Times 24412 – A bridge too far

56 comments on “Times 24412 – A bridge too far”

1. Like the Americans, having been late for two world wars, I’m determined to be in quick for the next (this) one!
   A rather easy puzzle I felt (16 min) with some nice semantically related crossing answers — cards at the top left and typography at the bottom right. 11ac is brilliant (side in red, indeed!!) and 13ac is close behind as COD. Only quibble is the inclusion of no less than three cryptic defs (28ac, 6dn, 20dn).
   Jack: “Type-A” as in personality perhaps?
2. 21 very enjoyable mins. I rather liked 11A, but my COD is 24D RECTO which seems to work very neatly (there’s another Sun ref. in 20D). In bridge, declarer does not lead on the first trick, so the lead is never ‘regained’ in a grand slam (3D). I also thought that ‘would-be dominant’ was a bit of a stretch for TYPE-A.

   Tom B.

3. Under 30 mins so fast for me. Although I didn’t understand either RESIDED nor GRANDSLAM although there wasn’t any doubt they were correct.

4. Do all setters play bridge? I will never be much good at these things if I don’t learn to play. I have a beautiful and brilliant niece who has wasted much of our relationship attempting in vain to teach me the rules of card games.
   Finished relatively quickly but question marks, reflecting precisely Jack’s uncertainty, against CARD GAMES, GRAND SLAM, TYPEFACE, RESIDED (thanks MC – brilliant indeed but too clever for me) and PANEL.
   Liked the CAN DO part of CANDOUR, so gets my Clue of the Day. CAN’T DO on the other hand was yesterday’s. Times site down first thing and home too late to comment, but just to confess, only half solved before binning.
   1. I suspect a bridge team selected from Times setters could be pretty strong. I’ve come across one or two contestants in Times crossword finals who played well enough to represent at least their counties. I played a bit of pretty rough bridge at school, and very little since. But my mother loved games like Solo Whist and Black Maria, which I still enjoy when I get the chance, and I’ve dabbled in Central European trick-taking games like Skat and Sixty-Six, which are both well worth a look, and the trick-taking games played with the gaming (i.e. original) versions of the Tarot pack.

      Very good site on the subject: http://www.pagat.com/

   2. Barry, you can get excellent bridge playing software these days that will both tutor you, play against you and partner you in past tournaments in which you can pitch you+computer against top players. One great advantage is that the computer does not throw a tantrum or refuse to speak to you for a week for playing the wrong lead. I use Bridge Baron and find it very good.
5. The place to go for the one-hour webchat at noon is:
   http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/live_debate/

   More later on this puzzle.

6. I solved this in 9:58 so would count it as an average Times puzzle in terms of difficulty. There were quite a few familiar clueing ideas which the setter managed to prevent me from noticing on my first look at a clue, which I hope shows their good technique rather than a poor show from me. Notable examples: 2, 26, 22, 5.

   I strayed away from my usual solving order a couple of times – I failed to read 21’s clue, and wrote 23’s answer in its space. After fixing this little mess (thanks to the easy 20) , I skipped a few acrosses for a moment to look at 28, probably because K?Y at the beginning looked helpful, and failed to resume at the right place, so didn’t look at 25 until much later. I don’t think the unintended order changes cost me more than 15 seconds or so.

   Answering points raised:
   1 and 22: I don’t think there’s any more to see. As both fooled me the first time, I’m reluctant to dismiss them, though I guess the style is a bit old school.
   11: I don’t think you need the nickname, just the colour, Liverpool being a “side in red”. You’d have to be seriously ignorant of football not to know that.
   16: The characteristics of a Type A personality given in ODE are ambition, impatience and competitiveness – the last of which seems to match “would-be dominant” pretty well. From memory, apart from 27 where just like yesterday I only saw two of the defs in a triple, this was the only one solved without full wordplay understanding, from ?Y?E?A?E plus “where can I put an F?”.

   1. Raises hand.

      What is ODE that you refer to please?

      sidey

      1. Include me too! Having researched it for the blog it appears they also play in white for away matches so presumably it only applies half the time.
         1. As I understand it, “away” strips are only used when there’s a perceived risk of the two sets of colours being confusing – so less than half the time

            Away colours (of which at least the big teams have two versions I think) seem to change quite often, so I wouldn’t expect clues to relate to them (possible exception: the red and white worn by England in the 1966 World Cup final – I guess we have to call that one a “change strip” or similar, as they were playing at home!). The usual colours for the really big teams have all been much the same for decades if not centuries, and I’d count knowledge of these as fair game for the best-known dozen or so teams. Likewise Harlequins and Wasps in Rugby, to the extent that their names reflect the designs.

