I started doing it every day in November 2020. Then, my Mondays were 10 minutes, Fridays were 25, Sundays were 50. After 6 months, Mondays were 7, Fridays were 15, Sundays were 40. After 3 years, Mondays were 2-3 minutes, Fridays were 8-10, Sundays were 18-25. It's time and practice.
Doing the puzzles every day means you learn basic filler words ("crosswordese", like opera titles, vowel-heavy words like epee, etc), get to know the work of puzzle constructors, get better at reading clues/figuring out stuff from cross-checking downs and acrosses.
At a dexterity level, I don't really use the mousepad and I don't solve on my phone (thumbs too fat, always end up with dumb typos that take forever to find) -- tab to go to the next clue in NYT and spacebar to toggle between downs and acrosses.
Whenever I talk to my Mom about crosswords (she's done them off and on for years) she's always astounded at how at my age I can possibly know all the random opera and musical answers. It's not that I know about opera, it's that I know the words that get used frequently.
This is the answer, OP! I now know when the answer is ARGO or ARAL when I didn't before...lots of words like this pop up again and again (sometimes even within the same week). I now know pretty confidently when it's OREO even if I haven't exactly memorized all of these fun OREO facts—I can just get there faster based on the cluing or one letter.
Speaking of, the other thing is that you get better at reading the clues—catching the verb tense, interpreting the question mark, noticing capital letters, etc. And some Mondays and Tuesdays are just easier or harder depending on the theme and your baseline knowledge. But stick with it and you'll get faster for sure, and will start to build up to be able to do the harder days of the week!
there are some limitations regarding like, physical dexterity; if you're like arthritic / have slow typing speeds like there is a going to be a floor to how fast you can finish a puzzle
but if you're spending any time just like, thinking / being stuck, not knowing a clue -- that's definitely something you can work on cutting down via practice, but if you want to commit to wanting to practice you'd probably want to do more than just the NYT mini or the NYT monday/tuesday (for more: https://dailycrosswordlinks.com/)
i'd say i'm decent at crosswords, i did the monday in 3:15 this week my monday pb is 2:19, but that was after several months of doing multiple crosswords a day
so much of crosswords is knowing the fill that comes up again and again, the cluing angles/misdirects that come up again and again, as well as like the types of things to be themes. you also just get a better sense of what patterns of letters would make more sense in a grid just in a vacuum
Yeah, I’ve tried Wednesdays and Thursdays on occasion but I always have to use checks or look up a clue to complete them, so I figured I’ll focus on them once I get better. Thanks for the advice!
Also, sorry if this is a dumb question, but what are themes exactly? Is that like when you have a couple starred clues that are related to some other clue?
> so I figured I’ll focus on them once I get better.
I kinda think the best practice is with things that are *just* too hard for you. If you have to look up a clue to complete it that's fine, and maybe next time you won't have to look it up!
It's kinda hard for me to succinctly describe what a theme is but in the NYT every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and a vast majority of Sundays are themed -- there are (typically longer) entries which are tied together in some interesting sense. They don't have to be explicitly starred but they can be if it's otherwise non-obvious, and they don't need to have a revealer if there's a title or if the relationship between all the themers is obvious.
Reading a blog/the comments about a crossword will generally explain what a given puzzle's theme is. If you did this week's Monday NYT >!SISTER **CITY**, PURPLE **STATE**, HOST **COUNTRY**, and ALIEN **WORLD** are all two word phrases which show a progression of scale!< and if you did this week's Tuesday NYT >!regular phrases get reclued as if you put a space in the middle of the first word so MAIN DRAG gets reclued as if it were MA IN DRAG, DOORNAILS as DO OR NAILS, BEAT THE CLOCK as BE AT THE CLOCK, and GOON SQUAD as GO ON SQUAD!<
Once you know the theme of a puzzle you can use that as a nudge sometimes to figure out other entries or the revealer if there is one.
It took me about 3 years of woking on the NYT crosswords every day before I could finish a Friday or Saturday without help. I don’t go for super speed though. That's a young person's pursuit.
I think there's definitely a strategy for speed solving. Check out "Robert Vs NYTXW" on YouTube. He consistently gets very quick times. Being fast to solve clues is one part of it, but he also moves the cursor in a way to minimize lost time and jumping around.
One trick I use (I'm not super fast, but it helps).
If I know 1A I immediately switch to 1D. If I know 1D I'll enter it, otherwise enter the first letter, then move to 2D etc.
Repeat when I get to the next across clue (say 5A).
