New York Times Mini Crossword Leaderboard

Daily Mini Rankings
Mini Royalty

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1Time Adjusted to Daily Average (TA-DA): This number represents the average daily performance relative to the average time specific to an individual day. This metric attempts to account for the variable difficulty and participation from day to day. For example, a time of 85 seconds on a Saturday (where the average time among all players was 115) may increase the average time quite a bit for one player, despite the time being very good for that day. Also, consider a player who only completes a relatively easy puzzle with a time of 45 seconds where the average time among all players was 30 for that day. If we're only comparing these two puzzles, the player who completed the easier puzzle would have a much better average time.

However, in this scenario, the first player would receive a TA-DA score of -30, while the second player would receive a TA-DA score of +15. These numbers are then averaged across the week/month/all time.

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Unlike the complete NYTimes crossword, there is little difference in the difficulty of a given mini crossword puzzle based on the day of the week, with one big exception: Saturday. Saturday's puzzles often proved to be the hardest -- offering more clues to be solved and less black squares, meaning longer words. This resulted in a few different metrics above including an average time excluding Saturday, as well as the Time Adjusted to Daily Average (TA-DA), which both sought to isolate/remove the impact of the Saturday puzzles and not overly punish the people that consistently completed them instead of skipping the day in order to save their precious average time.

With that in mind, I had a few questions. Was there any realtionship between Saturday and Non-Saturday puzzles? Were there any competitors that excelled on this day compared to other participants, or was it simply another reflection of overall performance -- those that had the fastest time overall, also led the ranks on Saturdays.

On average, most of the competitors took about twice as long on Saturdays compared to non-Saturdays, with a few exceptions... Good friend of the blog and previous collaborator on Stop and Frisk in DC Mika Weinstein bucked the trend on Saturdays, taking 248 seconds on average compared to her speedy 44.5 seconds on every other day throughout the week (about 5x longer). This isn't actually terribly surprising to me; she was the main reason for creating the average time excluding Saturday, as well as pushing me to create a more even fair measure of completion time: my baby, the TA-DA. Other outliers to this trend include my cat's favorite roommate Stu Fooks, who put in an admirable effort every day, completing 62 puzzles (9th most overall). While he was a bit slower on Saturdays, he was actually only 20 secodns slower on average (about 1.13 times slower).

Hover over each dot to see the name of the contestant and their corresponding times.