Stella Daily (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} stellavision) wrote,@ 2008-03-03 13:19:00 |
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ACPT: Saturday morning/afternoon
crossword_fiend had organized a Women in Crosswords breakfast for Sunday morning. I signed up for it, and spent the few days leading up to the tournament wondering why I had. Nothing against you, Amy, and everything against 8:00 AM. :) It was, despite the ungodly hour, a good time.
At last it was time to start solving. This year I took a very different approach to the tournament than I have the past couple of years. After I made it into the top 10 in 2005, I kind of freaked out at my sudden rise in the rankings and was determined to win. So I was solving, like, 20 puzzles a day for three months. What did it get me last year? 31st place, because I was freaking out so hard over winning that I lost the care I needed to stay mistake-free. I needed to listen to that little voice that says, "If it doesn't feel right, it's not right." So this year I consciously decided: Less training (in fact, it worked out to be almost none; many days I solved the NYT puzzle, and nothing else), but more training my brain to think "be careful!" and "check your work!" I realized that if I have a perfect year, I'll make it into the top 10, and if I don't, I won't, and that's that. So I decided to say "screw the rankings," and aim only for a goal of a clean run.
I didn't quite make it, as the rankings show, but I'm not too upset with myself for that, the reason being that, while my error was somewhat boneheaded as I was making it, and I did make it in the only puzzle that I turned in without checking my work (I had ONE second left in the minute), it was not something that I would have caught with my normal methods of checking. The error was in puzzle 3: I wrote HANG IN instead of HUNG IN, having incorrectly read the tense of a clue. I would not have caught this in a check, because I normally check only to see that everything looks like a word; carefully checking each clue against the answer would make me too slow to be in the top group even if everything is correct, so that's a gamble I'm willing to take. HANG IN, therefore, would have looked normal, and I didn't know the crossing word BIBULOUS, so BIBALOUS most likely would not have looked wrong to me.
This year was different in that the preliminary rankings were posted on Saturday instead of Sunday. In theory this would have been a huge help for afternoon play; in practice, 700 puzzles were simply too much to grade in enough time to post the rankings at a time in which they would have changed anybody's strategy. The scores for puzzles 1 through 3 did not appear until we had already finished puzzle 6, and the scores through 6 not until late that evening. Still, it was good to *know* where I was and not *wonder* where I was.
The pajamas came with me again, of course. Not the same pair this time, though. I dropped a dress size training for the marathon (thought I would gain it back afterwards, but apparently my off-season training schedule has been enough to keep me at the lower weight), and I'd long since lost the drawstring to the pajama pants. Now, perhaps there are some people who would enjoy it if I dropped trou in the middle of the tournament, but I wasn't going to go there, so I ordered a smaller pair and tossed the old ones. (You can't have any sentimentality when you live in a tiny Manhattan apartment -- not even for an outfit I wore in a movie.) As usual, I was photographed many times, usually by nice people who asked permission, and once or twice by surreptitious cell-phone-camera snappers. Dude, I would have said yes if you'd asked. I suppose I'll end up with a black rectangle over my eyeballs in Glamour's Dos and Don'ts one of these days, but as I've said before, the ACPT is the only environment in which it is socially acceptable to wear crossword pajamas in public, so why not?
I've been loudly championing the cheap eats in Brooklyn (and dissing the Marriott's expensive food) for months, so of course I had to practice what I preach and lead some solvers to lunch. Ten of us, includinglunchboy, qaqaq, rpipuzzleguy, Trazom, and me, went to Lichee Nut, because we only had about an hour for lunch and I figured it would be a cheap, good (if not amazing), fast option. Well, I got two out of three of those right. Guess they just couldn't handle so many people (there was another group of ACPT'ers whom I had pointed to the place also there) at once, because our food took an agonizingly long time to arrive. More so because puzzle 4 was getting alarmingly close and we had five A solvers at the table! (cazique and thedan were there, too, so a couple of the top B's were feeling in danger of missing out.) Fortunately, the food finally did arrive, in just enough time for everyone to wolf it down before going back for puzzle 4. Also fortunately, the black pepper beef (my favorite dish there) was as good as usual -- I recommended it, and three other people ended up ordering it! I was, like, "Shit, if this isn't very good, then Trazom, cazique, and his friend are all gonna hate me!" They didn't hate me, and they did like the food. :)
Evening report to come. Good thing it's a slow day at work!
