The whirlwind weekend that is ACPT has come and gone once again. It was a blast as always. For the second year in a row, I worked behind the scenes on the Tech Team scanning puzzles. It's a good way for me to experience the tournament. I like competitive solving, but I don't like like it,* and I very much enjoy the perks of being an official. This year we got Sunday breakfast in the concierge lounge on the 16th floor, with a view of the majestic New York City skyline and the slightly less majestic WWE corporate headquarters.
Of course, we do a lot of work to earn these perks. Distributing, collecting, marking, scanning, and sorting nearly 5,500 puzzle in almost real-time is no easy feat. It makes me wonder if someday this tournament will be totally paperless. I don't think it will ever be totally virtual -- people like gathering (that's kinda the whole point) and solving by writing (as opposed to typing) -- but it could still plausibly go paperless. Like, everybody could solve in the ballroom together with a stylus on a tablet, and then everything could be scored and uploaded to the web instantaneously. The need for human judges would then be almost completely obviated. Man, I hope that doesn't happen in my lifetime. It's a scary thought. Some people fear ChatGPT; I fear ChatACPT. Don't make me pay for my room and board!
*To give you some idea of my solving ability, I can tell you that I finished the final puzzle (using C-Division clues) after the C-Division winner but before the C-Division runner-up. Second place -- not bad! Now, it was pointed out to me that the people solving on the big board had to do so with several hundred people watching them. But I responded that I perform better under pressure, so had I actually been a C finalist, I probably would have won. It's absolutely untrue, but it's a decent retort, nevertheless.
The work of being a scanner can get monotonous at times, but just when you feel yourself starting to space out, something crops up to command your attention. One of those things this year was the same thing, with the same competitor, that caused the B-Finals debacle back in 2019. Said competitor writes in nice, thick black ink, which is great, until he makes a mistake and has to write over it. When he does that, it causes our scanners to think it's a black square, which inflates the number of words it thinks is in the puzzle, which gives him more points than he should have (each correct word is worth 10 points). It's very annoying.
Now, one's first impulse might be to say, "Stop solving with thick black pen, jerk!" But really the software should be able to handle this. It should be able to recognize that something is amiss with the word count and alert us so that we know to make a manual adjustment. Plus, the solver is not a jerk at all. He's actually quite nice and very scrupulous and self-reports whenever this happens. Dude just wants to solve in pen -- it's not an unreasonable ask. And we got everything resolved before final scores were posted, so it was no big deal. I'll definitely be on the lookout for his puzzles next year.
The best part about being an official -- the best part about attending ACPT in any capacity, really -- is meeting and getting to know a bunch of cool people. This year, I spent a lot of time talking with fellow Tech Teamer Shehroze Aamer. He's a really nice, super interesting guy, so it was a pleasure swapping stories with him. The thing is, there are so many brilliant, amazing people at this tourney that it can be kinda surreal at times. Sometimes it feels like I'm watching it as an outsider, like I'm not actually a part of it. It's not imposter syndrome. I don't feel like a phony. It's more like I feel that somehow I'm not actually there. Every now and then, I have to tell myself, You're a part of this too! Seriously, you are! Maybe that sounds kinda hokey or humblebraggy, but it's truthful.
The other thing about there being so many cool people there is that it can induce some serious FOMO, as there's no way you can meet and talk to everybody. On Friday night, for example, I was super tired, walking back to my room after a beer in the bar, and I saw two people talking, both of whom I would have loved to have met. But I was exhausted and felt kinda weird about interrupting them, so I just skipped it. Then I couldn't even sleep (it's the same story every Friday at ACPT), so I just lied in bed, regretting my decision to even come up to my room in the first place. Oh well... next year.
I did get to meet a few new people I admire this year, such as assistant LAT crossword editor Katie Hale and final-puzzle constructor Kameron Austin Collins. Katie I actually got to talk to a bit because she was also an official, which was neat, but Kameron I only met briefly. However, we did get our picture taken together a couple times by the
tournament photographer, one with Wyna Liu, another constructor I really like, and
I'm hoping those pics get published to the ACPT website at some point. I wanted to get one with my phone, but I was late on the draw, and Kameron got pulled away before I could do so.
In general, I gotta start taking more pictures. I don't like taking them, but I really like looking at them later, and it's tough to look at them later if you don't take them in the first place. I mean, I've traveled to and from the tournament with the same DC/VA crew four times (shout out to Brian, Mike, and Dan), and I realized I don't even have a picture of the four of us together. Oh well... next year.
I did take a few good pics, though (or rather I asked other people to take them, so that I could be in them). I'll post them below* and call it an entry.
*I think that's okay. I'm never totally sure what the etiquette is of posting pictures of people on-line. But I think when they were taken at a public event like this, it's fine. On the very off-chance somebody in one of them sees this post and wants me to take it down, I will -- the picture, that is, not the entire post.
[Me.]
[Me and Tracy Bennett. My Wordle thread freaked out when I texted them this pic and told them she was the Wordle editor.]
[Me an Sam Ezersky. If you can get pics with the Worlde and the Spelling Bee editors, you gotta do it.]
[Me, Will Shortz, and Shehroze Aamer.]
Oh, by the way, Dan Feyer won the tournament (his 8th championship) in dramatic fashion, edging Paolo Pasco, only because Paolo paused for a few seconds to think about whether his final entry should be SIP or NIP (it was NIP, which he registered just a touch too late).* I was sitting very close to the front of the room, which sounds good, but I actually had a bad angle and couldn't really see Paolo or his board, so I didn't realize how close it was until the audience gasped. Tyler Hinman came in third, finishing well after the other two. Guy's one of the greatest solvers ever, but it wasn't his puzzle, wasn't his day. Oh well... next year.
And that was ACPT 2023.
*I was reminded that this isn't actually what happened. He paused for a moment to decide between MADRE and PADRE. (It was the former.) Earlier in his solve, he wrote "N/S" in a square that could have started NIP or SIP, and then came back to it later and immediately filled it in correctly. The puzzle commentators mentioned this, and apparently it caused me to misremember things.