      2. Sorry – Oxford Dictionary of English – the OUP’s one-volume competitor against the full versions of Chambers and Collins. As far as I know, it’s not an “official” dictionary for any crossword at present, but I’d say it was the best one-volume dictionary on the UK market, unless you need Chambers for barred-grid xwds.
7. We’ve had quite a long run of essentially non-controversial puzzles (witness the lack of opposing views being expressed on this site) and then suddenly two on the trot.

   I don’t find RESIDED brilliant. It requires arcane knowledge (the colour of a football team’s strip for goodness sake) that is in my view unreasonable. Where might this end? Full marks to Jack for even figuring it out.

   I can’t follow the logic of “pontoon bridge splitting” I even looked up “splitting” to see if it is a card game. The setter wanted to put “pontoon” and “bridge” next to one another in an attempt to mislead but then got rather stuck in my view.

   I also can’t quite see PANEL but can’t think of anything better than Jack’s explanation.

   At the end of yesterday’s blog Peter asked for views on clue padding. As many may not have read what he had to say today might be a good time to say your piece on the subject.

   1. Agreed. I wasn’t all that enamoured with “cover” = MAC and the lack of a proper definition in 7dn either.
   2. If the fact that Liverpool play in red is arcane but the existence of a snake called a mamba or the fancy word for “left hand” relating to book pages is not (and that’s just picking two examples from this puzzle), you must have a very different range of knowledge to many people. The point is surely to include a range of GK areas so that everyone knows some of them.

      Mrs B professes to hate football with a passion but I’m sure she could tell you the colours of clubs as well-known as Liverpool.

      1. That’s a fair point, Peter, but I think what some of us (well me, anyway) have a problem with is the assumption just because something is part of mass popular culture that “everybody” knows it. I wouldn’t think it odd that some people may not know the other examples you quote but because I don’t know about soccer and Jimbo had never heard of Neighbours until recently seems to give rise to some degree of astonishment and disbelief.

         My only little corner of knowledge about soccer comprises the names of lots of the teams, some of them really quite obscure, acquired from sitting through endless match results on Saturday afternoons in the 50s whilst waitng for them to finish so that children’s TV could start.

         1. I suspect the Times xwd ed could confrim from his mailbag that there’s nothing that you can assume everybody knows. What stuns me about the negative comment about this kind of clue is the notion that this makes the Liverpool and Neighbours references unfair or arcane. If you stopped people in the street and asked them what colours Liverpool play in, I reckon at least 50% would give you the right answer. I think you’d do far worse with “What is a mamba?”, “Whose wings melted in the sunshine?”, or “Who sculpted The Thinker?”.
            1. Never one to duck a challenge and needing to visit my small collection of local shops before I froze to death I managed to ask 24 people the questions you pose exactly as you have written them. The results: Liverpool 6 correct, 4 wrong, 14 don’t know; Mamba 20 a dance, 4 a snake; Icarus 14 correct, 6 wrong, 4 can’t remember; The Thinker 10 correct, 5 wrong, 9 can’t remember.

               How to explain that? Simple – it’s all in the sample. I live in a community of retired professional people (predominantly men)and their usually well educated wives. 20 of my sample were such women. You make the mistake Peter of thinking that the people you mix with are typical of the population and of course they’re not.

               1. If I was basing my guess on “the people I mix with”, I’d plead guilty to the mistake. But I’m basing it on my (potentially wrong) assessment of the UK population as a whole. I know that this is different from an assessment of people who do the Times xwd.

                  I can’t help noticing that even your sample did 50% better with the Reds than the mamba, though from the resemblance to mambo and samba, “dance” is a very easy mistake to make.

                  If you think the Times xwd has too much “arts and books” in it, what do you want instead? Just fiendish wordplay, just science, or a mixture includingh things that lots of “ordinary” people know, and which just might help to dispel the idea that the Times xwd is a game for mastermind contestants and Oxford dons?

