3 Sudoku Tips EVERY Solver Needs To Know - SHC 241 

📕Get my FREE Solving Guide that will help you solve over 80% of all Sudoku puzzles🧩to include NYT Hard👉👉www.buymeacoffee.com/timberlakeB/e/125822 Timestamps 0:00 Intro 00:19 It’s Solving Time 00:43 Puzzle Story 01:54 Tip #1 04:23 Tip #2 06:28 BONUS Tip 09:34 Tip #3 11:15 Sweeping The Blocks 12:12 BONUS Trick

Another fine offering from Mr. Kumar. Here's a path requiring a fair bit of virtual memory early on (32 = row 3 column 2): 32 (hidden single, owing to hidden pairs in boxes 1 and 7): 32, 12, 25, 94, 89, 58, 41, 78, 98, 87, 29, 27, 85, 75, 81, 52, 67, 76, 83, 31, 13, 38, 18, 35, 15, 39, 17, 97, 79, 93, 71, 23, 21, 72, 92, 74, 36, 34, 53, 43, 55, 63, 49, 45, 59, 69, 56, 54, 95, 96, 14, 16, 57, 61, 51, 65, 47. My first variation had a HoDoKu rating of Extreme 8164. Here's a tamer beast: 100 000 007 020 809 060 003 000 500 070 204 030 000 060 000 080 305 020 006 000 700 050 607 080 400 000 009 100000007020809060003000500070204030000060000080305020006000700050607080400000009 HoDoKu rating: Hard 984. Andrew Stuart rating: Tough Grade 333. =========== And here's a bit of a handful: 200 000 001 070 405 020 006 000 300 020 103 070 000 000 000 030 204 080 007 000 400 080 607 050 900 000 006 200000001070405020006000300020103070000000000030204080007000400080607050900000006 HoDoKu rating: Unfair 1318. Andrew Stuart rating: Very Hard Grade 275. Edited to make a small correction.

I got lots of pairs all over the place. An opening swordfish in 1s limited 1s to two per cornermarked block. I have no idea if any good came of it. I continued pencilmarking and placing digits, and I can't tell when the puzzle collapsed. 2:40 That 35 pair appeared during the ordinary course of cornermarking. I suppose that finding directly them would enable me to solve faster, but I think that looking in vain would slow my solve down. 4:10 My next step after cornermarking 9s? I had the 26 pair in block 1, and a pointing pair of 9s in block 7. Therefore I returned to block 1 and cornermarked 9s in row 2, then noticed that 5s had to go there, giving me a 59 pair, and letting me place 1 and 7.

i did it in 14:20! This is the first time I got very close to the time of the length of the video. I did attempt it a few hours earlier, but I messed up and deleted all that I had done. So I started from scratch this time; I think that counts. I wasn't working off memory the second time, I was just going where my eye would naturally go.

4:14 What did I do? Swept the blocks with hidden pairs. Found a pointing pair of 9's in block 7, giving me a pair of 9s in block 4 and another in block 1. Sweeping block 1 gave me hidden 59's, and hence 1 could only be in R1C2, for the first solve. Watching on... Yeah, after running the 1's, it's pairs, pairs everywhere. Pretty straightforward. I had marked pairs of 3's and 9's earlier, so I worked the pairs in a different order. Did it in 15m22s, not great but not horrible. Not hard., but a pretty puzzle with the mirrored pairs in all the corners, and it's cute that you can Snyder-mark everything without solving anything.

The first serious restrictions I found was the result of the 35 oblique corner pair in block 7, which gave a vertical pointing pair of 9s in the middle column and a horizontal pointing pair of 2s in the middle row. I focused solely on the immediate impact of these restrictions: first, in column 2, 489 triple in rows 5, 7 and 9, and hence a 1 in row 1 and a 7 in row 3. This was enough to progress rather easily through the rest of the grid, realising among other things that all four corner blocks had identical constructions as I had found inblock 7. This is Mr. Kumar's style at his best. Great puzzle. Thanks for the great demo.

I have always at that first point, looked to pencil mark any row, column or box where I now know the contents of 5 or more of the cells.

My time was 4:07. It was an ok time for me! Thank you! 😊

Puzzle solved in 7:48