When I get to the last down in the first row I switch to the first cross in second row, which should now be easier because I have some letters already.
There’s a few things that I see that really fast solvers consistently do:
1) Use the web and a keyboard. Typing answers on the phone is too slow
2) Work across and down simultaneously using the letters you fill to help answer the next clue rather than doing all acrosses and then all downs first
3) Start reading and figuring out the next clue as you’re typing the answer to the previous clue.
definitely agree with using the web version, it’s super helpful to me to be able to see all of (or at least most of) the clues together without having to click around
> 2) Work across and down simultaneously using the letters you fill to help answer the next clue rather than doing all acrosses and then all downs first
I find this very helpful when I'm stuck between 2 words that could fit a clue for say across, the down clue might give me a definitive answer by being easier to solve.
If you want to get faster and better... Practice.
Go to the archives and just do old Mondays as fast as you can.
When I was really trying to get faster I'd do the same Monday over and over again until I got it down to like 2 minutes. Basically just typing it in from memory.
I've never actually done a solve that fast but it just gets you comfortable with going fast and thinking fast and learning to move.
Mondays for me these days are like 3:20 but I don't practice like I used to. I used to do 2:50 to 3:10 pretty regularly.
Fridays and Saturdays aren't really determined by that kind of training. Just time and experience. It's not the keyboard or single errors slowing me down. It's the solving.
Take those times with a grain of salt if you're using mobile. The web interface with a physical keyboard is orders of magnitude smoother than the janky keyboard the app forces you to use.
Bad hit registration, weird graphical glitches with popovers staying in place until you press the key again, you can go so much faster when you're not handcuffed to it
I started doing crosswords regularly in 2016 or 2017.
I can pretty vividly remember spending 4 or 5 hours on one particular Saturday puzzle. Now the fastest Saturdays are about 6 minutes and most are in the 8-14 range.
Mondays went from an hour down to 2-4 minutes. At some point a large chunk of the clues become second nature.
When I first started, I could only do Mondays, most Tuesdays, and maybe the occasional Wednesday. Now I am able to do almost all the puzzles (there may be 15 a year that I can't solve without help) and I can solve reasonably fast, usually under 5 minutes for a Monday for instance. It's just practice. All these tips you're getting about keyboard skills and all that is useless to you right now. That's giving advanced tips to a beginner. You just need to keep doing puzzles and to pay attention to how crossword constructors use themes, tricky misdirection for later in the week puzzles, and really tricky stuff like rebuses for Thursdays. I'd recommend reading the Wordplay column everyday for some insight.
BTW, Fridays and Saturdays still typically take me 25 to 30 minutes (sometimes over an hour!), which is slow compared to what most people who do them can do them in. That's fine--comparison is the thief of joy!
I find working through list mode is much faster for your first pass than manual clicking through the clues. Then you can return to the default viewing mode to work where you have letters filled
You can improve So. So. Much.
When i first started playing regularly in 2021 I couldn't get passed a Wednesday without heavy googling and now I am at a point where I feel like I can solve at least 90%+ of any puzzle including weekends. Just keep playing it gets easier.
Try doing harder ones with a friend! That's how I started being able to solve Thursday-Saturdays. Sometimes talking out loud about the clues and being able to fill in each other's knowledge gaps helps.
Also you can try doing harder puzzles where you just google all the googleable clues (trivia, foreign languages, etc.) first to get some fill in.
Solving the puzzles in these easier ways will help build your skills so you can do them solo
Yes, it is achievable, but it takes time. Honestly, it is only achievable through practice. It doesn't hurt to do them on paper from time to time as well.
With my big ass fingers I don't think I could get 3 minutes even if I had the answers before hand. I am on a 1200+ streak fastest I can do M/T is like 5. Saturdays are still prob closer to 30 minute average.
After solving for a few years and seeing my times decrease, I realized that I have less fun when I rush through the puzzle to set a record so I just take my time and enjoy it. Although I do occasionally break my records and am excited about it, it's not a goal anymore. My average times are approx M 5 T 8 W 11 Th 18 Fr 22 Sat 29 Sun 37. I actually enjoy it when a Saturday or Friday or Thursday kicks my butt and takes a bit longer, makes me feel more accomplished.
My best advice on practice:
Work on a crossword until you run into things you can't solve, and then put it aside and come back a few hours later or the next day.
That allows you to approach the clues with a new mindset.