      2. I can’t let you get away with that Peter. Knowing there is a snake called a mamba is my idea of GK. Knowing the word “recto” is arcane knowledge gained from doing too many cryptic crosswords. Knowing the colour of a football team’s strip doesn’t come under either heading. Next week will we be required to know what strip the Philadelphia Phillies play in (it’s red and white at home to save you looking it up). That’s specialist knowledge known to a particular subset. Neither my wife nor my daughters would have the remotest idea what colour Liverpool play in.
         1. I think I knew that Liverpool FC play in red. My problem was that it simply never occurred to me to think that “Liverpool” might refer to a football club. Towns and cities all over the country have all sorts of sporting clubs – I just think it requires too much of a leap.
            1. What a very good point – there is after all a Liverpool Cricket team. I wonder what colour strip they play in?
         2. Phillies: (a) no you won’t, and (b) Classic pub quiz Q for Brits: “In baseball, which team always plays in white?”. A: The home team – all baseball teams play in an essentially white kit at home and an essentially grey one for “road games”. It’s only the red bits that distinguish the Phillies, though not very much as red and blue seem to account for most of the teams.

            I can just about imagine a reference to the fact that the 18D Yankees (baseball’s Man U, to the extent that they’re the team all the others profess to hate) play in “pinstripes”, but in a puzzle where Babe Ruth is just about the only baseball star required, I doubt it.

            1. US puzzles used to define ‘Ott’ simply as ‘Giant’. He would be quite useful in cryptics, except we already have ‘over the top’.
               1. Yes – often enough for me to remember him from my sporadic goes at US crosswords – though I have to take care not to mix him up with the equally useful (Boston) Bruin = (Bobby) ORR.

                  (And I’m often surprised that US-based cryptic crosswords use so little of this kind of knowledge. There seems to be an idea that “cryptics are difficult so we must stick to dictionary material rather than deceptive tricks” – US team names in various sports could provide all sorts of chances – Yankee = BABE and the like)

                  Edited at 2009-12-18 02:34 pm (UTC)

      3. Even my mum knows that Liverpool play in red. There are at least seven things I would consider more “obscure” in the across clues alone.

         This kind of argument only seems to develop when sports references are made. I guess this is because the complainants, who usually have no interest in sport, see it as an easy target. Perhaps it’s also because a lot of people (including many readers of this blog) get very passionate about sport, and it’s therefore easy to get under these people’s skin by denigrating it.

         In this case, the bottom line is that if you don’t know Liverpool play in red then that’s tough – you’ll have to solve the clue using the definition and checking letters (easy, in this case). Similarly, if you don’t know the name RODIN you’ll have to put in two fairly arbitrary vowels at 6dn, which is also tough. These puzzles (as Peter suggests) require a little knowledge of a lot of different areas, and sports knowledge doesn’t come much more basic than this.

   3. I tend to agree with dorsetjimbo about ‘card games’–I had a vague memory that there is/was such a game as pontoon, & what with the down words it had to be ‘card games’, but I don’t like the clue.
      On the other hand, applying the same ‘it could only be X’ logic to ‘resided’, I rather liked the clue; I know nothing about soccer (all right, ‘football’), but figured it out retrospectively; as I often have to.
8. I forgot to mention this point: In Bridge, the team playing against the winners of the auction always have the lead to the first trick. That must be why the clue says “never regain” rather than “never have”.
9. 3dn – presumably the “sporting achievement” refers to the golf or tennis “grand slam” and the rest of the clue to the bridge variety – I don’t think bridge could be a “sport”.

   4dn – there used to be a series of pictorial gardening hints in the (?)Sunday Express called “Adam the Gardener”.

   22dn – just to clarify jackkt’s point – in the US the “panel” is a group of potential jurors from which a jury is chosen (once the opposing lawyers have had a chance to weed out any who might be unfavourable to them). (Jurors don’t go into the witness box.)

   1. Bridge = sport: fair comment until my letter to Seb Coe is taken seriously and crossword solving is a 2012 demonstration sport (yes I am joking!).

      4D Well remembered but I wouldn’t expect them to put columns from other papers ahead of the basics of Christianity.

      22D: a quick search suggests that “jury box” is a recognised term in at least some Eng-speaking countries.

10. I was deighted to finish unaided in 55 minutes today. i found it tough but reviwing it afterwards i felt that i was being slow. i too felt that Macadam was hard to justify but got it. I feel that knowing Liverpool play in red is GK so i side with PB. i liked candour and typeface and i too puzzled as to card games being the right answer but concluded that it had to be. satisfying in parts was my conclusion…Soupcon was my COD
11. Surely it is relevant that Liverpool FC is a very famous football club whereas Liverpool Cricket team and similar are not. Having said that I got the answer but didn’t understand why.

    By the way I’m new to the Times crossword and find this blog immensely helpful.

