Lollapuzzoola 2021
Aaron saw Lollapuzzoola advertised with the NYT crossword and since his girlfriend was unavailable- he teamed up with Avery for team Brother-Sister Synergy! Aaron is the better puzzle solver of the two, regularly finishing NYT Sunday puzzles in under 20 mins. By contrast, Avery finishes in about an hour with autocheck after half an hour. Neither one of the duo has ever participated in a competition or tournament event. The event took place virtually on Twitch August 21, 2021. Avery came home from Hawaii on Thursday. The next day, Aaron came over to practice for the event. On Saturday morning, they were ready to go at 9:30 AM sharp!
Aaron was appointed the team member who would man the keyboard. Their strategy was to generally work the puzzle together starting with the across clues (L to R, T to B skipping any they don’t know off the bat) and then do the downs in the same fashion. When they would get close to finishing, Avery was to scan the puzzle for any typos while Aaron finished the last boxes.
Spoilers below!
Puzzle 1
Extremely Casual Friday by Robyn Weintraub
31A – We put SLEEPOVER before realizing it wasn’t long enough. We were able to get PAJAMA PARTY after looking at 31D
44A – Very relatable
58A – We had LINE before looking at the downs.
66A – We thought this was a very funny theme answer. Aaron thought “No Pants” was the highlight of all the puzzles.
We enjoyed the interview with Robyn and we appreciate her talent of writing “easy puzzles” and “mom humor”.
| Time | 5:55 |
| Errors | 0 |
| Score | 2895 |
| Place | 64 |
Puzzle 2
Tag! by Amanda Rafkin
We liked the @ for at rebus.
19A – We got this correct, but don’t understand the clue.
26A – We realized we didn’t know whether O or X was the hugs XD
45A – Creative clue for a common word
85A – We had a typo here that we caught right before submitting!
88A – We used to get these every year from our family!
| Time | 7:44 |
| Errors | 0 |
| Score | 3286 |
| Place | 58? |
Puzzle 3
Get the Message by Sid Sivakumar
15A – We had LUCIFER here initially until we got to 2D.
21A – Avery doesn’t know what yeeted means, but was in college in 2011 and is very familiar with the fraternity staple NATTYLIGHT.
32A/33D – Our last clue to fill in, we had a bit of a guess here since we didn’t know either of these.
15D – We had a spelling error on the Z here that we caught!
45D – Aaron loves this game! Avery hates it!
Avery couldn’t remember her Twitch username and password to post in the chat, so they didn’t get to shout out in the CHAT BOX how awesome Sid was for making the rebuses symmetrical. Badass!
| Time | 16:03 |
| Errors | 0 |
| Score | 3967 |
| Place | 38 |
Puzzle 4
Connecting … by Brooke Husic
Oh my, where to start. So Avery thought that the down clues were “loading” and would appear as they filled in across clues. Aaron agreed to just start filling in the across answers. However, they didn’t get far.
1A – We made an educated guess here for ASL.
4A – Great clue… we have a restaurant in the Bay Area called “Pho Kim Long” which is a similar concept and Avery thinks is incredibly funny.
17A – Another guess here for PERU which we thought we confirmed by filling the down clues with answers that were words.
20A, 36A, 49A, 70A – Aaron knew these.
22A – We went with LIV, to make HEALS. Now that we know how the theme works- maybe it is VIV to make HEAVE?
25A – Avery guessed this was referring to eating with chips.
35A – Avery got this one (barely! it’s been a long time since we calculated limits)
66A – We got this one, but didn’t figure out how the downs worked.
1D, 2D, 3D, 4D, 13D, 23D – We got these based on having enough across clues to make some valid words
51D, 64D – We got these even though the clues didn’t exactly fit (we didn’t know the theme)
At the 20 minute mark, team Brother-Synergy knew they needed to use the Facilitated Cheating feature. The premise is that you can ask for the answer to a clue for the penalty of 50 points to your score. Since they were far from finished on the puzzle, getting a longer answer could really improve their chances of getting more of the puzzle filled out. Avery wanted to ask for 55A or 59A. Aaron wanted 29D or 26A. In the end, Aaron asked for 29D. They didn’t get a reply. Aaron spent the next 10 minutes scrolling through all the across answers that they still had no answers for and getting increasingly frustrated. Finally, 10 minutes later, the facilitators responded that the down clues were all themed answers and couldn’t be given out with the Cheat. Aaron immediately responded that the team wanted 26A. They wouldn’t get a response back.
