Face Off

The in-person energy competing against other puzzlers is unmatched. Even when we compete virtually, we often find that our times are better when we’re not alone at our table.

Even if it’s not a formal contest, invite someone to join you at your house, a library, or other neutral location to race you while you puzzle. You don’t even need to be doing the same puzzle.

Puzzle Everything

While it definitely makes sense to puzzle as many puzzles from the brand you know will be in your next competition, it’s still important to solve as many different brands, cuts, piece counts, and images as possible, even ones you wouldn’t normally gravitate toward.

Fur, feathers, greenery, sky, buildings, gradients, solid colors, busy images, illustrations, photographs, 100s, 1,000s, grid, ribbon, and random cut, try it all.

Physical Skills

Great piece manipulation and being able to move pieces in your hands can shave off critical seconds. Practice holding pieces in your palms while you flip and sort, and working with both hands independently.

Any tasks that improve your hand-eye coordination will help with your speed puzzling. You can even practice color differentiation with phone apps like I Love Hue.

Do smaller puzzles with just your non-dominant hand so you improve your dexterity and ability to have both hands working independently.

Regularly exercising can also help your back not hurt as you stand over the table. Focus on your back and core and if worse comes to worse, you can stand with one foot on your chair to relieve some lower back pain.

Strategize and Plan

If you’re an edges first person, try doing edges last, particularly puzzles where the edge is mostly the same.

Work the easiest stuff first, whatever jumps out at you when you first see the pieces. Once you get the easy stuff out of the way, you’ll have fewer pieces to sort through to find the tougher sections.

When you get stuck, move on to something completely different.

Watch Back Tape

Of course, you should time yourself and compare your times with published times of others, but you can also take video and timelapses of yourself. Watching back what went well and what slowed you down is so helpful in determining strategy moving forward.

Discuss how you tackled a puzzle with friends and learn from their approaches things you haven’t thought of yet. Watching others’ timelapses is helpful too!

Run Drills

We don’t always have time to run a 500-piece puzzle, especially if we’re new to the hobby and it takes more than two hours. But there are lots of things you can do to practice that aren’t that big of a commitment.

Try getting out a puzzle and just seeing how quickly you can flip the pieces and sort a particular section (edges, a color block, standout texture).

Control Variables

Ideal circumstances are a white surface with natural light, but you may not always have ideal circumstances so just like runners train on hills, you can practice on darker surfaces, in artificial light, with distracting noise, with and without music, etc.

If you can get someone to stand over you with a camera, it’ll be perfect practice for Nationals and Worlds! 🙂

Tools of the Trade

Puzzling can be a very affordable hobby, especially if you swap puzzles to practice with other speed puzzlers. But there are some tools that can make your experience more pleasant like a box top holder, a long lasting timer, and an easy-to-use phone stand to angle your timelapses perfectly.

Compete!

Sometimes you just have to put yourself out there and try it out. Show up to a puzzle race, we promise you’ll have a great time! Even if you’re last, you’ll make new friends and learn how to solve the puzzle faster next time.

And honestly, if you finish in the back half of the competitors, you typically have a bigger cheering section since the early finishers now have hands free to clap!

Sign up for your first event!