Category: Announcement

On 19th January 2008, I’m repeating the “How to solve cryptic crosswords” course I held in January this year. The next version should be better than the last, partly because people won’t just have me … Read more “Advertisement: a How to Solve course”

This is a weekly unofficial contest based on your times for the Times cryptic crossword from Saturday to Friday. Championship puzzles and this contest Contests 13-18 will consist of five puzzles each rather than the … Read more “Unofficial Times cryptic RTC No. 15 – your times please”

The Grand Final puzzles and solutions are now on the Times Online site. You can find them here. Sadly, they’re picture files which print out no more than adequately (and that’s on a fairly new … Read more “2007 Times Championship final puzzles – up at last”

Interesting puzzle with a few words you don’t often see in crosswords, although I was a little disappointed that, having made the effort to get X, Q and Z into the puzzle, the setter didn’t … Read more “Find the K”

Not a very satisfying solve, as most of the clues weren’t that challenging, and I am sure that, had I not been rusty and distracted, I could probably have completed this in half the time … Read more “Cruciverbo ergo sum”

This is a weekly unofficial contest based on your times for the Times cryptic crossword from Saturday to Friday. Championship puzzles and this contest Contests 13-18 will consist of five puzzles each rather than the … Read more “Unofficial Times cryptic RTC No. 13 – your times please”

As promised, here are full results, which were sent to me by the organiser with permission to put them up. Producing this HTML version from a Word doc took me about one hour with pretty … Read more “Times Crossword Championship 2007 – results”

The six puzzles from the two preliminary rounds will be published on Wednesdays, and I’m pretty sure this will start tomorrow. The Times website is being rather slow to put up the Grand Final puzzles … Read more “RTC contests for Championship puzzles”

In 1967, Terry Biddlecombe won the Cheltenham Gold Cup on Woodland Venture. Today, I just managed to win a “Cheltenham silver cup” for the Times Crossword Championship. I’m afraid I was too busy accepting congratulations … Read more “40 years on…”

This is a weekly unofficial contest based on your times for the Times cryptic crossword from Saturday to Friday. In July 2007, someone commenting on Tony Sever’s Times 2 RTC blog suggested a competition like … Read more “Unofficial Times cryptic RTC No. 12 – your times please”