How to Improve at Crosswords - 29 July 2021 New York Times Crossword

Just incase anyone was curious, here's the NATO phonetic alphabet(feel free to correct any mistakes):
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
Indigo
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-ray
Yankee
Zulu

Not being fully indulgent in a single language all your life probably makes these quite difficult for people. I believe someone who has spent significant time switching between 2-3 languages all their life would find themselves lacking the required vocabulary and trivia for one specific language's crossword.

That's why I think people who find crosswords hard should give sudokus and the like a go. Math puzzles are universal, more or less.

I’m always so hard on myself for not knowing everything. I would refuse to look up answers and I’ve left so many puzzles unfinished. Going forward, anytime I have to look something up, I will look at it as an opportunity to learn and not something I should shame myself for. Thanks!

Usually I hold off looking stuff up until I'm really stumped which is usually after I make at least some headway in the puzzle, but here we had New York Theaters

This is the first video of yours that I've watched & it was super helpful. I've always wanted someone to share their thought process aloud while solving the more difficult puzzles. Glad to see you're human and you weren't spitting answers left and right like a robot. Gives me hope & inspiration to do more NYT crosswords, especially later in the week. Thanks!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and tips. I’ve introduced a number of friends to the NYT puzzle. They always say they won’t be able to do it and later say how much fun it is.

feels weird going back and seeing the moustache again

I was completely lost on this one.

I feel like other type of skill crosswords test (related to the wordplay aspect) is being able to come up with words based on combinations of letters and blanks (like _b_d_). I sometimes find this quite difficult and need to manually go through every possible combination, whereas you seem to often be able to come up with possibilities in your head. I am also very bad with anagrams or scrabble-type games, and I feel as though these skills are quite related

It's July 29th, 2019, and this... is The Daily Solve.

Warmest greetings.

You beat my time today by over 20 minutes, so well done there. I uploaded mine for whomever wants to watch me flounder.

Wow. Did not get that theme at all
That's great.

Stuck around for the post credits scene. Hoping you get recruited by Nick Fury alongside a Sudoku solver and a Rubik's Cube master.

I love that you skip „follower of catch or latch“ at the start and just a few seconds later say that you need to find an area that allows you to „latch onto“ it. 😅

Really loving these videos Chris, and am finding your talk throughs to be interesting and helpful (I'm particularly partial to the times you use the word in a sentence to give them context). So thank you!
P. S. Do you have plans for the white box in the top right of your video (above your head)? Or are you playing the long game and providing space for the inevitable reaction videos?!

The part of speech for let threw me as well. I had RENTAL up until the end where I had to untangle that section to make anything make sense.

This theme totally eluded me through completition. If only you could hear the groan I made when I looked it up after the solve.

Unless I missed it, you didn't go back to 50 down, "Unlikely trick taker", for which the answer was Trey. Apparently that means three in poker, which ties in to one interpretation of the clue you were considering.

Wednesday or Thursday is usually the hardest puzzle I can solve. This one was a doozy but it was really fun trying to get as far as I could on my own, watch a bit of this to get some help, then go back to doing it on my own! that theme really stumped me, so I'm glad you were able to figure it out in the end.

Once you did disposal area and "fill in the blank" I groaned out loudly. Excellent theme. I've been doing the LA Times daily crossword since I watch this series and it's been pretty excellent so far. Do you have an alternative to NY Times crossword that you would recommend?

You were perhaps getting stuck on one understanding of a clue with "prefix with penultimate" again - "antepenultimate" is a word for the third to last in a series. :)

Wow that theme broke my brain when I saw it. Always surreal hearing someone read your comment, I always expect a comment on a YT video to be shot into the ether. Thanks for the response! If nothing else, watching these videos should help with my crossword skills!

B in the phonetic alphabet is Bravo, not beta. Just FYI.

“Asleep” being NUMB refers to a limb, not really a person.

My partner arrived at Ironclads before you had also based on their knowledge from Civilization. Also rumble strips are bumpy areas on the side of the road which causes a car to rumble if a tired driver veers too far to the side.

That thumbnail photo of you… phwoar!

Yeah, sorry, we're going to need to see the cat.

A "rumble strip" is the line of small raised bumps at the edge of a motorway/highway that makes an audible rumbling sound when driven over, to alert drivers that they are drifting off course. Pete Rose was a star baseball player (and notorious, due to gambling offences) for the Cincinnati Reds - hence "Red Rose".

Speaking of looking things up, which you are early on in this video, this puzzle probably involved more looking up for me than any, I was just not making very much headway in any area of the puzzle, for a good 30, 40 minutes. Usually I hold off looking stuff up until I'm really stumped which is usually after I make at least some headway in the puzzle, but here we had New York Theaters, US politicians, and other quite obscure terms aside scattered through the whole thing, plus a theme that took me a while longer than usual to get.

The only area here where I really felt I had an advantage potentially was 12 down, where I saw that the answer was to do with the letter 'z' right away, but this being a US crossword, I put ZEE instead of ZED. I think I see why they went with ZED but still, it was fun to be hoisted by my own regional English.

Wise words on getting better at solving. I think my big stumbling block has been coming to terms with the idea that crossword solving is a skill that you can practice and improve at with time, and not purely a trivia quiz like I'd been thinking previously. Your demo of the UK vs American style crossword really threw into sharp relief just how much more is going on here than pure trivia.

It's funny, I have so much trouble with the little crosses and 3-4 letter clues and coming up with a word, but I had the theme answer figured out from just the "LI". I always go for the long answers first when I solve

Thanks for the words at the beginning! You are correct, of course - the primary challenge for me is to have the confidence to not look something up, because a lot of the time I know the word, but just can't remember it. That is something I've noticed myself getting gradually better at, which is very satisfying. And it is also why it is extra frustrating to run into a new puzzle that just completely throws me off, like yesterday's - but I'm at a 15 streak now and I intend to keep going, and these videos are definitely a big part of that, so thanks again.

Another horizontally rather than rotationally symmetrical grid!