Tyler or the Field?

When people in the pro golf world look ahead to a major tournament, they don’t ask “Who’s going to win?” Instead, as Tiger Woods continues to demonstrate that he is the world’s greatest golfer, the question is, “Tiger or the field?” With 24-year-old Tyler Hinman playing for a record fourth consecutive championship at this weekend’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the question this weekend was, “Tyler or the field?”

Hinman, a recent graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, lowered expectations like a pro athlete before the competition. “I made a mistake in ’04, and I’m sure a day will come when I stumble again. Hopefully, that won’t be this year…but I certainly don’t consider myself invincible in that regard.”

Despite the buzz surrounding a potential four-peat, Hinman said that eventually breaking the record for most career championships (seven) would be much sweeter. “The streak is a tricky thing. All it takes is one bad square in one year, and it’s over.” With a pursuit of the overall titles record, “you can always try again the next year. It just speaks much more to consistency.” Of course, consistency is one thing. Dominance is another.

I’ll admit, the Tiger Woods comparison has its limits—you wouldn’t mistake the frat-boyish Hinman, in his loose-fitting jeans and T-shirt, for a sports star. Neither would you take him for a typical crossworder. His mat of red hair, bursting from his RPI cap, stood out from the salt-and-pepper majority in the ACPT crowd.

The demographically accurate representative of “the field” would be perennial runner-up Al Sanders, a Linux project manager and father of three from Colorado. One of the friendliest in an amiable bunch, Sanders has a built-in rooting section ever since losing to Hinman in the 2005 ACPT, which was filmed for the documentary Wordplay. The climax of the film comes when Sanders smashes his headphones to the ground, realizing that he left two squares blank on his championship grid, robbing himself of his long-desired win.

You would not guess from Sanders’ huggable disposition that he had such agonizing brushes with victory. “I’m just trying to get into a positive mindset,” he said Friday, on the eve of competition. “For years, I thought, ‘Oh, gee, I really hope I make it to the top three,’ and then I realized, maybe that attitude was my problem.”

Puzzle #1: “Encouraging Words” by Andrea Carla Michaels

The competition portion of the ACPT takes place over two days. Six puzzles are played throughout the day on Saturday. After a seventh puzzle on Sunday morning, the scores are tallied, and the top three competitors in each skill division face off on a championship puzzle. All the puzzles are played on a time limit.

The scoring is complicated, but past champion Trip Payne gave me the quick gloss as part of a pep talk before the first puzzle: “The most important thing is accuracy, much more than time. Your first mistake costs you 195 points, and a minute of time costs you 20 points.”

When he finished getting me psyched up, I asked Payne how he was feeling. He claimed that he was “tired” and “not as gung-ho” as in the past. “I’m just taking it easy this year, I guess,” Payne said, in a bit of gamesmanship that would ring false as the tournament went on.

Besides, nobody was taking it as easy as Manhattan copywriter Stella Daily, who lounged around in her crossword pajamas. I gathered this was something of a tradition: “I had to replace the old ones,” she said, “because they were falling off, and it wouldn’t have been pretty.” She gave her new PJs points off for inaccuracy, pointing out that the grid had misplaced clue numbers and clumsy design that resulted in two-letter words. “Whoever designed this didn’t know what they were doing.”

Puzzle #2: “Change of Venue” by Mike Shenk

The New York Times daily puzzle, the gold standard of crosswords, famously gets more difficult over the course of a week. The Monday crossword is welcoming to novices, but by Saturday, the clues are cryptic and unwilling to give up their secrets.

Heading into the weekend, I wondered how this close-knit group would receive a nosy guy from a website with a smartass name. I had no need to worry; the ACPT regulars are a Monday puzzle.

A sense of community defines the ACPT despite an attendance that has almost doubled since the release of Wordplay. This year, more than 700 people competed. The tournament’s growth forced a move from the Stamford Marriott, site of the first 30 ACPTs, to the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott.

There were few complaints. “Stamford was noisy, noisy, noisy,” said Karen Otto, a travel agent from Greenwich, Conn. Joan Young, a 19-year veteran of the tournament, gave a vigorous nod and said, “That’s because it was right across the street from a mall.” She spat the word “mall” as if it were “whorehouse” or “secret organ-harvester hideout.”

Locale is irrelevant to the ACPT; it’s about people. Smart people: IT experts made up a huge proportion of the competitors, and there were plenty of educators—one math teacher said, “I keep recognizing people I know from conferences.”

I reveled in the intelligence of the crowd, as did Ruth Tetschner, a retired high school principal. “I’ve never been in a group of brainier people. You will see some amazing wit here, especially among some of the younger guys.”

Joan Young again piped up: “Young turks, we used to call them! Now, you call them ‘geeks.’” Actually, now I call them “turks,” because that is awesome.

