ZingSync

Another year, another ACPT in the books. It’s always an amazing weekend for me. It’s my chance to spend time with the great friends I’ve made over the years doing this hobby-somehow-turned-career, and make new friends. I really consider the folks that go there to be my second family. The competition puzzles are actually the worst thing about the tournament, and they’re quite often very good puzzles.

Here’s a brief recap: Dan Feyer took home his seventh crown, though not without having to sweat out Tyler Hinman finishing the championship puzzle well before him (but with one mistake) with Joon Pahk not far behind. Me? I finished 40th out of 618 competitors, and for the third consecutive year I completed all seven puzzles with no mistakes! That’s my only solving goal each time. Last year I was 59th and didn’t think I had much room to move up, but what gave me a boost was that, even though I struggled on the easier puzzles (or at least I felt like I should have been faster on them), I thought I had nailed the harder ones. I don’t want to give out spoilers in case you’re planning to solve the at-home version of the puzzles, but I completed the dreaded Puzzle #5 in under 13 minutes, a six-minute improvement over 2016.

I’ve said before that I don’t anticipate I’ll ever make it up to the big boards — there are too many crossword-solving speed demons who are much faster and there’s only so much I can improve on my own speed. But hey, I didn’t think I’d jump up from 59th to the top 40 in one year, and I finished 13th in the B division this year, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that I can get to the B finals one day. It would be very difficult, for sure, but never say never. If only I could not struggle with any of the seven puzzles, then I’d be set. (I bet every ACPT competitor says that.)

You know how sometimes you’ll see punny-style clues like [Greek leader?] and the answer is GEE, as in the phonetic spelling of the capital letter G in “Greek”? Today’s puzzle flipped that convention around. Ten answers have clues which are only one letter long; in order, those ten letters spell CHARACTERS. The answers to the theme clues represent familiar two-word phrases in which the second word describes each clue letter’s position in the first word:

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• 23A: [C] is CHESS OPENING, meaning the opening letter of the word “chess” is the letter C.
• 37A: [H] is HEAD START. The start of “head” is H.
• 39A: [A] is ARCTIC FRONT. The front of “arctic” is A.
• 54A: [R] is NERVE CENTER. The center of “nerve” is R.
• 69A: [A] is HEAVY HEART. The heart of “heavy” is A.
• 73A: [C] is CULT LEADER. The leader of “cult” is C.
• 89A: [T] is STOLE SECOND. The second letter of “stole” is T.
• 104A: [E] is MATTE FINISH. The finish of “matte” is E.
• 107A: [R] is BITTER END. The end of “bitter” is R.
• 122A: [S] is SERIES FINALE. The finale of “series” is S.

In the original draft, 69A had actually been “CRAZY HEART,” the 2009 movie for which Jeff Bridges won the Academy Award for Best Actor. But one of my testers convinced me that this answer stuck out like a sore thumb since it was the only one that referred to a proper noun, and thus it’d be much tougher to get if you hadn’t heard of it. I’d missed HEAVY HEART on the first go-round, but I’m glad I reworked the grid to make it fit. Incidentally, “BRAVEHEART” might be a much more recognizable movie title, but I considered it a no-go because it’s one word, not two.

I tried my best to follow a fairly logical progression where the first few theme answers would describe the beginnings of specific words, the middle theme answers would describe letters in the interior, and the last theme answers would describe the endings. I had to cheat with CULT LEADER appearing in the middle of the grid, but I chalk that up to it being remarkably difficult to find a matching set that follows that pattern and allows you to keep normal grid symmetry. I guess you could do SPACE CENTER and REACTOR CORE as matching 11-letter answers near the middle, but then you can’t use NERVE CENTER; plus there wasn’t a good two-word phrase I could find with MIDDLE as the second word.

Finally, I should mention that I have seen this particular conceit in other crosswords. Brad Wilber published a puzzle for CrosSynergy with the one-letter clue theme in June 2016 (similarly entitled “Character Analysis”). David Levinson Wilk published a puzzle for the L.A. Times with the same concept in July 2009, and that also featured a pattern where the first theme answer referred to the first letter of a specific word and the final theme answers described the last letters of other words. Norma Steinberg used this theme idea for the New York Times back in June 1991, before Will Shortz became editor. No doubt there are other examples. But what I thought might make today’s puzzle a little different is that the individual letters in the theme clues could spell out a relevant term.

Other answers and clues of note:

• 22A: [Nationals ace Scherzer] is MAX Scherzer. Baseball is just around the corner for you Nats fans, though it appears Stephen Strasburg is getting the start on Opening Day.
• 3D: [Video game console that succeeded the Sega Saturn] is the Sega DREAMCAST. I never owned this, but I’ve heard it was a pretty advanced system for its time and died out way too quickly. Some developers are actually still making games for it.
• 12D: [Elon Musk company that built the Falcon 9 rocket] is SPACEX. This very same rocket was in the news this week for becoming the first orbital rocket to be relaunched. I didn’t plan for this clue to appear just after the relaunch …. or so you think.
• 15D: [Derek Zoolander’s metallic-sounding signature look] is BLUE STEEL. At first when I put this answer in the grid, I thought it was Zoolander’s look that could stop death in its tracks, but that’s “Magnum.” In my defense, all of his looks pretty much look the same.
• 56D: [Do some work at the Post office?] is EDIT. Here’s hoping my own editors approve of that clue.
• 59D / 84D: [With 84 Down, star of the 2016 film “Arrival"] is AMY / ADAMS. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’ve heard it’s quite good.
• 121D: [“No Flex Zone" hip-hop duo ___ Sremmurd] is RAE Sremmurd. In case this group pops up in a clue again, here’s a tip: The name spells “ear” and “drummers” backwards.

See you next week!

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