Congratulations to the Marbles crossword tournament winners!

This past weekend, Marbles: The Brain Store hosted crossword tournaments at five stores nationwide. Here are the winners:

Joe Weidner, Peter Gwinn, Aaron Wilson

Chicago, IL:

1. Peter Gwinn (he placed 33rd at the 2013 ACPT)
2. Aaron Wilson (he made the C finals at the 2013 ACPT, 61st overall)
3. Joe Weidner (rookie)

Columbia, MD:

1. Scott Weiss (15th at the 2013 ACPT)
2. Marie desJardins (24th at the 2013 ACPT)
3. Alexandra Doumani (88th at the 2011 ACPT)

King of Prussia, PA:

1. Jeff Hyson (36th at the 2013 ACPT)
2. Paul Coulter (58th at the 2013 ACPT)
3. Nancy Ross (254th at the 2013 ACPT)

San Francisco, CA:

1. Jon Berman (32nd at the 2013 ACPT)
2. Yoshie Hill (rookie??)
3. Jeremy Horwitz (71st at the 2013 ACPT)

Bill Farhood, Eric Maddy, J.T. Williams (photo courtesy of Susan Davidson)

Sherman Oaks, CA:

1. Eric Maddy (11th at the 2010 ACPT)
2. J.T. Williams (4th at the 2012 Crosswords LA tournament)
3. Bill Farhood (57th at the 2012 Crosswords LA tournament)

So if you have found the ACPT to be too daunting—with speed demons Dan Feyer and Tyler Hinman having blown away the competition since 2005—do seek out your smaller local puzzle events. They may be at Marbles stores, they may take place at the local library, they may be held at a school or church—but rookies can and do make the finals at small crossword tournaments.

Mindstein game from Marbles

One of my thank-you gifts as a tournament official was a trivia game called Mindstein that Marbles itself has published. It looks really neat—here’s a review of it. You answer five multiple-choice trivia questions on a card in your head, and combine the correct answers’ assigned letters to make a five-letter word. You win a SMART card if you get the right five-letter word—which means you can also use crosswordy letter-pattern skills to deduce the correct answer to a tough question if you’ve got most of the other letters/answers already. And there will be valid five-letter words that can be formed from incorrect answers, so tread carefully. (Available from Marbles.)