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Crossword Competition: The Times report
Meet the man with a mind for puzzlesGeorgie KeatePublished at 12:01AM, October 20 2014For most crossword enthusiasts, winning the Times championship six years in a row would be quite a feat. In August...
View ArticleIf you haven't done the Prize puzzles...
... be aware that some solutions are given in the Guardian piece below!
View ArticleQuick Cryptic No 162 by Tracy
Tracy - thanks - this was great fun. If you like anagrams then you've come to the right place. A couple of longish ones pushed my time up to 18 minutes - I ended up not being able to do them 'on...
View ArticleTimes 25,923
12:49 on the Club timer, and based on the current leaderboard (on which I'm about half-way down page 2) that time was about par for me. An interesting puzzle, where I quite often had to pick up a clue...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic No. 163 by Joker
Thanks to Joker for an enjoyable puzzle. Not too tricky (definitely at the easier end of the QC spectrum) but with a wide variety of clue types. No cricket and no birds - good news for...
View ArticleTimes 25924
This pleasant puzzle, about 6 on my Richter Scale, took me 24 minutes, of which at least 5 was spent trying to parse my LOI 5dn. I think we have it sorted now. Someone will tell us how many times we...
View ArticleTimes 25925 - in which I bomb
Solving time : After about 11 minutes, all I had left to put in was 14 across. And nothing at all came. For almost 10 minutes - I could see SPEED and SPIED and OPTED fitting the space there, but...
View ArticleToday's Times Quick Cryptic - Help!
Hi everyoneI have had a last minute hospital summons this morning. Could someone cover for me today? If not, i'll put the blog up this afternoon when I'm home
View ArticleQuick Cryptic No. 164 (guest blog by faceofboe)
Welcome to guest blogger faceofboe, who is standing in for macavity, who is unable to blog this one. Our best wishes go with macavity, and our thanks to fob...Across1 MANSFIELD PARK - mans = chap...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic Number 165 by Izetti
This is quite a tricky puzzle, in my opinion, which makes use of some archaic and unusual words. I got almost all the way there before having to resort to the internet for 18dn. It’s easy to forget how...
View ArticleTimes 25,926: More Haste, Less Speed
Well, after my freak respectable performance last weekend - 9th in the second prelim, 16th in the finals - alright, alright, I'll stop "casually" mentioning it everywhere I go now - I've been trying to...
View ArticleSaturday Times 25921 (18th October)
Times Championship day, when the puzzle (it always seems to me) is extra-hard just to rattle the competitors before the main event. For a change, not wanting to be rattled, and because I was driving to...
View ArticleTimes Jumbo 1104
Great to see so many of you at the Times Championship last Saturday - congratulations and/or commiserations to all participants.I thoight this was another medium-difficulty Jumbo, but witb some answers...
View ArticleSunday Times 4612 (19 Oct 2014) by Tim Moorey
Solving time: 48:55I never concentrated in History at school, but I managed to drag 23a up from somewhere. I'm also not sure where I managed to pull 11a from either, but it was in my head for some...
View Article2014 Times Crossword Championship results
Sorry for the delay in getting this up - before last year I used to laboriously create an HTML table and post it here, then last year Pete gave me a link to the file somewhere on the Times site. This...
View ArticleMephisto 2825 - Paul McKenna
Sorry I'm a little late in getting this up - I don't think there was anything too controversial or mega-obscure here, though there were a few I got from definition and had to retrofit the wordplay for...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic 166 by Hurley
This is at the easier end of the spectrum and an enjoyable outing, with plentiful opportunities to flex one's anagramming muscles. No obscure vocabulary from what I can see, but the parsing of the clue...
View ArticleTIMES 25928 - The City of My Ancestors
Solving time: 75 minutesMusic: Mingus Ah UmAs you can see, I was quite slow on this one, and I suspect it is at least moderately difficult. There was definitely some clever stuff that is hardly typical...
View ArticleQuick Cryptic No 167 by Flamande
Well, I didn't know that - or that... If you liked yesterday's easy QC and think they should all be like that then look away now. Personally I think these QCs are great. They provide a...
View ArticleTimes Cryptic 25929
This was something of a repeat of my Monday experience in that I solved one half of the puzzle quite easily (this time the LH side) but the other half proved more difficult, especially the SE corner...
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