crossword_fiend had organized a Women in Crosswords breakfast for Sunday morning. I signed up for it, and spent the few days leading up to the tournament wondering why I had. Nothing against you, Amy, and everything against 8:00 AM. :) It was, despite the ungodly hour, a good time.At last it was time to start solving. This year I took a very different approach to the tournament than I have the past couple of years. After I made it into the top 10 in 2005, I kind of freaked out at my sudden rise in the rankings and was determined to win. So I was solving, like, 20 puzzles a day for three months. What did it get me last year? 31st place, because I was freaking out so hard over winning that I lost the care I needed to stay mistake-free. I needed to listen to that little voice that says, "If it doesn't feel right, it's not right." So this year I consciously decided: Less training (in fact, it worked out to be almost none; many days I solved the NYT puzzle, and nothing else), but more training my brain to think "be careful!" and "check your work!" I realized that if I have a perfect year, I'll make it into the top 10, and if I don't, I won't, and that's that. So I decided to say "screw the rankings," and aim only for a goal of a clean run.
I didn't quite make it, as the rankings show, but I'm not too upset with myself for that, the reason being that, while my error was somewhat boneheaded as I was making it, and I did make it in the only puzzle that I turned in without checking my work (I had ONE second left in the minute), it was not something that I would have caught with my normal methods of checking. The error was in puzzle 3: I wrote HANG IN instead of HUNG IN, having incorrectly read the tense of a clue. I would not have caught this in a check, because I normally check only to see that everything looks like a word; carefully checking each clue against the answer would make me too slow to be in the top group even if everything is correct, so that's a gamble I'm willing to take. HANG IN, therefore, would have looked normal, and I didn't know the crossing word BIBULOUS, so BIBALOUS most likely would not have looked wrong to me.
This year was different in that the preliminary rankings were posted on Saturday instead of Sunday. In theory this would have been a huge help for afternoon play; in practice, 700 puzzles were simply too much to grade in enough time to post the rankings at a time in which they would have changed anybody's strategy. The scores for puzzles 1 through 3 did not appear until we had already finished puzzle 6, and the scores through 6 not until late that evening. Still, it was good to *know* where I was and not *wonder* where I was.
The pajamas came with me again, of course. Not the same pair this time, though. I dropped a dress size training for the marathon (thought I would gain it back afterwards, but apparently my off-season training schedule has been enough to keep me at the lower weight), and I'd long since lost the drawstring to the pajama pants. Now, perhaps there are some people who would enjoy it if I dropped trou in the middle of the tournament, but I wasn't going to go there, so I ordered a smaller pair and tossed the old ones. (You can't have any sentimentality when you live in a tiny Manhattan apartment -- not even for an outfit I wore in a movie.) As usual, I was photographed many times, usually by nice people who asked permission, and once or twice by surreptitious cell-phone-camera snappers. Dude, I would have said yes if you'd asked. I suppose I'll end up with a black rectangle over my eyeballs in Glamour's Dos and Don'ts one of these days, but as I've said before, the ACPT is the only environment in which it is socially acceptable to wear crossword pajamas in public, so why not?
I've been loudly championing the cheap eats in Brooklyn (and dissing the Marriott's expensive food) for months, so of course I had to practice what I preach and lead some solvers to lunch. Ten of us, including
lunchboy, qaqaq, rpipuzzleguy, Trazom, and me, went to Lichee Nut, because we only had about an hour for lunch and I figured it would be a cheap, good (if not amazing), fast option. Well, I got two out of three of those right. Guess they just couldn't handle so many people (there was another group of ACPT'ers whom I had pointed to the place also there) at once, because our food took an agonizingly long time to arrive. More so because puzzle 4 was getting alarmingly close and we had five A solvers at the table! (cazique and thedan were there, too, so a couple of the top B's were feeling in danger of missing out.) Fortunately, the food finally did arrive, in just enough time for everyone to wolf it down before going back for puzzle 4. Also fortunately, the black pepper beef (my favorite dish there) was as good as usual -- I recommended it, and three other people ended up ordering it! I was, like, "Shit, if this isn't very good, then Trazom, cazique, and his friend are all gonna hate me!" They didn't hate me, and they did like the food. :)Evening report to come. Good thing it's a slow day at work!
