The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament this weekend was an unexpectedly emotional experience for me.

For one thing, there was the pure giddiness of being with my crossword friends in person for the first time since the August 2019 Lollapuzzoola tournament. It felt cathartic to see everyone and to feel the buzzing energy of so many people from the crossword community in the same place once again. It’s been too freaking long. We’ve had (and are still in) a pandemic and there’s been other national/world trauma, and meanwhile the crossword world has exploded online. There are many people who’ve become established names in crosswording since 2019, and it was almost sensory overload to see so many of them in the same place. Until this weekend, I hadn’t completely realized how much I had missed all of this.

As for my tournament performance: wow. I had no expectations of anything going in. At the last in-person ACPT in 2019, I came in 95th out of 700-ish people. My goal this time was just to rank in the double digits again.

[Note: this is my own blog, of course, so obviously I’m writing about this from my perspective and putting my own feelings and point of view front and center.]

There were fewer attendees this time because of the pandemic, under 500 total. But I figured there’d be some amazing rookies there after such a long gap between tournaments.

So. We did the first three puzzles on Saturday morning and then went to lunch. I didn’t think about scores, because I didn’t want to get into that stressed-out mindset yet.

But eventually, in the middle of Saturday afternoon, the scores for the first two puzzles were posted online, and I looked, and I was in 24th place.

Wow!

That felt really cool.

Later in the afternoon, the scores for the third puzzle went up, and I was doing even better – I was tied for 14th! And then after the fourth puzzle, I was still 15th!

And then, after the notorious puzzle #5, which usually breaks most people, I WAS IN ELEVENTH PLACE.

WHAT?

How was this possible?

I was sitting in the hotel bar with some of my friends who are amazingly good crossword solvers. We were all looking at the scores. I was doing so well. Some of them congratulated me. I’ve never really felt good enough at crosswords – I’ve had a bit of fragile self-esteem about it – and it all felt wonderfully validating.

At that point, I was ranked 4th in the B division, and I started to wonder if I could possibly make it into the top three of the Bs and get to solve the puzzle on stage during the B round, while Ophira Eisenberg and Greg Pliska did commentary. It was doubtful, because the competition was fierce. It was of course going to be Paolo Pasco and then Jenna Lafleur and then someone else. Maybe it was possible I could be that third. Who knew. Maybe? Could you imagine?

After puzzle 6, I was ranked 14th again, but still number 4 in the B division. I doubted things would break my way. But I was definitely daydreaming about it.

To that point I’d had six clean puzzles in the tournament. No errors. I’d never had an error-free ACPT before. In fact, I’d only had one completely error-free puzzle tournament before – Lollapuzzoola online, last summer.

And then Sunday morning turned out to be bit of a roller coaster for me.

Puzzle 7.

I took a little longer on it than I wanted to – I got slowed down in a couple of places. But I completed it, and the timer was nearly at the minute mark, so I gave the final grid a quick once over, and it didn’t seem like I had any errors. I turned it in. Fingers crossed.

But then: bad news for me.

I was chatting with some folks after the puzzle, and it turned out that two of the people in the running for the top three of the B division, Jesse and Matt, had finished faster than me. I didn’t know how Jenna had done, but she’s amazing and I was sure she’d crushed it as always. So I was probably going to be ranked 5th in the B. Oh well.

But a little bit later: A TWIST!

I was talking with Matt and he said he’d realized he’d made an error on the puzzle.

And then, on Twitter, I learned the heartbreaking news about Jenna: she had overslept and had missed puzzle 7 entirely. I felt awful for her. That really sucked.

I refreshed the website to see if my puzzle 7 grid had been scanned yet, and it turned out it had – and I had no yellow squares! I had seven clean puzzles. I was probably going to make it into the top 3 for Division B. Oh my god oh my god oh my god.

But then: ANOTHER TWIST.

I was talking with Matt, and during our chat, the final overall scores for the tournament were posted. And… I was ranked way lower than I should have been. Even below Matt. How? What had happened? What was going on?

Matt and I started to write a note to the judges so they could figure out what had happened.

But then, curious, I reloaded the page with my scan of puzzle 7 – and now there was a yellow square.

Ugh.

I guess it had been re-checked. And, yeah. I looked at that yellow square. I’d screwed up.

I’d made a stupid, stupid mistake in that one square. It wasn’t even that I didn’t know the answer: it was that in filling in the unfilled squares in the answer, my hand and my brain didn’t communicate properly and I wrote a letter that I’d previously already written in the word instead of the one that it was supposed to be.

This is not the first time this has happened to me in a tournament.

Heh. Of course. The balance of things was restored. I wasn’t meant to be up there.

But I was very happy that Adam Doctoroff made it up there instead, because he got screwed out of being on stage a few years ago due to a judging error that wasn’t discovered until after the tournament. Adam is a freaking sharp solver.

I spent a lot of the morning kicking myself for my stupid mistake.

But: a final ironic twist!

Eventually I looked at the scores more closely. And I discovered that even if I hadn’t made my stupid mistake, I still wouldn’t have made it onto the stage! Adam had performed so well on puzzle 7 that I still would have wound up 10 points behind him overall.

That made me feel better. I’d made a dumb mistake, but at least it wouldn’t have changed anything.

Anyway:

In the end, I finished 23rd out of 474, which is amazing, way better than I could have possibly imagined. And I reunited with old friends. And I made new ones. Overall, a pretty wonderful experience.

And one of these days I’ll learn not to make stupid mistakes.