    1. Thanks twice over. From participation in athletics, I can tell you that Liverpool Harriers wear yellow (or did in the 1980s), but I really will eat my hat if that ever comes up in the Times xwd.

       If you’re new to the puzzle don’t worry about not getting it – converting the knowledge to “side in red” is pretty difficult – just remember it as an example of the kind of thing you sometimes need to be ready for.

       Edited at 2009-12-18 01:43 pm (UTC)

12. 43:00 .. these things must be getting harder, ‘cos surely I’m not getting dumber?

    RESIDED – a bit unfair with nothing to indicate that this is Liverpool FC.
    PANEL – hm
    COMMUNIST PARTY – terrific
    ACCRA – twisted and brilliant… COD

    Satisfying puzzle to conquer, however slowly. A tough one, I think, to blog. Thanks, Jack.

13. Without going over all the details again, I support everything dorsetjimbo has said. I didn’t enjoy this puzzle much. By the time I was about 4/5ths of the way through and beginning to struggle I was rapidly losing interest. There were too many clues where I had a possible answer but either didn’t get the references (11, 3) or found some looseness in the clue. I’m quite happy to plead serious ignorance of football; not knowing that Liverpool play in red is not the sort of gap in my knowledge that I worry about and I certainly do not regard it as something I should retain to enhance my general knowledge.
14. 42:10 – I felt at the time that this was slow, and indeed spent over 10 minutes staring at the final clue (TYPEFACE) before the penny dropped.

    I started at a canter (well, for me anyway), finishing the top half in about 10 minutes, but then slowed lower down. As a keen bridge player and a Liverpool supporter, the contentious clues in the NW corner went straight in with barely a pause. Although I did wonder how many others would share my specialist knowledge.

    ACCRA made me chuckle, so I give that my COD.

15. This was not difficult but a bit of a slog. I was left with the intersecting Spell and Panel. I was just about to reach for my dictionary when I twigged the triple definition. Then I went for panel, which I had previously rejected, on the jury box theory.
16. I thought 11ac was a really original clue and I like it. Objectors are mainly being snobbish imho, they are quite happy to deal with questions about cricket without complaint.. but don’t listen to me, I am in a bit of a strop because I see I have yet again missed the live webcast 🙁
    1. You can see what was said if you go to http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/live_debate/ and look at the “Completed Events”.
17. ….naturally, the Liverpool clue would be difficult for overseas solvers, if the answer wasn’t obvious. I also didn’t see ‘panel’, ‘grand slam’, ‘card games’.

    The COD was definitely 26, never saw one like that before – very clever.

    1. Can’t remember the precise clue but I’m sure there’s been one for YUCCA based on “why you seize a”
18. Continuing the discussion at the end of yesterday’s blog, here are the clues in today’s puzzle that I’d count as containing words that are not essential for the cryptic reading, but help to make the surface make sense and can still be read as part of the cryptic reading. As said yesterday, this is the acceptable kind of padding for what I’m counting as most of us. What someone suggested we call “stuffing” (words that can’t logically be seen as part of the cryptic reading) is, I believe completely absent from this puzzle, like nearly all Times dailies.

    Link-words: 4 uses: is in 6A, of/17, to be seen in/21, as/25, of/18
    Other additions: (3 or maybe 4): somewhere in 11 (“lived” could do on its own for “resided”), “this” in 26 (it indicates that the port is the answer, but that’s not compulsory), “some” in 1D (arguable – “energy” would be enough for some, but this helps to show that one E for enrgy is left in), “encountered” in 16.

    There’s just one place where a I think a word might reasonably have been added – 4D’s “cover” might have been “waterproof cover” which would have indicated MAC a bit more clearly without spoiling the gardening story.

    Edited at 2009-12-18 02:50 pm (UTC)

    1. I agree with your analysis Peter. I like the idea of “stuffing” to describe what in Liverpool might be called “offside” padding.
    2. I think waterproof could, as a noun, replace cover for mac.
       1. For the cryptic reading, yes. But as the noun “waterproof” on its own means a garment, the surface would then be about rockery smuggling rather than tidying away some crazy paving or similar. For me, having a surface reading that’s convincing is just as important as having a cryptic reading that’s logical.
       2. By my reckoning there are link-words/phrases in 1A (resulting from), 6A (is), 10A (for), 12A (of), 17A (of), 21A (to be seen in), 25A (as), 26A (in), 14D (for), 18D (of), 19D (in). I’m still not sure how to classify ‘somewhere’ in 11A, as RESIDED is adequately defined by ‘lived’ on its own. I think the incidence of links in this crossword is a bit higher than average for the Times.

