Meet the man with a mind for puzzles
For most crossword enthusiasts, winning the Times championship six years in a row would be quite a feat. In August Mark Goodliffe fancied a change — and won this newspaper’s sudoku competition too, becoming the first person ever to hold both titles.
Then at the weekend he triumphed in the crossword contest once again.
What does it take to claim victory in the two disciplines? After completing three cryptic crosswords in 22 minutes yesterday, Mr Goodliffe, 49, was asked whether the secret to his formidable success might be performance-enhancing substances.
“No. I did have one can of Coke before I started though — I’m sure it made me faster,” he said.
Compared with last year, which was “monstrously” hard, he claimed that the puzzles this time round were much easier. “I did have a problem with a clue in the last crossword. It was ‘Way to get disorderly house under restraint’. ‘Way’ is mode — quite a common synonym in crosswords. And ‘disorderly house’ is sty. I don’t think many people got that right away but I’ve seen it before. But then it took me a while to work out that sty had to be ‘under’ mode. It was a down clue so it made ‘modesty’, which is also a word for restraint.”
Mr Goodliffe, an accountant, sat the tests on Saturday as one of 24 finalists at desks in a windowless room reminiscent of a school exam hall.
His quickest time for three crosswords has been 17 minutes. As the clock ticked, the tension in the room increased. Then, at 22 minutes, he nonchalantly waved his finished puzzle sheet in the air, sat back and opened a newspaper while he waited for the rest to catch up. It was a full six minutes before the runner-up, Simon Hanson, 56, could do the same.
The trophy, which was made in 2006, has only Mr Goodliffe’s name on it. “My family have come to watch me in the past but now they don’t want to have to give up yet another Saturday afternoon,” he said.
“I do one, maybe two crosswords a day, and the sudokus in the paper each morning. There isn’t much more to it than practice. I started young and remember completing my first crossword at boarding school with all those hours to kill.
“It still gives me a thrill, there is a eureka moment with every single clue. People say I finish them too quickly to enjoy them but that’s not the case.”
Should he have been a spy or a Nasa scientist? “Using those skills to be a spy would have been fun,” he said. “But when I was young, I didn’t know I was competitively good at crosswords, and I chose accountancy.”
The finalists were almost exclusively male in checked shirts and spectacles. Only one woman, Helen Ougham, sat in the last 24 — a contender who has won twice in the past and the only female to do so.
The last record-breaker was John Sykes, a dictionary compiler who won four times in a row and then stepped down to let others have a chance. The current champion, however, has no such intention. We’ll see him back next year, no doubt.
…and the Guardian one:
Crossword blog: watching a champion solver at work
Mark Goodliffe has won the Times Crossword Championship for the eighth time. Alan Connor watches, not in shock, but in awe
A samurai in civvies, the figure of Mark Goodliffe compels the gaze as powerfully as his mind commands the stubbornest crossword clue.
If you have never watched someone complete a crossword, I urge you to do so. I urge you specifically to look upon the eight-time champion completing the three puzzles which make up the final of the Times National Crossword Championship.
To do so is to be mesmerised, blissfully. The non-Goodliffe components of the cosmos disappear, leaving two things: Goodliffe’s eyes and Goodliffe’s pen.
Nothing else budges. His untapping feet and chino-clad legs point parallel, straight ahead beneath the desk. The licking of a lip, the mouthing of some consonants to elicit an answer? Preposterous. Goodliffe needs no such crutches.
So your eyes are drawn first to his. While the rest of Goodliffe is as still and as silent as statuary, the pupils leap from clue to clue, riotous as midges in a Speyside summer.
And then there is that pen. It’s not a lucky pen; Goodliffe tells me he has made a conscious decision not to have superstitions. It might have been a pencil; “It’s not a decision that matters to me.”
It had, indeed, been a red pen at the qualifying stage, before the checkers told him that they prefer to keep that colour for themselves when going through the formality of checking his entries against the solutions.
This is a pen with a lot of work to do. What it certainly is not is a pen that leaves Goodliffe’s hand. It barely leaves the grid. As it writes each answer, its master is already at the next clue. Occasionally it hovers as much a half-inch above its next mission.
So devastating is his dominion that if you didn’t know that the inner workings were so outrageously creative, or hadn’t had the good luck to talk to this affable accountant, you would conclude that you were watching a part-cyborg.
Until … it happens.
Just as the serenity seems intransmutable, it erupts twice into immoderate drama.
First, there is what keener observers might identify as a smile. A mere soupçon, it turns out to have been prompted by this clue …
21ac Which involves getting a round in but hoping not to buy it? (7,8)
… and before it flickers back off, RUSSIAN ROULETTE has been inked in.
More sensational than the Smile is the Pause. A real one. It can happen. It did happen, in 2014. I know; I was there.
Here is the clue that did it, from the same puzzle:
17d Old boring person who’s bound, on paper, to be smart (7)
Entire seconds pass.
Then, harrowingly, even more. Such longueurs, Goodliffe later remarks, can be “extremely irritating”. Behold the havoc that can be unleashed by a word like SOIGNEE.
And then, after 22 minutes, you breathe again and realise that it’s over. A check, the raising of the arm. You recall then that there are other solvers in the room. Across the rows and down the columns of desks, those other entrants – the lickers and movers of lips – have only ever been racing for second place. Goodliffe is in battle with his past and future selves.
More than six minutes will pass before another arm is raised.
Goodliffe tends to arrive with a bag packed in preparation for the wait. He reaches discreetly into it, then relaxes with a crossword.
Reproduced with assumed permission from the Times (“subscribers may now share articles” I think I read somewhere recently), and without explicit permission from the Grauniad. In the interests of providing access to our overseas readers, and at Olivia’s specific request. If either object, Z8b8d8k is the one seated on the right of the top photo,on the way to 22nd place in the afternoon semi.
We are enjoined to email David Levy for a full copy, but perhaps someone who has one could post it here?