by Will Eisenberg
Will is a French horn player, music teacher, and crossword constructor located in the Twin Cities. He is the current 3rd horn of Orchestra Iowa and a founding member of the Minnesota Horn Quartet. More of his puzzles can be found on the blog Half-Baked Puzzles.
Crosswords and video games tend to feel worlds apart. And if you were going to pick a video game to compare crosswords to, you probably wouldn’t think Street Fighter. But a book about competitive gaming, especially fighting games, caught my eye and really made me think about my own approach to crossword solving. It describes something called the “Scrub Mentality”: players who are so wound up in their idea of how a game ought to be played that they struggle, stuck in a cage of their own making. I recognized how that mindset impacted my crossword solving for a long time, and I think that’s true of others as well.
David Sirlin, the author of that book, describes the “scrub” mentality in reference to competitive fighting games, like Street Fighter. A scrub isn’t just a bad player, a scrub is someone shackled by their own mental conceptions about how the game ought to work. “No fair!”, you might hear the scrub complain, even when their opponent’s moves are perfectly legal. A scrub gets mad when you use the same move over and over against them, because it’s “cheap”. A scrub places a high value on “skill” moves, and turns up their nose at “unskilled” moves. But the scrub loses to the competitive gamer, who plays within the rules of the games, but is willing to exploit every aspect of the game to win, and use any moves necessary.
So why am I writing this–just to poke fun at weaker solvers than me? Far from it! I’m interested in describing a phenomenon I’ve seen among some solvers, but for those who want it, this article could serve as a roadmap to becoming a better crossword solver. I certainly had a similar mentality when I started solving, and I think that’s true for a lot of folks. Overcoming it, and getting better at solving, meant I could solve more puzzles, harder puzzles, and a greater diversity of styles and themes. And indeed it’s a mentality that still creeps into my solving from time to time–and letting go of it in those moments is key to overcoming some very challenging solves.
We should talk a little here about design philosophy in puzzlemaking. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about “fairness” in puzzles. And in an era when there’s more communication than ever between editors and solvers, and when constructors and solvers coexist in many online spaces, it’s not surprising that this philosophy gets echoed frequently by solvers. A square that the solver couldn’t finish might “feel a little unfair”, or an entry that was unfamiliar might “feel too obscure” to be in a puzzle. Of course, what feels fair often correlates with what a solver already knows, and vice-versa.
As a constructor, I think a lot about the fairness and accessibility of the puzzles I design–a lot. So what’s wrong if solvers share that feeling? The difference, as I see it, is that for the solver, the puzzle is already in its final form. Solvers can (and should) feel free to make decisions about what venues and constructors they want to engage with based on the contents of the puzzles. But when you’ve got a puzzle in front of you, what’s “fair” or not is no longer your concern as a solver. Your goal is to solve the puzzle! If you find yourself imagining which unsolved entries you might complain about before your solve is even finished, you might be blocking the part of your brain that can actually solve the puzzle.
Puzzles are meant to be solved.
Crosswords aren’t competitive in the same way as a fighting game. Even in a tournament setting, the competition is ultimately still solver versus puzzle, not solver versus solver. But a shift in mindset might be just what’s needed to become a better solver, whether that means simply being able to enjoy solving easy puzzles without feeling anxious, or competing at crossword tournaments. There is maybe no more unhelpful bit of advice than “get good,” but what I’m proposing is different: shift your mindset, and the rest will follow.
A confident solver adopts what I’ll call a resilient mindset. One noted speed solver begins Puzzle 5 at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, one of the hardest puzzles of the year, by reminding herself “There’s no P5 you can’t solve.” The belief that you can and will solve the puzzle is key–even if your skills don’t quite match up yet! Looking to other competitions for comparisons, imagine the mindset of a professional goalkeeper in hockey or soccer. Without fail, these players have let in hundreds of goals in their career. Perhaps they’ve even let in several already in the game. But their mindset is always “I won’t let in another goal. It’s not even a possibility worth considering.” If telling yourself you will solve the puzzle seems scary, just remember this mantra: Puzzles are meant to be solved. Let’s look at how we might replace our scrub mindset with a resilient one, and some strategies we might use to help our puzzle-solving skills match our confidence.
To cultivate a resilient mindset, you have to want to improve. Many solvers who lack a resilient mindset are content in their solving level, even (especially?) when they think they lack the skills to solve puzzles. Probably the number one thing I hear from folks who don’t solve puzzles regularly is “Oh, I’m not smart enough to solve puzzles.” I’ve even heard that from a doctor! Sure, many top solvers are brainiacs. But many people who have gotten good at crosswords through practice are neither geniuses nor trivia buffs. They got there through hard work. Dismissing your own ability to solve puzzles before you’ve attempted to get better is no different than saying “Oh, I’m not smart enough to speak Spanish.” Well… did you try? Crosswords, like anything else, are a skill to be acquired. Learning the language of puzzles, both the words that appear over and over, and the way the constructor is speaking to the solver, trying to help them, is how you get good at solving puzzles. “Being smart” becomes a trivial factor when it’s outweighed by practice and effort.