          Tom B.

          1. You’re right on all counts – sloppy analysis or conversion of written notes from me. I’d count “somewhere” as acceptable padding though it takes us away from an exact synonym of “resided” to a dictionary-style def – “live somewhere” is a reasonable two-word summary of “have one’s permanent home in a particular place” (ODE)
19. Took me 50 minutes, after a very slow start. First entry was ICARUS, since I couldn’t see anything above that on first look. Last entries: ACCRA/TYPEFACE. Didn’t understand: 1A, since I didn’t know ‘pontoon’ as a card game, or RESIDED, as a US person the reason is apparent. It’s not in the puzzle, but don’t know the precise meaning of ‘strip’ when referring to a team’s color either. For what it’s worth, if these were US based puzzles a major sports team’s colors would probably be thought of as general knowledge and OK to include. Regards.
20. In a sporting context, strip (UK) = uniform (US) – which I suspect could be the basis of a cryptic clue!

    Edited at 2009-12-18 03:05 pm (UTC)

21. 15.10 Last in were the IT pair of KEYSTROKE and TYPEFACE . I have no issue with the Liverpool clue – this is definitely widespread “General Knowledge” in the UK even if it is outwith the ken for some of us. We definitely come up against clues requiring more in the way of esoteric knowledge almost every day – e.g. I knew ACCRA was capital of Ghana but I would just be guessing it was a “port”. For me , CATS PAW was a new term. I have been confused by D’ETAT (5) before so a quick solve of that one was down to previous experience
    1. Clue solved and understood = general knowledge.
       Clue unsolved or solved but not understood = arcane/esoteric.

       From one who knows a lot about soccer and Liverpool, who solved 11ac without knowing why. Bridge on the other hand…

    2. I think the problem is not so much that Liverpool FC play in red, but that Liverpool is not just a football team. A soccer fan might immediately make the association “Liverpool” = “Liverpool FC” but most wouldn’t. If the clue had used “Arsenal” that would be fairer (yes I know it’s not a place, but just for example) as the association is clear.

       What about “Lived somewhere like Wales”? After all the Welsh rugby team are famous and wear red (and for all I know probably the soccer team do as well). But you would have be a person whose life was dominated by Welsh rugby (ie Welsh) to make the link.

       1. That’s an excellent point, Anon. The problem was not so much having the required knowledge of soccer, but making the connection to sport simply by the mention of Liverpool.

          As mentioned in my blog, I was baffled for ages trying to explain the obvious answer. It was only eventually spotting the contained word “side” that led me to the right conclusion.

          1. It’s a potential problem for the solver, but surely not something to complain about. Exploiting unexpected meanings of words is part of the crossword game, not just in cryptics – see the stuff about Giant = OTT above. Liverpool = (a football team) is the same trick as Grant = Cary, see = Ely, and all the others.

             If there’s anything to criticise, it’s the indirectness – the fact that “side in red” has to be thought of and then used as information about the answer. That is certainly difficult, but it’s balanced by at least three things:

             • a very specific def – as well as helping the surface to make sense, “lived somewhere” eliminates many meanings of “lived” that would be possible for a single-word def – “Lived in Liverpool” would be a legitimate but much harder clue.
             • past tense – if you think “lived” or “lived somewhere” is the def., an -ED ending is very likely, so the final checking D supports this idea strongly.
             • checking letters – for R?S?D?D, I can’t think of any other word. I thnk RESIDED may be a less obvious member of the group with ERATO and OKAPI/OMANI in it – words that keep appearing because they have to, and are therefore in dire need of fresh clues!

             The dud surface means that “Lived somewhere like Arsenal” isn’t a cryptic clue, any more than “Lived somewhere like Manchester United” unless you count the area round Arsenal tube station as a named district of London (not a usage I’ve heard, and I’ve been up & down the Piccadilly line many times). “Wales” would be hard to object to – their football team play in red too, and I suspect the same is true for many less popular sports.

22. I do hope I haven’t once again overlooked someone’s comment, but a grand slam in baseball is a home run with the bases loaded. Irrelevant, you may say, and I may say, too; but, with the L & M, it helped me guess correctly, where the clue left me, ah, clueless.
    1. I suspect other sporting grand slams helped solvers too – in the Six Nations Rugby tournament, a “grand slam” is winning all five matches. This isn’t necessarily the same as leading the results table all the time, but might well be.

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