When he was starting out, he kept a stack of hard-copy puzzles he’d done in his apartment. The city was central to fostering his crossword mastery: He did crosswords on the subway and in the orchestra pit when he was working an off-Broadway show. While he recently moved to the West Coast, Feyer spent 14 years in New York City - he still covets his 212 cell phone number. These folks can quickly make sense of a lot of coded information. Jon Delfin, a seven-time champion, is also a pianist. 2 The tournament elite aren’t poets or Shakespeare scholars or copy editors for the most part they’re musicians, programmers and the mathematically inclined. The doing is the training.īy day, Feyer is a pianist and music director in San Francisco. There’s no guidebook to becoming a master crossworder, like there is for, say, Scrabble. He’s done all of the nearly 8,000 puzzles in the New York Times’ online database, and routinely whips through puzzles from The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Chronicle of Higher Education, CrosSynergy, and others. 1 Now he routinely does 10 crosswords a day, and he used to regularly do 20. Feyer started puzzling in earnest after seeing the crossword documentary “ Wordplay” in the fall of 2007. By his back-of-the-envelope calculations, he’s spent “just” 4,000 hours of his life solving. And Dan Feyer has done lots of crosswords. The only way to get good at crosswords is to do lots of crosswords. It was like a year later I was like, ‘Ooh! Those were the Saturday puzzles.’” Feyer had “a book of New York Times daily puzzles, and like every sixth one I wasn’t really finishing. Crosswords are well known to get tougher as the week goes on. I didn’t understand different constructors, I didn’t even really know the day of the week,” he said. But as recently as 2006, he was oblivious to any of their finer points, he said. If he ran across a New York Times Magazine in college, he’d take a crack at the Sunday puzzle. Whoever finishes first raises his hand and, assuming nothing is wrong in the puzzle, wins the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.įeyer came to crosswords late in life. “Inventor of the spinning jenny” is HARGREAVES. “One who’s not committed?” is a SANEPERSON. And while Howard Barkin has never won, this was his fourth trip to the finals. Feyer, 37, is a professional musician and five-time defending champion.įive seconds later: “Tyler, Howard, begin.” Tyler Hinman is the record-holder for youngest champion - he first won the tournament when he was 20, in 2005. A tournament judge tapped Dan Feyer on the shoulder, and he began. Dan, begin,” said Will Shortz, New York Times crossword editor and tournament impresario. Dry erase markers in hand, noise-canceling headphones on their heads, the three men stood in proper puzzling stance: right foot in front of left, marker arm crooked, clues in hand at convenient reading height. They took their places on stage in front of giant whiteboards with empty crossword grids. The contestants entered the ballroom to roaring applause, like it was a heavyweight prizefight.
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