Tag Archives: analysis

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament: Rising Stars and Familiar Names

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The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament was this past weekend, and unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend. I did my best to keep up with the event through social media, enjoying everyone’s observations, jokes, highlights, victories, trials and tribulations.

One message in particular stuck out to me, though.

I can’t remember if it was posting the results after the sixth or the seventh puzzle, but they remarked that they were excited to see some new blood in the top ten.

I couldn’t help but laugh, because all the names were pretty familiar to me.

Paolo Pasco won the tournament for the second year in a row, dominating the final puzzle with a record-breaking time of 3 minutes and 45 seconds. (Solver Paul Edward did the math on Facebook and calculated that Paolo spent less than 34 minutes across the 8 puzzles that weekend. WOW.)

Will Nediger and former champ Dan Feyer duked it out for second place, with Will edging out Dan by ONE SECOND, solving the puzzle in 4 minutes and 38 seconds. What a nailbiter!

The next day, after the tournament was over, I still had that message lurking in my brainspace.

Now, anyone who reads this blog can tell that I’m a nerd for many things. I’m a nerd for puzzles, games, and RPGs. I’m a nerd for trivia.

And I am absolutely a nerd for statistics. I love numbers and analysis and compiling data.

If you’ve ever perused the website for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, you’ll find it to be a treasure trove of data just waiting for analysis.

So I read through the full results available for each tournament going back years, focusing on the top ten from this year’s tournament and reflecting on their ACPT careers. I had to see if that “new blood” message had any merit or not, and I figured this was the best way to find out.

Let’s see, shall we?

  1. Emily O’Neill

Emily has been competing since 2005 (unless there’s a name change involved, which is possible), and has been in the top ten twice. She has been in the top 30 ten times!

  1. Glen Ryan

Glen has been competing since 2013 (where he placed 3rd in Division B), and has been in the top ten five times. He has been in the top 30 ten times!

  1. Al Sanders

Al has been competing since 1999 (where he placed in the top three), and has been in the top ten TWENTY times. He has been second place twice and in the top 3 seven times. He has never ranked lower than 21!

  1. Stella Zawistowski

Stella has been competing since 2001, and has been in the top ten THIRTEEN times. She has been in the top 30 nineteen times!

  1. Andy Kravis

Andy has been competing since 2011, and has been in the top ten six times. He has been in the top 30 ten times!

  1. Tyler Hinman

Tyler has been competing since 2001 and is a seven-time champion! He has been in the top ten NINETEEN times (including five times in a row at second place and fourteen times in the top three). He was the Division B winner in his second appearance.

  1. David Plotkin

David has been competing since 2010, and has been in the top ten TWELVE times. He has been in the top 3 six times and has never ranked lower than 28th!

  1. Dan Feyer

Dan has been competing since 2008 and is a nine-time champion! He has been in the top ten SIXTEEN times (literally every time except his first tournament appearance).

[It’s not until the final two names that we really get anyone who qualifies as new blood.]

  1. Will Nediger

Will has been competing since 2021 and has been in the top 3 twice. He has been in the top ten three times (meaning every time he’s competed).

  1. Paolo Pasco

Paolo has been competing since 2021 and is a two-time champion! He has been in the top ten five times (every time he’s competed). He was also the Division B winner in 2022.

You have to go back to the year 1998 to find a tournament that didn’t feature one of these ten people as a solver. That’s amazing!

Originally, I was just going to focus on the top ten solvers from this year’s tournament and their many accomplishments.

But as I was going through the rankings year by year, I was struck by how many names I recognized, and how many times I got to see those names. I got to experience the tournament community as a microcosm across literal decades.

I watched the changing of the guard as some names slowly slipped out of the top ten and were replaced by others. Names like Anne Erdmann and Trip Payne and Jon Delfin and Ellen Ripstein and Douglas Hoylman. I was more familiar with some than others.

The slow evolution of solvers really struck both the puzzle nerd in me and the history nerd in me. I ventured back before my own career in puzzles started (back in 2003).

