Friday, Saturday and Sunday bring some of the hardest puzzles of the week.
Welcome to Part 3 of “Mini to Maestro.” If you’re here, you’ve made it through the gantlet of themed puzzles and are looking to try out some themeless grids. If this doesn’t sound like you, you can check out Part 1 of our guide, where we go over the basics of solving, or Part 2, where we go over some intermediate tips and help you get into the habit of solving often.
To refresh your memory, your guides are Jackie Frere, community engagement manager, and Isaac Aronow, associate editor of Gameplay. In this part, we’ll be going over how to attack the Friday and Saturday themeless puzzles, as well as a few notes on Sunday. Yes, these are difficult, but you’ll be able to solve them in no time.
Forget (some of) what we just taught you
On Friday and Saturday, we typically run into a different type of puzzle: the themeless kind. The name is self-explanatory: It’s a grid with no theme answers. As far as the difficulty goes, Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times Crossword, said in an email that “themeless crosswords aren’t inherently harder than themed ones.” But he added that they “tend to be harder than themed ones, because they have longer answers, especially ones that have rarely or never appeared in crosswords before.”
The added answer length is built in, as The Times has a lower word limit for themeless puzzles — 72, compared with 78 for themed ones — and it’s not at all unusual to see puzzles go even lower. Because of the added space, themeless puzzles are afforded more room for fresher answers, which moves the needle toward their being naturally harder to solve. Just how difficult do they get? Sam Ezersky, a digital puzzles editor, said, “We save our fireworks for Friday and Saturday, if you will.”
The other factor is that in themed puzzles, the construction is limited by the theme itself. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — sometimes an excellent theme takes a puzzle from just good to great — but it means that constructors often end up using similar fill, or nonthemed, answers in a themed crossword. After you’ve solved a lot of puzzles, you’re bound to start recognizing these as they come up, and they don’t surprise you in the same way an answer like GAY PORN or COINKYDINK might.
Don’t worry too much if this is making your head spin. You can use the skills you’ve already learned from the puzzles you solved earlier in the week to help you solve a themeless. First, find something you know and build from there. There are still plenty of three- to five-letter answers in any Friday or Saturday puzzle, and odds are you already know the answer to at least one or two of them. Second, there aren’t really any new types of clues at the end of the week, but they tend to lean even more on misdirection.
Will gave us the example of a simple clue like “Light,” which can be a noun, a verb or an adjective. It’s hard to answer clues like that if you don’t have a crossing answer. “Light” has appeared in New York Times Crosswords 22 times since 1993, according to XWordInfo.com, an online database of New York Times Crossword puzzles. On April 18, 2006, a Tuesday, the answer was AIRY. On April 30, 2004, a Friday, the answer was LAMP. On April 30, 2016, a Saturday, the answer was SET ABLAZE. So you’ll have to use your solving skills to try to figure out which meaning the puzzle is asking you for, but it’s nothing you haven’t already done.
Friday versus Saturday
At this point, you may be asking yourself, What makes a Saturday harder than a Friday? It’s a very fair question, especially since there are no themes in these puzzles to help. Looking at XWordInfo.com, we found that Saturday puzzles have the lowest word counts, the fewest black squares and the longest average word lengths. From that data, we can infer that Saturdays are harder than Fridays.
But does that mean that Saturday is always going to be a huge challenge while Friday is just going to be a bit tough? Not necessarily. It’s important to note that while themeless puzzles come in all levels of difficulty, The Times publishes ones that are harder to fit into the Monday-to-Saturday difficulty curve. Some solvers may also find that, in a given week, Friday is actually harder than Saturday. Isaac, who loves themeless puzzles, says it can be a tossup. Jackie says that she finds both equally hard but that she enjoys a good challenge.
Often, it really just comes down to what you know as a solver, and not necessarily the contents of the puzzle itself. The construction of Saturday puzzles, which is often more complex, means they tend to be harder, but if Friday is full of obscure trivia and Saturday is full of clues you’re familiar with, you’ll probably have an easier time with the purportedly harder puzzle.
In our experience, this isn’t incredibly common, but it does happen every now and then. You’re not weird if, in a given week, you struggle through a Friday only to quickly fill in a Saturday. It happens more often than you think. Try out a few Fridays yourself, and then try out some Saturdays. Let us know which ones you find harder.
Let’s solve the themeless puzzle from Friday, May 13, 2022 together:
Isaac gets a slow start on this puzzle, filling in only a few across answers on his first pass. This puzzle has a lot of Down entries, but Isaac is able to sort out LOOSE ENDS at 11-Down.
Here are five Fridays that Wyna Liu, crossword editor, recommends:
Here are five Saturday puzzles we recommend:
The big day
Sunday puzzles are the biggest of the week, but not necessarily the hardest. They are 21x21 instead of 15x15, and in nearly all cases, they are themed. They don’t introduce any new concepts, and the clues aren’t notably more difficult than any other themed puzzle.
Sundays do take longer to solve than other puzzles, but that’s more likely a consequence of their size rather than their difficulty. They aren’t much more than a big Wednesday, so if you can solve a regular Wednesday puzzle, you should have no trouble getting through Sunday.
What makes Sunday special is that for many, it was an event when someone in their home was solving one. Often, people learn to solve crossword puzzles because people they love do so. “There’s a lot of variety, but at the end of the day, it’s a kind of puzzle where there’s going to be something for everybody,” Sam said. “It’s a great one to solve with family around the kitchen table.”
A challenge for you: Grab a group of friends or family members and see if you can solve a Sunday together. You never know what kind of information you will all bring to the puzzle. It’s a great way to get others involved in your practice.
Here are five Sundays that Catilin Lovinger, a Wordplay columnist, recommends:
Takeaways
See, you can do these! There’s no right or wrong way to solve a puzzle. Feel free to use autocheck, look up an answer, phone a friend or do whatever feels right for you. The key thing to remember here is that crossword puzzles are games, and they’re meant to be fun. Sure, they can be difficult, and sometimes even exasperating — but over time, crossword puzzles can become an engaging and rewarding part of your day.
These guides are meant to get you started on your crossword journey. Bookmark them, come back to them, and don’t forget to use Deb Amlen’s “How to Solve The New York Times Crossword” as your crossword guide.
Let us know on Twitter or in the Wordplay comments how you’re progressing! We’re always here to cheer you along, and our editors are always here to help.
September 19, 2022 at 08:00PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/crosswords/mini-to-maestro-part-3.html
How to Solve Hard Crosswords - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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