Who is this guy? What kind of person knows the name of Gorbachev’s wife (Raisa), a synonym for no-good (dadblasted), the Rangers coach in 1994 (Keenan), a platinum-group element (iridium) and the meaning of objurgation (rant)?
The kind of person who whips through 20 crosswords a day (at least 20,000 in the last three years), who won this year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and who has 100,000 puzzles saved on his computer.
“I feel I want to do them all, somehow,” Mr. Feyer said. “I’ve probably done more crosswords than anybody in the world in the last three years. I don’t know if that’s something to be proud of, but it’s a claim to fame.”
He does have another life, as a pianist and music director for musical theater productions. His most recent shows were “With Glee,” which ran Off Broadway in Manhattan last summer, and “Dracula, a Rock Opera,” which ran in Rochester, Mich., in October.
“Music directors teach actors the music, accompany them in rehearsals and conduct the band,” Mr. Feyer said. “On Broadway, the music director is the guy with the baton in the pit. Off Broadway, it’s the guy sitting at a piano conducting with his head.”
So how does that guy become a puzzle ace? Besides training like an athlete, Mr. Feyer said, it helps to have “underlying brain power and a head for trivia.” He always had high grades and test scores, he said. He excelled at math as well as music, abilities that he thinks go together with crossword solving.
What they all have in common, he said, is pattern recognition — as he begins filling in a puzzle grid, he starts recognizing what the words are likely to be, even without looking at the clues, based on just a few letters.
“A lot of the time, crossword people are musicians,” he said, noting that Jon Delfin, who has won the tournament seven times, is a pianist and music director. “Mathematicians and computer scientists are also constructors.”
Arthur Schulman, a crossword constructor and retired psychology professor from the University of Virginia, who taught a seminar called “The Mind of the Puzzler,” agreed that there is a strong correlation between skill at word puzzles and talent for math and music. All, he said, involve playing with symbols that in and of themselves are not meaningful. “There’s an underlying connection, but I’m not sure what it might be,” Professor Schulman said. “It’s finding meaning in structure.”
Mr. Feyer is a relative newcomer to the world of competitive crosswords, though he has liked all sorts of puzzles since childhood, when his parents bought him books of brain teasers to make up for his boredom at school. He grew up in San Francisco, where his father is a municipal bond lawyer, his mother a law professor. He has two younger brothers, one a management consultant and the other an English teacher in Bhutan. His grandfather George Feyer was a pianist, and played for decades in the lounges of some of Manhattan’s most elegant hotels.
Mr. Feyer went to Princeton, majoring in music. He did crosswords from time to time over the years, but he didn’t get hooked on them until he saw the 2006 movie “Wordplay”, a documentary about crosswords, the tournament and Will Shortz, the New York Times puzzle editor and the founder and director of the tournament.
“I didn’t realize this whole puzzle world existed,” he said.
He bought a book of crosswords, and then another, and began following crossword blogs and downloading puzzles. Before he knew it, he had become one with the puzzle people.
In 2008 he entered his first tournament, in which hundreds of people in a hotel ballroom race to finish a series of puzzles. He had found his niche: the sound of 700 people turning over a piece of paper at the same time thrilled him. He finished “50-somethingth,” he said. But that put him at the top of the rookie division for which he had qualified. The following year, he finished fourth. This year he won, beating many veterans, including Tyler Hinman, the champion of five previous tournaments.
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