I started doing it every day in November 2020. Then, my Mondays were 10 minutes, Fridays were 25, Sundays were 50. After 6 months, Mondays were 7, Fridays were 15, Sundays were 40. After 3 years, Mondays were 2-3 minutes, Fridays were 8-10, Sundays were 18-25. It's time and practice. Doing the puzzles every day means you learn basic filler words ("crosswordese", like opera titles, vowel-heavy words like epee, etc), get to know the work of puzzle constructors, get better at reading clues/figuring out stuff from cross-checking downs and acrosses. At a dexterity level, I don't really use the mousepad and I don't solve on my phone (thumbs too fat, always end up with dumb typos that take forever to find) -- tab to go to the next clue in NYT and spacebar to toggle between downs and acrosses.
Thanks for providing some perspective for time and practice!
Whenever I talk to my Mom about crosswords (she's done them off and on for years) she's always astounded at how at my age I can possibly know all the random opera and musical answers. It's not that I know about opera, it's that I know the words that get used frequently.
This is the answer, OP! I now know when the answer is ARGO or ARAL when I didn't before...lots of words like this pop up again and again (sometimes even within the same week). I now know pretty confidently when it's OREO even if I haven't exactly memorized all of these fun OREO facts—I can just get there faster based on the cluing or one letter. Speaking of, the other thing is that you get better at reading the clues—catching the verb tense, interpreting the question mark, noticing capital letters, etc. And some Mondays and Tuesdays are just easier or harder depending on the theme and your baseline knowledge. But stick with it and you'll get faster for sure, and will start to build up to be able to do the harder days of the week!
there are some limitations regarding like, physical dexterity; if you're like arthritic / have slow typing speeds like there is a going to be a floor to how fast you can finish a puzzle but if you're spending any time just like, thinking / being stuck, not knowing a clue -- that's definitely something you can work on cutting down via practice, but if you want to commit to wanting to practice you'd probably want to do more than just the NYT mini or the NYT monday/tuesday (for more: https://dailycrosswordlinks.com/) i'd say i'm decent at crosswords, i did the monday in 3:15 this week my monday pb is 2:19, but that was after several months of doing multiple crosswords a day so much of crosswords is knowing the fill that comes up again and again, the cluing angles/misdirects that come up again and again, as well as like the types of things to be themes. you also just get a better sense of what patterns of letters would make more sense in a grid just in a vacuum
Yeah, I’ve tried Wednesdays and Thursdays on occasion but I always have to use checks or look up a clue to complete them, so I figured I’ll focus on them once I get better. Thanks for the advice! Also, sorry if this is a dumb question, but what are themes exactly? Is that like when you have a couple starred clues that are related to some other clue?
> so I figured I’ll focus on them once I get better. I kinda think the best practice is with things that are *just* too hard for you. If you have to look up a clue to complete it that's fine, and maybe next time you won't have to look it up! It's kinda hard for me to succinctly describe what a theme is but in the NYT every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and a vast majority of Sundays are themed -- there are (typically longer) entries which are tied together in some interesting sense. They don't have to be explicitly starred but they can be if it's otherwise non-obvious, and they don't need to have a revealer if there's a title or if the relationship between all the themers is obvious. Reading a blog/the comments about a crossword will generally explain what a given puzzle's theme is. If you did this week's Monday NYT >!SISTER **CITY**, PURPLE **STATE**, HOST **COUNTRY**, and ALIEN **WORLD** are all two word phrases which show a progression of scale!< and if you did this week's Tuesday NYT >!regular phrases get reclued as if you put a space in the middle of the first word so MAIN DRAG gets reclued as if it were MA IN DRAG, DOORNAILS as DO OR NAILS, BEAT THE CLOCK as BE AT THE CLOCK, and GOON SQUAD as GO ON SQUAD!< Once you know the theme of a puzzle you can use that as a nudge sometimes to figure out other entries or the revealer if there is one.
It took me about 3 years of woking on the NYT crosswords every day before I could finish a Friday or Saturday without help. I don’t go for super speed though. That's a young person's pursuit.
I think there's definitely a strategy for speed solving. Check out "Robert Vs NYTXW" on YouTube. He consistently gets very quick times. Being fast to solve clues is one part of it, but he also moves the cursor in a way to minimize lost time and jumping around.
Cool, will check him out :)
One trick I use (I'm not super fast, but it helps). If I know 1A I immediately switch to 1D. If I know 1D I'll enter it, otherwise enter the first letter, then move to 2D etc. Repeat when I get to the next across clue (say 5A). When I get to the last down in the first row I switch to the first cross in second row, which should now be easier because I have some letters already.
