For some, a crossword is just a black-and-white squared grid; for others, it is a gymnasium, a treasure hunt, a refuge. Travelling across country lines, I called Paolo Pasco to discuss winning a recent puzzle tournament to get down to the nitty-gritty and examine the crossword lifestyle.
A cruciverbalist ‘grand-master’, Pasco took the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) crown in April this year, after years of near-misses and “heart-breakingly close calls”. Describing the tournament as “punishing”, he warns, “you go insane, completing six crosswords on Saturday, needing to be both fast and perfect for each one”. Regardless, he loves the sport and the community behind it, which “brings him back each year”.
Freshly teenaged Pasco completed his first crossword on a sleepy road trip, and was quickly hooked on the game. He grew up on a strict puzzle diet, solving sudokus in crayon at knee height, but steered clear of the crossword as a child. “Crosswords have a reputation of being targeted to older demographics as it is trivia-based”, he says; but exposure to the grid quickly revealed the illusion of this stereotype. Pasco shifted from clueless to clued in, publishing his first crossword in the New York Times before starting tenth grade. His gridlocked love affair stems from his people-focused and intimate view of crosswords: “you are seeing into someone’s mind; you get to know the other person and their view of contemporary culture”, he shares.
If you’re looking for a cheat’s way to solve crosswords quickly, Pasco has embittering news. “I apologise when I say that all I did to improve was solve a lot of puzzles”, he says: “you just have to do a sick number of reps”. To challenge himself, sometimes he attempts solving a crossword with just the down clues; “you have to work at guessing answers based on clues alone, and better at recognising letter patterns”, he advises. As any regular gym-goer would know, there are opportunities for ‘cross-training’, to refine the cruciverbalist mind somewhere other than the grid. When he is not solving crosswords, Pasco focuses on “getting better at trivia, such as watching Jeopardy”.
Understanding crossword-writing techniques is also critical for any solving fanatic. What surprises me is that difficulty-tuning is not executed in the answers, but the clues. The ACPT has three difficulty streams: A, B, and C, where the clues differ but the answers are shared. C-stream clues are often straightforward synonyms, but more sophisticated crossword solvers must reckon with webs of wordplay, misdirection, and general crossword chicanery. For example, the answer “needle” bifurcates itself into the simple B-stream clue: “stylus”, or the A-stream con: “one with an eye for good tailoring”.
After years of navigating linguistic deceit, Pasco has developed a certain form of paranoia — a forgotten side-effect of frequent crossword doses. “I assume I’m being tricked in every instance”, such that “I have an adversarial relationship with the creator”, he admits. However, when on the other side as a crossword constructor, antagonism turns into goodwill. He explains, “the game exists to give people time to relax”, and depicts the crossword-crafting community as welcoming and open to mentorship. The recipe for good crossword construction is an analogue to swift crossword-solving: “solving lots and making lots”, Pasco says. Pasco encourages any aspiring crossword constructors to “just ask people in the community for help with testing, or to co-construct. My early collaborations were with people who outclassed me, but this helped me improve”. Ultimately, he testifies to the welcoming nature of the community, promising fresh faces that support abounds.
Discussion on any art form cannot escape the hot-button issue — does Artificial Intelligence threaten to raze crossword communities down to their barest bones, slurping the marrow from black-and-white squares? Pasco is hopeful: “AI is pretty good, but not great at solving crosswords — if it competed at the ACPT, it would be middling”. Crossword constructors also realise they have nothing to fear: anyone who has tinkered around with ChatGPT knows it is a wordplay amateur. Meanwhile, the last five years have seen many interesting developments in the land of human-made crosswords. “Many young people have been enacting changes, making crossword clues more accessible for younger people and more diverse demographics”, Pasco says.
As the oracle says, or @zohsie on X, “every hot girl has a brief but meaningful era of 1-3 weeks where she goes absolutely insane for the NYTimes crossword”; speaking to Pasco has revitalised my addiction, even if I’m addled by autocheck. Though I am far from attending the ACPT, as I may always fret at a NYTimes’ Friday crossword’s difficulty, it’s heart-warming to feel a part of a community with every answer charted across and down.