Along with wanting to improve, the resilient mindset is marked by wanting to learn. Those who lack this mentality often decry “trivia” in puzzles. Of course, this complaint falls apart completely on examination. Everything in crossword puzzles from start to finish is trivia. Even a puzzle with zero proper nouns in the grid or the clues is still testing your knowledge of vocabulary. And clues that seem like wordplay in their purest form still test knowledge.
Let’s take a banger clue from Brooke Husic as an example. Examine the clue [Black and white drawing] for STALEMATE. At first blush, this might appear to be totally “trivia free”. But what is it actually asking of the solver? To parse and solve the clue, you need to know the rules of chess. You need to know that “draw” and “stalemate” are synonyms in the context of a tie game in chess. You also need to know that chess sides are divided into black and white pieces, and often referred to solely by their colors. Even clues that appear to be pure of any trivia are drawing on the knowledge and cultural background of the solver.
I must admit, while many of the areas for improvement I’ve described apply directly to me, this anti-learning mentality is hard for me to get into the mindset of. I’m hungry to learn. When I come across an entry that I don’t know, I’ll often spend a long time reading up about it afterwards. Is knowing that the Sicilian town of ENNA is called the “bellybutton of Sicily”, or that it was once breached by troops via its sewers in 859, going to help me solve puzzles? Probably not, but it made for a fascinating rabbit hole. And honestly, who knows? It certainly might help me decide a similar-looking answer is definitely not ETNA.
There are endless options for puzzles that operate on pure logic, puzzles for which everything you need to “learn” can be explained in a few minutes. Logic puzzles, kenken, sudoku, star battle, chess puzzles, Spelling Bee, Minesweeper, and so on and so on. Learning, or trivia, or whatever you want to call it, is here to stay in crosswords. Deciding to embrace this is a step towards the mentality of a resilient solver.
Ironically, though, another barrier to reaching a resilient mindset involves viewing the puzzle strictly as a trivia contest. This is related to the fighting game mentality that prizes “skill shots” and derides “non-skill” moves. In our context, answering a crossword clue without even looking at the grid is the “skill” move. Doing anything else is not so much derided as being unfair, but is simply not considered as an option. But great solvers work a puzzle forward and backward. Clues give a handhold into the grid, but the grid in turn offers suggestions and even answers about what letters must go into place to make a valid solution. Remember, puzzles are meant to be solved.
Let’s look at a few examples of how that might work. A key tool in the solver’s toolbox is “Wheel of Fortuning” an answer–that is, filling it in based off of the letter patterns in the grid alone. Even new solvers do this, to an extent– if you look at D?REDTODRE?M, you’d probably be inclined to buy an A, or just fill them in. But honing this skill can have huge payoffs in solving. When tricky themes are in play, becoming overly focused on solving the clue can become a detriment to solving the puzzle.
Crosswords, like anything else, are a skill to be acquired.
In Lollapuzzoola’s 2023 puzzle 4, several of the long answers seemed to not match their clues. With the clue [Doesn’t just bother] and the letter pattern ?OZ?OFF, can you solve this entry? Yes, you can! Nothing else makes a valid entry besides DOZE OFF. Why does that match the clue? Well, in the short term, it doesn’t matter. If the crossing entries look good, you can move on, knowing you might return later to work out the theme mechanic. In that puzzle, I solved most of the themers by simply making the words in the grid make sense. When I finally came to a theme entry where I needed to understand the theme to solve it, I had a large handful of examples to look back on to try to work out the pattern.
Rather than seeing the puzzle as a series of trivia questions, all of which the solver needs to “know” to “win”, the crossword becomes much more of a logic exercise. Now the clues are a wealth of hints to solving, but they’re no longer all needed. Many top solvers can solve puzzles “downs only”, that is, without using any across clues. In the trivia model, if you hit a single down clue you don’t know the answer to, it’s all over. But in practice, many across entries can be worked out without their clues at all by using letters you’ve already placed in the grid, giving more crossing hints to the unsolved down entries, and so on.
Even without downs-only solving, approaching the crossword as a logic puzzle pays dividends. We saw how it can be used to overcome thematic clues that don’t seem to make sense, but it can also be deployed against trivia. You probably couldn’t solve the trivia question [First name of my uncle], but what about if you have the letters ?AVI? in place? Here’s where it gets interesting: there’s not one guaranteed correct answer here (unless you know my uncle). But there are a range of probabilities. MAVIS is not out of the question, but feels unlikely. GAVIN is a more typically male name, but a relatively uncommon one. DAVIS isn’t impossible, but offers an opportunity to do some reverse engineering: if the constructor had DAVIS in the grid, there are a handful of notable people with that as a last name: Jim Davis and Angela Davis might be likelier angles than somebody’s random uncle. The high probability guess, of course, is DAVID. With those inferences made, you might return to the entry crossing the first letter, and try a “D” in the cross, with “G” as a backup attempt.
