The 17th annual Lollapuzzoola Crossword Puzzle tournament was held today in NYC and Owl Chatter competed!

I have to tell you, when I first entered the big room, I was pretty nervous.

But after I found a seat and settled in and picked up some (dreadful) coffee, I looked around at the competition — and then I got really nervous. But it wasn’t my first rodeo. Actually, it would have been my first rodeo, but it wasn’t my first XW tourney — it was my third. And that really helped. I was pretty calm.

Each puzzle had a time limit, 20, 30, or 40 minutes. You earned ten points for each square filled in correctly, 100 bonus points for a perfect grid, and one point for every second you finished before the time expired. There were two divisions: local (for mortals) and express (for serious puzzle folk — those who can complete a NYT Saturday puzzle in ten minutes on average). There was also a pairs division — two people work on each puzzle together. The tournament organizers proudly announced that they have been responsible for close to 40 divorces. [No they didn’t.]

In my division, I came in at #116 out of 169. Fine by me. That’s in the top half, right? Wait. Never mind.

I finished the first two with no errors and had just one error on the last one. D’oh! The fourth one — billed as the toughest — killed me. It was 40 minutes and I was staring at a blank grid for about the first 15 minutes or so. The theme was a “fun house mirror” and each clue was “distorted” with an extra letter in a word on half the grid, and in some other way on the other half. When I finally saw that, I was able to fill in a lot of it, but it took me all 40 minutes and I had 49 errors/blanks. Ouch. There was a lot of blood shed all over the place on that one.

My favorite was the third, although they were all top quality — and the constructors were there, so we could applaud them. The third one was based on the Drop Tower amusement park ride. At a bunch of places in the grid, an answer that had an A in it would suddenly “drop” via a long down string of A’s. Like you were falling and screaming. Then it would hit a level and finish off horizontally. It helped that you could fill in a whole bunch of A’s once you saw that. Several of the clues encouraged us to scream when we reached them, so there was frequent screaming from all over the place. It was funny and less distracting than I feared.

Two women wore dresses like this.

There was an hour-long break for lunch. I brought a tuna salad sandwich on a bagel with a pickle and enjoyed it outdoors on a park bench. Pizza and soda was provided to solvers who wanted it, for $15 (in advance). It looked good, but I was happy with my sandwich.

So that’s my report of a tiring day. Owl Chatter will resume normal broadcasting tomorrow, probably.

Until then — happy puzzling everybody!

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