Clearly I have no idea, but my readers already know that lack of data doesn't prevent me from speculating. Today's puzzle Splits and Mergers by Patrick Berry (answers) gave me some confidence that I'm learning a little. I suspected a trick, guessed what it might be, and confirmed it on my first theme entry.
Despite that head start, the super solvers surely flew right past me. I sat behind Tyler Hinman at the Tournament and I have no illusions about this. Let's set aside the advantages I can't do anything about. Great solvers are smart and fast and know a bunch of stuff. I'm less smart, slow, and I'm forgetting facts faster than I learn new ones, but I am still improving on some less obvious levels. Guessing the trick comes from experience, of course. It must be nearly impossible to surprise Mr. Hinman who at his tender age has no doubt done more puzzles than I ever will.
But he out-classes me in some less obvious ways as well. For example, I still fall into the trap of hanging on to my mistakes way too long. This was the most interesting part, for me, of watching the division finalists on stage. I was so sure "Great White ____" was SHARK that I held on to that way past the time when even a cursory knowledge of the distribution of letters in English made that guess impossible. It turns out that HERON comes in a great white variety as well.
That skill of seeing letter distributions in empty squares is one I'm still working on. A word with a lot of S's on the right or bottom edge is a good guess. I can even speculate that empty squares adjacent to known words are probably vowels or not. Tyler, I suspect, does far more. From a single word he's probably, if only subconsciously, already got three or four vowel/consonant patterns in his head for that whole quadrant ranked by probability, and likely letters for several squares before even reading the clues. It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't some distribution probability calculations going on when he walked into the hall for the final puzzle and saw the general shape of the grid.
There were some dandy clues today. "Concave button" is INNIE. "Exchange words" is a great clue for TRANSLATE. "Gap filler" becomes DENIMS. "Fictional blue humanoid" is SMURF which, we learned at the tournament, is called a Schtroumpf in its native France.
I'm still working on the High Scrabble Score puzzle analysis. More on that when the numbers crunch.