That concept of reverse-engineering is the ultimate ace in the sleeve of the resilient solver. The goal is not to solve the puzzle by knowing every bit of trivia and carefully unraveling all the wordplay… the goal is to finish the grid! The solve doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to get done. In crossword tournaments, you get no points for showing your work. Understanding why the answer fits the clue is always going to give you a higher certainty of being correct, but it’s not strictly necessary.
We’ve talked ways you might solve that involve putting less emphasis on the clues. But there’s a change in approach in using the clues that can help us reach a resilient mindset as well. It involves abandoning the idea that if you can’t immediately answer the clue, the clue cannot help you at all, and is useless. This leads to not really reading clues in depth, and missing a lot of hints that have been put there by the constructor. Like on “Jeopardy!”, parts of a clue may be designed to give a hint to even solvers who know very little about the entry at hand. A straightforward example is a clue like [Spooky-sounding Great Lake] for ERIE.
Let’s consider a more complex example for a longer entry. Take the clue [Potential method of cancer treatment involving nanoscale folding]. Very few solvers are going to know this one off the dome, especially if they have no crosses: ??????????. But consider it with some letters to help: ?NAORIGA??. It would be easy to dismiss this as still looking like nonsense, like some drug name you haven’t a clue about. But the key words in the clue are nanoscale and folding. How might they apply, especially after searching for a potential word break: ?NA ORIGA??. Now did it pop into place? Even with a largely unfamiliar new topic, clues can be giving hints to more familiar words. By deciding you know nothing about it and moving on, you lose the help these hints are meant to bring.
It’s also worth knowing that you don’t have to completely solve an entry to make headway in a grid. Experienced solvers will drop in an “S” when a clue is plural. They may drop in an “ED” when the clue is calling for a past tense verb, and an “ING” when it seems to call for a gerund. Of course, these aren’t always guaranteed. [Running] might be a clue for OPERATIONAL. [Flock members] might be a clue for GEESE. But putting wrong letters in the grid is rarely as detrimental as it seems. The chance you might put in a correct letter, and then make a connection to the next crossing answer, far outweighs the risk of putting in a wrong letter. As the solve continues, wrong letters will become more and more obvious, and can be removed.
So what happens if you deploy all the techniques here and still find yourself stuck? You went in with a resilient mindset, you approached the puzzle confidently and didn’t let its difficulty rattle you. You worked hard, but you’re still staring down some empty squares. “It’s your puzzle, solve it how you want” is a great maxim that still holds true. Googling answers, using check grid features (in most online solvers), or clue hints (available at Puzzmo) are all viable strategies, especially for newer solvers.
There’s no pat answer as to whether these tools can be part of building a resilient mindset. Some solvers who don’t use any assistance find themselves stuck, and unable to improve. They decide they’re not capable of solving puzzles, and often give up. For them, using assistance more would be a way to gain knowledge and skills that in turn would give them the confidence to solve harder puzzles. For other solvers, relying on assistance may become a crutch. By failing to truly try their hardest to solve a puzzle without assistance, they rob themselves of the chance to flex their solving muscles and improve. For those solvers, sitting longer in moments of discomfort while solving, without reaching for assistance, might help them more in the long term.
Here’s a secret, if you’ve read this far: the scrub mentality impacts everyone when the puzzle gets hard enough. With a few exceptions (who may feel free to identify themselves), sooner or later we all hit a section of the grid that leaves us feeling like we simply don’t have the knowledge and skills to solve it. But no matter how many tricks are in your solving arsenal, the ultimate way to improve is to get more comfortable with this feeling. “Oh yes,” the seasoned solver says, “I’ve heard that excuse before, brain. Well, I’m going to stare at it a few minutes longer anyway, and see what happens. I know you think it’s hopeless, but let’s try anyway.” In my experience, it’s not much longer after that line of thought that answers can start falling in place. But if you give up before you get to that point, you’ll never have the opportunity to build up those muscles. The countless times I found myself twenty minutes into a David Steinberg Saturday NYT puzzle with only a few fill-in-the-blank answers in the grid, waiting for literally any insight at all, helped me build the skills to make Saturday puzzles less intimidating to solve.
The scrub mentality can do more than slow down or stop a solve. Honestly, I quit puzzles for over a decade because of it. When I was in high school, I really enjoyed solving crosswords, but I just felt like I didn’t know enough Things. Of course, when I came back to solving, I knew more Things, and puzzles had gotten a lot cleaner in the way they were constructed. So it’s perhaps flippant, with hindsight, to suggest that I had simply needed to put my nose to the grindstone and get good. But of course, it wasn’t just about that. I needed to understand the puzzles I was doing were meant to be solved, and had more ways of breaking in than I knew. Even if harder puzzles were always going to be a struggle, any amount of solving practice over those intervening years would’ve made me a much better solver than I was when I picked crosswords back up. I’m glad to have the puzzling community, now, and I wish I hadn’t given up on it so quickly. I think a resilient mindset would’ve helped me persevere even when the challenges felt insurmountable. I hope if any part of this article resonates with you, you might not give up on the next puzzle so quickly either.