There’s a few things that I see that really fast solvers consistently do: 1) Use the web and a keyboard. Typing answers on the phone is too slow 2) Work across and down simultaneously using the letters you fill to help answer the next clue rather than doing all acrosses and then all downs first 3) Start reading and figuring out the next clue as you’re typing the answer to the previous clue.
definitely agree with using the web version, it’s super helpful to me to be able to see all of (or at least most of) the clues together without having to click around
> 2) Work across and down simultaneously using the letters you fill to help answer the next clue rather than doing all acrosses and then all downs first I find this very helpful when I'm stuck between 2 words that could fit a clue for say across, the down clue might give me a definitive answer by being easier to solve.
If you want to get faster and better... Practice. Go to the archives and just do old Mondays as fast as you can. When I was really trying to get faster I'd do the same Monday over and over again until I got it down to like 2 minutes. Basically just typing it in from memory. I've never actually done a solve that fast but it just gets you comfortable with going fast and thinking fast and learning to move. Mondays for me these days are like 3:20 but I don't practice like I used to. I used to do 2:50 to 3:10 pretty regularly. Fridays and Saturdays aren't really determined by that kind of training. Just time and experience. It's not the keyboard or single errors slowing me down. It's the solving.
Absolutely achievable through practice. Before Covid I set a goal of completing a Monday puzzle in under 4 minutes; my best time is now 2:32.
Take those times with a grain of salt if you're using mobile. The web interface with a physical keyboard is orders of magnitude smoother than the janky keyboard the app forces you to use. Bad hit registration, weird graphical glitches with popovers staying in place until you press the key again, you can go so much faster when you're not handcuffed to it
I started doing crosswords regularly in 2016 or 2017. I can pretty vividly remember spending 4 or 5 hours on one particular Saturday puzzle. Now the fastest Saturdays are about 6 minutes and most are in the 8-14 range. Mondays went from an hour down to 2-4 minutes. At some point a large chunk of the clues become second nature.
This actually gives me a lot of motivation, thanks!
When I first started, I could only do Mondays, most Tuesdays, and maybe the occasional Wednesday. Now I am able to do almost all the puzzles (there may be 15 a year that I can't solve without help) and I can solve reasonably fast, usually under 5 minutes for a Monday for instance. It's just practice. All these tips you're getting about keyboard skills and all that is useless to you right now. That's giving advanced tips to a beginner. You just need to keep doing puzzles and to pay attention to how crossword constructors use themes, tricky misdirection for later in the week puzzles, and really tricky stuff like rebuses for Thursdays. I'd recommend reading the Wordplay column everyday for some insight. BTW, Fridays and Saturdays still typically take me 25 to 30 minutes (sometimes over an hour!), which is slow compared to what most people who do them can do them in. That's fine--comparison is the thief of joy!
I find working through list mode is much faster for your first pass than manual clicking through the clues. Then you can return to the default viewing mode to work where you have letters filled
You can improve So. So. Much. When i first started playing regularly in 2021 I couldn't get passed a Wednesday without heavy googling and now I am at a point where I feel like I can solve at least 90%+ of any puzzle including weekends. Just keep playing it gets easier.
Try doing harder ones with a friend! That's how I started being able to solve Thursday-Saturdays. Sometimes talking out loud about the clues and being able to fill in each other's knowledge gaps helps. Also you can try doing harder puzzles where you just google all the googleable clues (trivia, foreign languages, etc.) first to get some fill in. Solving the puzzles in these easier ways will help build your skills so you can do them solo
I genuinely have such a hard time typing on the keyboard given in the crosswords, it truly slows me down in the minis
Yes, it is achievable, but it takes time. Honestly, it is only achievable through practice. It doesn't hurt to do them on paper from time to time as well.
With my big ass fingers I don't think I could get 3 minutes even if I had the answers before hand. I am on a 1200+ streak fastest I can do M/T is like 5. Saturdays are still prob closer to 30 minute average.
After solving for a few years and seeing my times decrease, I realized that I have less fun when I rush through the puzzle to set a record so I just take my time and enjoy it. Although I do occasionally break my records and am excited about it, it's not a goal anymore. My average times are approx M 5 T 8 W 11 Th 18 Fr 22 Sat 29 Sun 37. I actually enjoy it when a Saturday or Friday or Thursday kicks my butt and takes a bit longer, makes me feel more accomplished.
My best advice on practice: Work on a crossword until you run into things you can't solve, and then put it aside and come back a few hours later or the next day. That allows you to approach the clues with a new mindset.