Trying the Expert Level

I think that I had started the transition before my surgery, but I had little else that I wanted to do once I was in my catheter-limited state of being.

I am referring to how I play Sudoku.

In the past, I have occasionally posted that I play Sudoku on the iPad just about every morning. I have described how I usually play a game designated as HARD while allowing myself to make notations. I have followed this by a round designated as MEDIUM level. To make this easier level more challenging I have played it without resorting to notations. My goal would be to complete the more difficult level within 20 minutes and the easier game within 10 minutes.

Occasionally, I would give the EXPERT level a whirl, but I would end up deciding that those games took too much time and that I also failed too often. I mean the more difficult EXPERT level games could consume the best part of an hour.

Recently, with a little more time on my hands, I tried one more time to apply my dubious talents to the Expert level.

Strangely enough, I have been doing much better at this level than before. I can complete most games within 30 minutes or not much longer. And although I do make some blunders or reach some impasses, I am solving many of the puzzles without error. Although 30 minutes seems like a lot, it is pretty close to the time that I had been spending on the hard game plus the medium one.

At the beginning of each round, the game tells me how people fare in a game of the difficulty that they are giving me on that day. Most of the time on EXPERT setting, they tell me that only 40-45% of the players who try games of this particular level difficultly, succeed. Occasionally, a given game reaches the 50% success rate. I think the highest percentage I have seen at the expert level is 55%.

The lowest percentage that I have come across, until yesterday, was a meager 35% rate of success. Somehow, I did solve that puzzle without error, but it took me a whole lot of head-scratching and close examination, and even then it took me a whole hour to finally solve it. Then just yesterday, it gave me a game that it said had only a 32% success rate, and I am here to tell you that I didn’t get very far.

Even though I have recently been more successful than previously, I confess that I am very slow. After the game, a player will be given some information. What they tell you varies from game to game, but when they tell me my speed compared to others, it is something like, "You are faster than 20% of the payers." That sounds better than being slower than 80%, but it means the same thing.

In a sense, I am both a good and bad candidate for Sudoku. I do have a very logical and convergent-thinking sort of brain, but I also have a brain that tends to wander and not be very precise. So, my wandering mind can easily click a 2 instead of a 3. Yesterday, I actually made a mistake on the very first move of the game. I had meant to put a notation into a square, but I had the Enter mode, rather than the Notation mode, activated. Sigh. While I am able to take the move back, the game still records an error. I wish we could be forgiven for an error by telling the app that it was a careless error rather than a logical one, but alas, an error is an error is an error  

In case you are interested, I play on my tablet, using the app by Easybrain, but I am sure there are others.. I did eventually spend a few $ to purchase the app because I was playing it a lot and was getting tired of the popup ads.