![]() Now 31, he hasn’t won since 2009, unseated by Feyer. He went on to become a five-time repeat champ. Hinman, on the other hand, had Feyer on the mind.Ī red-headed jokester who works as a game programmer for Lumosity, Hinman first won the tournament when he was 20, in 2005. When Feyer walked into the Stamford Marriott on the final weekend of March as a six-time champ this year, Delfin's record was on his mind. Supporting evidence: Jon Delfin, the tournament's only seven-time champion, also is a pianist. And he possesses a certain finger dexterity and hand-eye coordination - having his hand in the right place, over the right boxes when he is reading a clue. Sight reading a piece of piano music can be similar to seeing how the words are going to fit together in a crossword puzzle, he says. His music skills may play a part in his success. He finished 48th at his first American Crossword Puzzle Tournament appearance in 2008 - the year Hinman picked up his fourth consecutive championship. He does binge a bit leading up to the tournament, solving 20 or 25 puzzles a day. He has a shelf full of crossword books he does for fun, and he always keeps up with all the newspaper crosswords - New York and LA Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. Interesting, then, that his other pursuit is so solitary.įeyer solves an average 10 puzzles a day throughout the year, not speed solving. ![]() Musical theater, he says, serves as one of the most collaborative art forms there is. He doesn't play pop, rock, jazz or country - unless it's in a show. "I went into the arts, where being smart is useful but not a requirement," he says. Feyer occasionally picked up puzzles through his teenage and college years, helping his aunt and her best friend solve the Sunday puzzle in the New York Times Magazine when he visited her house.īut he fell in love with theater - not words or equations - and that set his path as conductor and piano player. He always got 99 percent on standardized tests he won the city spelling bee in eighth grade. He went to Princeton. Math and music became Feyer's two best classes as a kid. "A lot of puzzle people are mathematicians and computer scientists, and that is correlated with musical ability, too," he says. So how do these solvers get to elite status?Ĭognitively, the pianist Feyer hypothesizes, there could be some connection between reading music and solving crosswords. "A few moments of hesitation could be the tournament," Hinman says. Scoring is based not only on accuracy but also speed. That's how tournament competition works, with more than 500 participants from across the country seated at long tables, yellow dividers keeping them from glancing at one another's papers, like in an exam room. Solvers tackle eight crosswords created and edited specifically for this event. The casual solvers among us probably judge our puzzling prowess by which easy weekday puzzle we can complete, how many clues we need the dictionary (or Google) to answer, or the number of hours (or days) it takes to fill in a grid.įor the puzzle-solving elite, success is measured in minutes and winners and losers separated by mere seconds. Someone else, however, beat them at their game. They entered this year's tournament, which took place April 2 and 3 in Stamford, Conn., vying against each other for the top. A newer, hip crossword might use the word F-R-E-N-E-M-I-E-S (friendly enemies) to describe them. Together, he and Hinman - the record holder for youngest champion and a now 31-year-old adult prodigy - served as the fortress to first place, with 11 championships between them. In 2015, Feyer beat longtime rival Tyler Hinman by a split second to become the first person to win the annual word bout six times in a row. Then - a short while later - the much-less-horrific movie " Wordplay," which he saw on PBS, propelled Feyer on a most unordinary championship pursuit.įeyer is a six-time champion of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, a competition founded by New York Times Crossword Puzzle Editor Will Shortz. ![]() "That year, I basically got hooked," the bearded 38-year-old says, remembering that musical production from nearly a decade ago. Others read novels. Feyer, a theater pianist, puzzled out clues in a couple of crossword books. Hidden in the blackness below the theater stage, some musicians did Sodoku in between songs. Dan Feyer became possessed by crosswords in the orchestra pit of an off-Broadway musical called " Evil Dead."Ī "very stupid, very bloody" affair, Feyer says with a chuckle, remembering the gory production, but the perfect puzzling opportunity when one had time (and not demons) to kill.
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