2007 Grand Final Unofficial RTC – your times please

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Other Crosswords
This is a one-off unofficial contest based on your times for the three puzzles used in the Grand Final of the 2007 Times Crossword Championship. We’ll just have a ‘mini-championhip’ table for this one, so your entry (by comment, or e-mail for those who prefer) should look like this:

Montague James, 00:08:43, 00:09:15, 00:07:17, 2 – 2/23A 3/5D, 25:15
Format: Name (optional – I’ll use your LJ name otherwise), times for Puzzles 1, 2, 3, number of wrong/missing entries with list of them if necessary, Total time (optional – we can do the maths).

This contest is for people who did not compete in the Grand Final on the day. If you were there and did the puzzles in the audience, you can submit times or just a total time for the three. If you’re going to claim a time of less than one hour, you’re expected not to have used any books.

If you’re not used to these contests, you can look at other “your times please” postings to see more details.

Please enter by 3 p.m., Sunday 28 Oct. I’ll put up my reports on the Grand Final puzzles shortly after that, and the results within a day or two.

6 comments on “2007 Grand Final Unofficial RTC – your times please”

  1. Tony Sever, 49:30

    Slow – but I’d finished solving the three puzzles from the second semi-final just over half an hour earlier (and was still feeling very down after failing to qualify from the first semi-final).

    I actually completed each puzzle before going on to the next, but didn’t pause to record individual times.

  2. Sabine, 1, 1/15AC, 00:47:43

    Grrrr. Well, I really enjoyed the 25 seconds of believing I’d solved the three Grand Final puzzles in fewer than 50 minutes, those being the 25 seconds that passed between writing in my last answer (PARANG) and looking at the solutions to receive the bad news in Puzzle 1. I really, really believed the damn thing was called an expresso. Cruelly, I do the crossword every day in a coffee shop, accompanied by one caffeine-loaded liquid or another, or several in succession. (These three puzzles took around one and a half large cappuccinos.)

    Yes, yes, I know… check the wordplay….

    (I solved the puzzles as a set, jumping from one to another, so can’t give individual times.)

  3. I didn’t use the second hand knowing I’m really not in the running here, just in for the fun! I thought my only hope of not winding up in last place would be spending time looking for full accuracy.

    00:31:00; 00:29:00; 00:34:00, 01:34, no errors

    Barb

  4. Aaargh!

    Sorry, Peter. Delete all that. Those are my times for the qualifying puzzles!

    My excuse is it’s Sunday morning and I’ve just been robbed of an hour’s sleep that I won’t get back til Autumn!

  5. Sadly I can’t take part in this, since I did the middle of the three puzzles untimed, the problem being that I was on a different computer from the one I was recording my times on. (I have had a few problems getting internet access etc. sorted out in my new house, and have only now bought a Japanese adaptor for my usual computer.) But my times for the first and third puzzles were 6:10 and 6:35 respectively, so even given the extra pressure at Cheltenham, I like to think I’d have been competitive. Jason J
  6. I didn’t time them individually, but as a set of three they took me a few seconds under 30 minutes. I didn’t understand HONE at about 7d in the third at the time (though I think it’s brilliant now), but I did get it. So good enough against the actual competition – though they were the men in the arena and I wasn’t, which makes a BIG difference, but nothing to Jason’s times.

    However it’ll be interesting to see how I do with the preliminaries I would have got if I’d shown up, given my error in one of the ones from the other preliminary this week.

Comments are closed.