Puzzle #4: “Can You Dig It?” by Paula Gamache

To understand a subculture, study their humor. Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword editor, NPR puzzlemaster, and director/emcee of the ACPT, had attendees in stitches throughout the tournament. Shortz is a talented wit, but I’ll admit that many of the laughlines passed me by.

Before the fourth puzzle, Shortz took the podium and held up a tchotchke he had been given by an attendee’s mother. “As you can see, it’s a small, brown leather thing that folds and opens like a wallet,” Shortz said. “And on the outside, there’s something written, it says ‘Needle Case.’”

The audience roared. Shortz waited for the laughs to simmer and said, “So now you know what an ‘etui’ looks like.” Applause.

Huh?

A neighbor noticed my befuddlement and cleared things up by writing out the word for me. “Etui” is one of those crossword words, like “epee” and “oleo,” that crossword constructors love because they have a lot of vowels (and are therefore easier to squeeze into a crossing). There’s a bit of shame attached to these crutches, but they keep showing up anyway. There’s no alternative.

As we set to work on Puzzle #4, there were scattered chuckles as solvers reached this clue for a four-letter word:

DOWN
[…]
45 Decorative needle case

Although it made his punchline that much sweeter, Shortz seemed upset by the coincidence, and he later apologized for “revealing an answer.”

Puzzle #5: The Bastard

Puzzle #5 is traditionally the hardest in the tournament, and Shortz deemed this especially brutal grid “the bastard puzzle.” It lived up to the billing. This puzzle’s perverse difficulty became the day’s prime topic of conversation. One solver grumbled, “It’s one thing to have a difficult crossing, but an entire puzzle that hard? Come on.” I gathered he did not enjoy the challenge.

Much of the consternation came from the puzzle’s theme. Many of the most literate crosswords tie longer answers together with a common bit of wordplay or punnery. On puzzle #4, for instance, all of the long Across answers were clued the same way—“Digs”—but the answer varied. LIVINGQUARTERS for 20-Across, GETSTHEPICTURE for 47-Across, etc. Cute, and once you catch on, helpful.

Puzzle #5’s sheet noted that the theme would be revealed “step by step.” One entry clued “Pitched weight-loss products” for the entry SOLDDIETS. It was clearly one of the themed answers, but I didn’t get it, and judging by post-puzzle interview, I wasn’t alone.

Turns out that every long Across answer in Puzzle #5 took a common phrase, extracted a note on the vocal scale, and replaced that note with the next step up. So take FAD DIETS, replace FA with SOL (as in do-re-mi-fa-sol etc.), and you get SOLDDIETS.

If the previous paragraph was painful, there’s a taste of what it was like to work this puzzle.

The Trust

Al Sanders was the first to emerge from the ballroom after Saturday’s last puzzle. His smile was gone, and his shoulders drooped. “The sixth one was fine, but I died on five.” He shook his head. “That one killed me.”

Sanders had completed Puzzle #5, but he took too much time. To make the Sunday finals, perfection isn’t enough, as most of the top competitors will turn in flawless grids. You also need to be fast.

So after each puzzle, competitors powwow in a frantic exchange of information to figure out where they stand: “You gained a minute on me,” “I lost some time on the lower-right corner,” etc. The official standings take hours to compile, but by then it’s old news to the people who really care.

I stood alone with Sanders for a moment, until the rest of the best, having finished seconds later, arrived in the foyer to bark times and answers like stock traders on the exchange floor. A passerby jerked his thumb toward the scrum and cracked, “The brain trust.” That’s the right word, “trust.” This would be a great opportunity for a cutthroat player to deceive his opponents, but such tactics are anathema to this scrupulous group. Complete trust is implicit.

Tyler Hinman shared a near-death experience. After an early finish on the fifth puzzle, “I decided to play it conservative. So I finish and take an extra minute to check [my answers]. Fifteen seconds later, I see a blank.” His compatriots gasped. Any square left blank would have torpedoed his championship run. (Recall Trip Payne’s warnings about the cost of an error.) A flush Hinman smiled weakly, calling his cautious strategy the “best decision I ever made.”

Spelling Counts

Over the weekend, various competitors wondered aloud why ESPN hadn’t yet picked up coverage of this event. After all, they air Scrabble and the spelling bee, why not crosswords?

Probably because for a spectator, the first seven rounds of the ACPT are very, very boring. People file into a ballroom to work silently on a crossword. As they finish, they raise their hands and skulk out. Sure, the format could be reworked for TV, ginned up with intensive editing and post-production, but it would destroy the homey feel of the affair. As a CNN marketing producer who flew up from Atlanta for the competition remarked, “I like that it’s not polished. It’s not quite together.”

Fact is, the spelling bee has the tension of the spotlight, a Scrabble competition has the excitement of head-to-head competition, and the crossword tournament has neither. Until the final puzzle, when it has both.

