{"id":1953,"date":"2021-01-13T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/crossword\/"},"modified":"2021-01-12T14:23:39","modified_gmt":"2021-01-12T21:23:39","slug":"crossword","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/crossword\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Conquer the New York Times Crossword Puzzle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not a full-on puzzle head (yet). <a href=\"https:\/\/geni.us\/crossword-puzzles\">This little book<\/a> has been a confidence booster with my burgeoning Sunday obsession. There are plenty of helpful vocabulary and practice puzzle books out there, but what this concise guide provides is insight: common Thursday gimmicks (ex; backward spelling), the 300 most-used words broken down by category (ex; misc. 3-letter words: EER? &#8230;e&#8217;er = a contraction of &#8220;ever&#8221;); the basics of puzzle construction (FYI, the answers generally come first); and top solver Reynaldo&#8217;s step-by-step instructions on efficiently tackling over 60 puzzles of varying difficulty (ex; what to do in the event of a dead-end; when to resort to educated guesses); plus, if you&#8217;re still stuck, there are additional clues so you never feel hopeless. If you watched <a href=\"http:\/\/kk.org\/truefilms\/archives\/2007\/04\/wordplay.php\">Wordplay<\/a>, became intrigued with NYT editor Will Shortz and vowed to become a stopwatch-wielding diehard, but still haven&#8217;t, the quick takeaways contained within this book will get you going.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wordplay tips &#038; tricks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1953"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37710,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953\/revisions\/37710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}