Tyler Hinman, RPI graduate and national crossword champion, is back on top
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute graduate Tyler Hinman won the US crossword puzzle tournament for the seventh time last week, but don’t call it a comeback, he says.
The Connecticut native has been solving New York Times puzzles since he was a teenager and has been competing nationally every year since 2003. He first made headlines in 2005 when, at the age of 20, he became the youngest to win the national competition. crossword contest. The following year, 2006, the computer science major won again. And he kept winning until the end of the decade.
It would be a seven-year streak for Hinman “if you ignore the 2010s,” he said in an interview Thursday. “It wasn’t my decade.”
He got back to winning ways last year and won this year’s title on Sunday.
Since graduating and leaving the Capital Region, Hinman has worked day jobs in finance and programming while putting his puzzle-solving skills into side projects.
He starred in a documentary called “Wordplay” with New York Times puzzle creator and editor William Shortz, appeared on a reality TV show featuring contestants with “superhuman” abilities, and even published his own. crossword book.
He now lives in San Francisco, but has fond memories of his time in the capital region, including attending RPI hockey games and enjoying Buffalo chicken pizza and beer at the Villa Valenti pub in Troy.
“It was our date on a Friday night when we wanted to go out and eat pizza and wings.”
Hinman also attends National Puzzlers’ League conventions which have taken him around the country.
Some might expect the fastest puzzle solvers to be English teachers or trivia enthusiasts, but some of the top competitors are computer programmers, mathematicians and musicians, he said. .
“These three disciplines — programming, music, and puzzles — involve interpreting coded, stilted information very quickly and translating it into something meaningful,” Hinman said.
The crossword puzzle scene is younger and more vibrant than ever, he said. Hinman is still a fan of The Times crossword puzzles, but notes that freelance puzzle designers who self-publish on the internet have been a game-changer.
“The Times has brought a ton of innovation to this puzzle under the direction of Will Shortz,” he said, describing the old puzzles as “a scholastic and pretty dry vocabulary test.”
“The Indies go even further than that,” he said. “They hint at manners and styles that are just cavalier and free-flowing and stuff that The Times won’t allow because it’s The Times.”
This includes using emojis and obscure references and experimenting with unusual formats.
About the riddle, he said, “It was cool to just have a thing. Some people get good at a sport or learn an instrument. That’s what I got good at and I got it. pushed far enough.”