The setup for the championship round places three customized whiteboards on rickety easels at center stage. The top three contenders from each skill division are announced, fitted with noise-blocking headsets, and set their dry-erase markers loose on the championship puzzle. The C, B, and A divisions all play the same puzzle (in that order), but the clues are different. For instance, the C division had the clue “Part of ESP” for 44-Down, SENSORY. The A-level clue for 44-Down: “Organoleptic.”

After the C and B winners were decided and ushered offstage, the championship contenders—Hinman, Payne, and Howard Barkin, a software engineer who looked content with having made it this far—emerged from sequestration to play for the title.

An official started the 20-minute clock, and as Barkin riddled his grid with gaps and errors, focus tightened to the other two finalists: Hinman, the slouching kid who still qualifies for the ACPT “junior” division, and Payne, the tight-laced veteran with the levitating trousers. “What’s with Trip’s highwaters?” asked one of the play-by-play commentators.

Hinman rushed to an early lead, nailing words like EQUIVOQUE (clue: “Bit of paranomasia”) in the upper-right. Yet Hinman had a problem. All of his gains came on the right side of the grid, meaning that he would have to work backwards to fill in the very tricky left side. It is easier to work left-to-right (and top-to-bottom), as it gives you the starting letters of words you don’t know. As he finished the right half, Hinman’s progress sputtered.

Payne’s trademark idiosyncrasy is to fill in clues patchwork-style, all over the board, and then take another pass to fill in the gaps. That strategy served him well. As Hinman pondered a half-empty canvas, Payne’s grid got darker and darker. He nailed 1-Down, LEFTJAB (“Lead-in to a cross-over hit?”), and the upper-left corner followed. He got 60-Across, ULTRANICE (“Politer than polite”) where many contestants had fallen into the trap of entering EXTRANICE.

Meanwhile, Hinman chipped away at his puzzle. He made inroads in the bottom left corner, but the upper-left loomed large. He would have to work this trap-filled corner from the right and from below, the worst positioning possible. And as Hinman’s pace slowed, Payne’s marker gushed, spraying letters into the squares.

A buzz spread as Payne filled in the last entry that had eluded him, 5-Down, HELLSCANYON (“Snake carving?”). He stepped back, surveyed his board for blanks, glanced over to see Hinman still at work, and then threw his hands up. “Done!” Payne peeled off his headset, surely expecting to hear a spirited cheer for the new champion.

Instead, he heard a chorus of moans. For 42-Down, with a clue of “Adds,” Payne had written INVESTS. The correct answer was INJECTS. Like Payne said, accuracy is the most important thing, and at the last, he had been inaccurate.

Tyler or the Field?

All the other contestants having faltered, Hinman had only one opponent left, a field of white squares in the upper-left corner of his puzzle, glaring back at him under the lights. As long as Hinman completed his grid perfectly (or with only one error), he would win. With about eight minutes remaining, it seemed a sure thing that he would break through. At seven minutes, a little less sure. At six, a little less.

Hinman’s biggest roadblock was 1-Down, LEFTJAB. The entry was a timely boon to Payne, but it gave Hinman fits, and the corresponding Across answers were difficult enough that he had only filled in the “E” to build on. With about 6:30 on the clock, Hinman shrugged and wrote in BEATSME.

The joke, which Hinman erased seconds later, seemed cavalier, but Hinman didn't know what was at stake. He thought he was playing for second. Shut off from the crowd reaction by his headset, he would have glimpsed accuracy-is-everything Payne leaving the stage, considered his own stretches of inactivity, and done the math. As far as Hinman knew, the day was already lost.

Anxiety ran thick, and a few spectators yelled out in futility to cheer Hinman on. They had nothing against Payne, but nobody wanted to see a champion fall this way. Nobody wanted to see Tyler Hinman beaten by the puzzle. Yet the clock wound down. 6:30. 6:00. 5:30.

Then came 30-Across, BITMAP. Then 3-down, ACROBAT. Then 1-down, LEFTJAB.

Then:

When Hinman doffed his headset, he expected polite applause. Instead he got a delirious, pulsating yell of joy from 700-plus crossword nerds. A gracious Payne stood up and pointed at Hinman, mouthing “It’s you!” The unwitting champ looked to his family in confusion. “I didn’t understand why my dad was so excited about a second-place finish,” he said later.

Enthralled by a surprise (to him) victory and a record winning streak, Hinman admitted that he had “tried to play down the whole consecutive wins thing.” Downplaying was a theme of the weekend. “I’m not so good,” “She’s better than I am,” “I’ll be lucky to finish all the puzzles”—these were constant refrains.

Maybe these cruciverbalists felt a need to downplay because the notion of a “Tournament” carries too much pomp for an event that offers only about 20 minutes of truly heated competition. Except for that flash of excitement at the end, the ACPT is primarily a way for old friends to cross paths again and share in their love of language.

Crossword puzzles, after all, are far from a blood sport. They’re something you do at your kitchen table. For one weekend a year, that kitchen table gets a little bigger.