Superhard Crosswords to Keep You Sharp Review

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Superhard Crosswords to Keep You Sharp ReviewHaving played crosswords for over thirty years now, I was looking for a book of hard ones. The title of this book, "Superhard Crosswords To Keep you Sharp," plainly promises that the puzzles therein are not just hard but superhard. The introduction says the book "contains some of the most difficult [crossword] puzzles ever put between two covers."
These are gross exaggerations, and I can prove it.
Here are my times in minutes and seconds for the first nine puzzles: 10:07, 10:29, 14:14, 15:52, 10:27, 8:37, 6:31, 10:54, and 7:37. The sum of these times is 94:48, and the average is 10:32. If we throw out the two flyers the average drops to 10:20, but let's be conservative and round up to 11 minutes even.
To decide whether 11 minutes per puzzle is hard you need to know two facts. One fact is that the "New York Times" daily crossword puzzle -- sized 15 by 15 just as the puzzles are in the book under discussion -- gets harder throughout the week; Monday puzzles are the easiest, and Saturdays are the hardest. The other fact is that I have kept a record of my times solving those puzzles for over a dozen years, so I know how long on average each day's puzzle takes me.
Before I put the two facts together, let me point out that it doesn't matter whether your times are much faster or much slower than mine. All that matters is whether the puzzles in this collection are hard.
If they are, you would expect them to take me as long as at least a NYT Saturday, whether I'm a really fast solver or a really slow one. If they take me as long as a average Friday, then there's no way they can be fairly described as superhard.
In fact, my average time for a Saturday is a whopping 40:34. The first nine puzzles in this collection -- 11 minutes, remember -- are easier than a Wednesday! (My Tuesday average is 8:48 and my Wednesday average is 12:50.)
If being easier than a Friday disqualifies a puzzle from superhardness, then surely a Wednesday-level collection is nowhere close.
Now it's true that players who need a dozen minutes to finish a Monday will likely find "Superhard Crosswords To Keep You Sharp" to be hard. But that's not how this book is described. It's not described as being hard for novices. It's described as being hard for players "who've mastered the crosswords in [their] local paper." It's described as being hard for players who "can solve the puzzles in other crossword books as fast as [they] can write."
So, this collection is clearly described as being hard for experts.
But as I've proved, by no reasonable measure are these puzzles hard, and they certainly aren't super hard.
I was disappointed in the description of this book, and since I've played eight of the puzzles, I can't return it.
Now, having said all that, I will say that these are high-quality crosswords (the first nine anyway), written by respected constructors. If you want a Tuesday- or Wednesday-level collection of puzzles, this book might suit you.
I will also point out that there are only 50 such puzzles, not the 72 that many other books contain. You will have to perform your own price/puzzle calculation.
Superhard Crosswords to Keep You Sharp OverviewNovice solvers need not apply! Here's something fiendishly tough for those who find Monday (and maybe Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) crosswords too easy and want something substantial to sink their gargantuan brains into. Puzzlemeister Stanley Newman has cranked up the difficulty with tough clues that will really challenge-and entertain-aficionados.


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