In a very close final round, Jeffrey Schwartz won the 13th Westchester Crossword Puzzle Tournament over second place finisher Bob Mackey and third place finisher Ken Stern.
All three contestants finished the Thursday, October 1, 2009 New York Times puzzle by Patrick Blindauer and Rebecca Young perfectly. The three preliminary puzzles, which you can solve this Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in the Times, were by Lynn Lempel, Paula Gamache, and Kevin G. Der.
Mackey finished first on puzzle 1, Stern on puzzle 2, and Schwartz on puzzle 3. Both Stern and Schwartz finished with mistakes on puzzle 1 ahead of Mackey. Schwartz and Stern were virtually tied on puzzle 2, but Schwartz later stated that Stern had his hand up a split second ahead of him. Schwartz finished first perfectly on puzzle 3.
Besides Gamache, Blindauer and Young, officials in attendance were head judge Stan Kurzban, along with Fred Piscop, Ellen Ripstein, Helene Hovanec, Deb Amlen, Pat Merrell, Nancy Schuster, Adam Cohen, Howard Barkin, Dan Feyer, Tony Orbach, Frank Longo, Bob Bernstein, Mimi Raphael, Caleb Madison, Joe Cabrera, Mike Nothnagel, and Ashish Vengsarkar.
The annual contest, hosted by Pleasantville's own Will Shortz, benefits the Pleasantville Fund for Learning. Shortz noted that there were 67 contestants this year, which might be a record. It was also mentioned that the Tournament and other fundraisers netted the Fund for Learning, which benefits programs in Pleasantville's three schools, over $25,000 last year.
The image gallery is now up. I recommend you go there after you've solved Thursday's NYT puzzle. For more pictures, check out Elaine Lippman's Facebook gallery - thanks Tyger!
2 comments:
I think I had a clean but slow Puzzle 1. Thanks for the headline!
Congrats to both Jeff and Bob! As Jeff noted, I'm pretty sure that Bob finished 2nd to me on Puzzle 1.
I believe that Bob, Jeff and I finished 1/2/3 in some order on all three puzzles, and I don't know that that's happened before.
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