Rex Parker does exclaim that this particular puzzle "was phenomenally easy", so I'm not sure if I can replicate this performance on any given Saturday puzzle. But, since my goal is only to complete one Saturday NYT crossword, I welcome these kinds of outliers.
Anyway, I will continue training a little bit over the next week, but it seems like I'm at the point where I just need to run through the remaining 2017 puzzles and see if I can perfectly crack one of them. From a skill standpoint, I'm apparently ready for the final sprint.
(I may also return to today's July 22 puzzle in a few days, most likely for training purposes, assuming my brain can forget what it has seen).
Read the next post. Read the previous post.