Aaron was losing it! Avery has known Aaron for 27 years (his whole life) and has never seen him so flustered! With just 5 minutes left, Avery stopped Aaron’s doom scrolling of the clues and started writing in incorrect answers (The scoring doesn’t penalize wrong answers. It only rewards correct words). This made Aaron even more upset! With 33 seconds left, they gave up and ended Aaron’s misery by hitting the submit button.
Aaron collapsed on the ground claiming he was “broken by Brooke”.
Our tragic submission 
Beaten by Brooke
Team Brother-Sister Synergy’s Puzzle 4 submission dropped them down to 64 in the rankings D: Shattered by Puzzle 4, Aaron declared it was time for lunch. Avery went downstairs to make some noodles, but had to turn off the stove mid soup cook because Puzzle 5 was starting! In hindsight, Aaron wished the organizers had given a break after Puzzle 4 for contestants to put their brains back together.
| Time | 39:27 |
| Errors | 91 |
| Score | 890 |
| Place | 64 |
Puzzle 5
You’re Muted by Patti Varol
21A – One of our mom’s favorites
67A – Our dad played this song ALL the time!
105D – Avery got this one!
117D – This is in reference to CB radios for truckers?
After the bruising from Brooke, we didn’t have enough mental strength to check our work on this puzzle. We had 3 errors (still not quite sure where they are…) and a slower time than we were hoping for. Our goal was to finish each puzzle in less than 50% of the given time.
We love that Patti embraces younger constructors and the lexicon that comes with them! It’s very refreshing to see modern day slang and references in the crossword.
| Time | 21:06 |
| Errors | 3 |
| Score | 4814 |
| Place | 62 |
Aftermath
Team Brother-Sister Synergy ended up at 62/148 in the pairs division. This was a satisfactory result as they were hoping to be in the top 50%. Well, ok, they were hoping to be closer to the top 25% with the the top 50% being the minimum!
Despite being busted by Brooke, they recovered enough during Puzzle 5 that they decided to do the Tiebreaker, Local, and Express Finals.
They finished the Tiebreaker with no errors 29 sec over the allotted 5 mins. They finished the Local Final with no errors in 9:32. Even though they already knew the answers, Aaron did the Express Final. It was a bit embarrassing that having just typed in all the answers on the Local, they had already forgotten some of them. In their defense, this was on hour 6 of non-stop puzzling!
They had a great time watching the Local Finalists duel it out on the Twitch stream. True to the theme of Puzzle 4, there seemed to be some lag and whole sections would appear at once for some of the finalists. This was exciting in it’s own way. It was really interesting to see everyone make the same mistakes we made in our puzzle – TUXES on 5A and LOO on 23D and how quickly they were able to find their errors (some fast, some slow). Aaron had gotten 18A INNER CHILD immediately at the beginning of the puzzle, but none of the finalists filled that one out until near the end. They also got 24A – PELL fast- Mom got one of these when she went to college so Avery was familiar.
The Express Finalists were EXTREMELY impressive. Avery was mesmerized by the way Will Nediger navigated the puzzle and filled out his squares. It looked like he was going all keyboard and working out whole sections before filling in anything. Aaron had filled out the Express Final in 5:49 and was hoping this would be faster than the slowest finalist!
In all, the Lollapuzzoola was an engaging and lively way to spend 6.5 hours on a Saturday. Avery and Aaron didn’t have enough time to finish the Meta Puzzle Suite. They finished the Queen’s Gambit during the Lollapuzzoola and the Gardening afterwards. Maybe they can finish the rest (and Puzzle 4) tomorrow!
We busted out Morgan’s old chess set! 
Marking the piece’s vision with Avery’s stitch markers
This tournament was clearly a labor of love by the organizers. It is easy to imagine they spent all year putting together all the puzzles. Avery and Aaron had a small taste of how much effort goes into making a crossword puzzle when they made one together for Father’s Day. They really appreciated the work and thought that went into today’s puzzles!! The themes were topical and there were many clues that made us laugh out loud when we got them.
Can’t wait for next year!