I’ve never competed at the ACPT, but I attended the event for several years, working the Penny Press / Puzzlenation table in the common area, and I grew familiar with a lot of attendees. Puzzle people are genuinely nice folks, and so many of them were happy to visit for a bit, introducing themselves, checking out our magazines, and taking advantage of our pencil sharpeners.

Everyone was so friendly, sharing their excitement for the event and letting me know their thoughts on each puzzle as the tournament went on. It really is a delight.

(Just don’t start a conversation about which pencils are the best for solving and you’ll be fine!)

New blood or not, the crossword scene is clearly thriving, and I can’t wait to see what next year’s tournament brings.

Happy puzzling, everyone!

Winning Monopoly With Math!

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I’m always on the hunt for tips to make myself a better puzzler and gamer. Sometimes you stumble across those tips in unexpected places.

For instance, I was reading, of all things, a book about mathematics and Christmas — The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus: The Mathematics of Christmas — and inside, I found a statistical analysis of the best strategy for winning a game of Monopoly.

Yes, we’ve discussed this topic before, but even that previous deep-dive into the mechanics of the game wasn’t as thorough or as revealing as the work by Dr. Hannah Fry and Dr. Thomas Oleron Evans in this Christmas-fueled tome of facts and figures.

They started with a breakdown of how your first turn could go, based on dice rolls. This is the same breakdown as in our previous post, but with some important differences. For instance, they also considered the chances of going to jail after multiple doubles rolls.

Also, they covered the statistical impact of how landing on card spaces can affect where you land on your first turn. The Community Chest is a curveball, because of the possible sixteen cards, three will send you somewhere on the board: Go, Mediterranean Ave, and Jail.

A simple statistical analysis is complicated even further by the Chance cards — nearly half of the sixteen cards send you elsewhere: Go, Income Tax, St. Charles Place, Pennsylvania Railroad, Illinois Ave., Jail, and Boardwalk.

If you extrapolate forward from this point, you uncover some interesting patterns:

The orange property set benefits from all the ex-cons leaving their cells, and after their next turn the reformed criminals will likely end up somewhere between the reds and yellows… Illinois Avenue, with its own dedicated Chance card directing people to it, gets an extra boost, making it the second most visited square on the board.

…

The property that is visited least frequently is Park Place, where players spend just 2.1% of their time.

Check out this graph. This shows potential earnings from each complete color set, with the dotted line marking the point where your purchase of the property is canceled out by how much the property has earned in rent thus far. Everything above that is profit.

As you can see, blue and brown properties start close to the dotted line, because they’re affordable to buy and build on. The standouts on this graph are New York Avenue (which earns $30 a roll up through thirty rolls statistically) and Boardwalk, which is an expensive investment, but pays off handsomely down the line, remaining the top earning spot past thirty rolls.

Of course, that’s only single properties, and you can’t build on single properties. Let’s look at a chart for full color set revenue:

Some of our previous findings change radically. Boardwalk’s rating drops significantly, because of Park Place’s relative infrequency of being landed on (as we mentioned above).

So which properties should you nab to give yourself the best chance of winning? Well, that depends on how long the game lasts.

The average game of Monopoly takes approximately thirty turns per player, so the larger the number of players, the longer the game will last.

So, for a two-player game, your best bet is to go after the light blue or orange sets, since they’re better in the short term, and the odds are in your favor if the game stays short.

In a three- or four-player game, the orange and red sets are better, because the game is likely to last a while.

And if five or more people are playing, you’re really playing the long game, so the green set becomes your best chance for success.

What about building on those properties? Well, Fry and Evans considered that as well. If you’re playing against multiple opponents and know you’ll be in for a long game, then you definitely want to buy and place houses. But don’t fear if the first house takes a long time to start paying for itself.

As it turns out, your best strategy is to put three houses on your properties as quickly as possible, because the third house is the fastest to recoup on investment. So once the three houses are in place on each property, you can rest for a bit and regenerate your bank before investing further.

And there you have it. Better gaming through mathematics! The only thing better would be, well, playing practically any other game.

Kidding! (But not really.)

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