QC League Table of difficulty by Setter (June 2020)

Author   jackktPosted on Categories Announcement

Nobody has asked for it this time round, but undeterred I bring you an update of my analysis of QC difficulty levels by Setter. It’s based entirely on my own solving times and whether or not I achieved my target of 10 minutes on any particular day. It’s intended as a bit of fun and I am not suggesting for a moment that it would stand up to an objective statistical examination other than of my own failure rate, but when I published previously it proved to be of some interest.

Setters are once again rated 1 – 10 (easiest to hardest) and I have excluded a handful of setters who gave us fewer than 4 puzzles in the current period (1 July 2019 to 30 June 2020).

19 comments on “QC League Table of difficulty by Setter (June 2020)”

  1. Most interesting, especially as this statistical approach might soon lead to the main setters to be given ‘noms’. It would definitely increase interest and surely some of these chaps also set ‘the biggie’. It has never hurt the Guardian setters. Meldrew
  2. I never know (never look to see) who the setter is, so I have no way of checking my experience against yours. I was struck by the difference in consistency of difficulty across setters: Felix vs. Tracy, say.
  3. I am amazed that Mara tops this list, as his puzzles are aming the easiest I find when I am testing them.

    As long as I’m editor the main puzzle and the jumbo will remain anonymous. A major reason for this is that I don’t want the identity of the settet to detract from the puzzle itself. I admit that one or two of the setters don’t agree with me on this, but most seem to. And the majority of solvers seem also to agree from what we can tell.
    This doesn’t mean that the identity of each puzzle is a secret: just that at the point of issue, it’s “The Times Crossword” full stop, which I believe is a key feature of our crosswords.
    (A small point of interest: the smartphone version of the Quick is incapable of displaying the setter name).

    RR.

  4. … my experience of the setters is still quite limited, especially as there are so many of them. Quite a team – 15 at least and I think I may have spotted some other, rarer names in recent months. Perhaps they don’t set puzzles often enough to get on the grid. But I do always find Pedro a challenge, and Oink a relatively quick solve – as well as great fun looking for the porcine clue.

    Very interesting, and thank you Jack.

    Cedric

  5. I agree with comment above – Mara is far and away one of the easiest as his / her crossword always have so many anagrams. I would say Teazel (other than Teazel on a Monday) is one of the hardest setters. I have been always been convinced that Teazel regularly sets the Times bigger Crossword.

    Interesting how subjective it all is.

  6. for this!

    I normally do on a smartphone, so unaware of setter. Tracey normally turns out to give me most problems.

  7. Some of them, I am told, use more than one pseudonym, so it could just be one compiler using multiple names.
    1. I’m aware of the real names of all but two of the setters listed in the table and I don’t think that either of those are duplicates. One QC setter had three pseudonyms but sadly died about four years ago, and there’s another who uses two names but he doesn’t set regularly enough to appear in the list under either of them.

      Edited at 2020-06-30 05:04 pm (UTC)

  8. Very interesting thanks.The rankings change a lot over time-and of course reflect the results of only one very experienced solver.
    Like today one clue such as Outgeneral can slow nearly everyone down.
    And there is the wavelength point where it does help to know the setter’s identity. David
  9. Great stuff, Jack, thanks!

    For me the solving time seems to be less related to the setter and more related to how much sleep I had, how much whisky I drank the night before and how many espressos I’ve had before the puzzle …

  10. Interesting to see. I’ve started keeping track of my scores / times for each as I wanted some proper stats on how I was finding each setter. I’m more of a newbie to this (gradually starting over the last 1-2 years) so thought I might have quite different scores but my rankings are pretty closely linked to yours, Jackkt. That said, I have been doing a bit better with Mara more recently. Pedro, Joker, Felix & Des fill me with a bit more dread vs. Orphues, Hurley, Teazel & Trelawney.
    hookyt
  11. Thanks Jack, always interesting to see how others find the various setters. The thing which jumped out at me from your list is Mara – who I found difficult in the early days of the QC but then he became much easier but recently has gone back to being tricky. Your ratings seem to confirm my very unscientific musings on this.
    1. I’m sure that your ratings are no less scientific than mine. As mentioned in the intro mine are purely subjective and are only presented here as a bit of fun.
  12. I’ve only been trying these cryptics for about three years (and not a lot before) so it was interesting to see the editor’s thoughts about Mara. I agree with Jack – mighty dread cometh in my brain at the sight of the name.
    But then that is pretty much my thought with all!
    I feel that Joker has been getting tougher though and I somehow have an issue with Oink.
    Well done Jack, I love your archivist nature.
    Regards
    John
  14. Thanks Jack. Following your similar post last year, I started tracking individual setters against my solving times. Apologies, but I’ve only just got round to doing the spreadsheet magic to create this. This is my average solving times league table from start of May 2019 to end of June 2020… John’s QC Setters League Table. (Alas it is not possible to embed an image in a comment). What I have done is averaged my time over all puzzles for the setter and compared it to my average time over all puzzles (5:36) as in the SNITCH calculation. It’s interesting to compare – the correlation isn’t bad, although there are clearly a couple of setters I get on the wavelength with more easily than you. It is interesting that, despite our editor’s view, Mara comes pretty high up my list of difficulty too.

    Edited at 2020-07-03 07:33 pm (UTC)

  15. I saw something a while back (a tweet, I think) that implied that Felix, Des, Oran, Marty, and Kenny are all pseudonyms of Mr Rogan, which appear to be based on people connected with his favourite football team.
    1. Thanks for that insight now noted in my archive. It doesn’t conflict with anything previous and I knew for sure that Felix is RR.

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