I'm going to the ACPT (in Stamford, Connecticut) this year; I'm very excited! I haven't done practice puzzles yet so I'm not sure how good I am. My intuition, though, is that my speed will be competitive, but I'm not consistent enough — I think I'm at high risk of making errors or failing to finish one or more puzzles.
I plan to do some preparation (including historical ACPTs). I may post some info in the comments so y'all can calibrate.
Resolves N/A if I end up not competing.
https://www.crosswordtournament.com/info/history.htm (past winner info)
https://www.crosswordtournament.com/info/brochure.htm (contest info)
General policy for my markets: In the rare event of a conflict between my resolution criteria and the agreed-upon common-sense spirit of the market, I may resolve it according to the market's spirit or N/A, probably after discussion.
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Ranked 360 after the first six. Utterly failed to solve Puzzle 5. Just solved puzzle 7, got one square wrong I believe but everything else right (and everything right on puzzles 12346). Fun puzzles! This market was rather hubristic of me to make, haha…
Currently ranked 260/775 for the first two puzzles. ~67th percentile but wouldn’t be winning anything. Error free so far I think! Having fun so far.
https://crosswordtournament.com/2024/index.htm (I’m Jacob Cohen, contestant 118)
Oh, I’ve done some practicing in the last month. I now think that if I won the whole thing, it’d be absurd. All the top players live in the West division, and there are some strong Juniors, so my best shot is probably Rookies - though sometimes there are strong people in that category too. Not sure if I can solve all the puzzles error-free, that’ll be something to watch since I think it could maybe go either way? (Though I bet I’ll make one or two errors or DNFs. Puzzle five is scary)
@Conflux I know nothing about crossword tournaments but I know about competition in other fields. Winning any contest that a dozen others care about on your first try is indeed almost unheard of.
So, I did the pacer puzzle on their website (about which they claim “If you can complete it in 15 minutes, you would be competitive at the tournament. A time of under 10 minutes would be excellent.”) in 9:21, with one error. (ACPT punishes errors quite harshly; a single wrong square would cost you the equivalent of eight minutes if I’m interpreting the scoring correctly.) However, that puzzle was from 2014 and it felt somewhat dated (and I got stuck for a few of the minutes), so I think this data point underestimates my chances.
Unfortunate thing about previous competitions - they’re behind a paywall. So I might just practice on the daily NYT puzzles (but ideally printed out, since ACPT is paper solving - I do have experience paper solving).