Over the pandemic, the sale of puzzles skyrocketed. And while people of all ages enjoy piecing together jigsaw puzzles as a more leisurely activity, others take it at a much more serious and competitive level. Speed puzzling is a competition where everyone is given the exact same puzzle and individuals, duos or teams work together to complete it the fastest. Last month, USA Jigsaw Nationals brought together puzzle lovers across the country to Atlanta to compete. Portlander Rob Shields was one of the attendees. He is a speed puzzling enthusiast as well as the host of “Piece Talks,” a speed puzzling podcast. He joins us to share more on what he saw at the nationals and what makes speed puzzling so appealing.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The sale of jigsaw puzzles skyrocketed over the course of the pandemic as many people turned to the pastime for comfort and distraction. But there is another way to approach puzzles. Speed puzzlers as individuals or teams compete against each other to see who can fit the pieces together fastest.
The USA Jigsaw Nationals last month brought together puzzle lovers from all across the country. Portlander Rob Shields was one of the attendees. He is a speed puzzling enthusiast as well as the host of the podcast “Piece Talks.” That is P I E C E. Rob Shields joins us now. It’s great to have you on. Think Out Loud.
Rob Shields: I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Can you describe what a competitive puzzling competition looks like?
Shields: Yeah, absolutely. So the basic idea is you get a bunch of people in the room. Everybody gets the same puzzle. Usually the puzzle’s not visible, so it’s in some sort of bag you can’t see through. Somebody starts a timer and says go, and everybody takes the puzzle out of the bag, and the goal is to be the first one to have that puzzle in front of you fully assembled.
Miller: So the puzzle is still in a box, sealed up, when you start?
Shields: It depends on the competition, but it is definitely in a box. It used to be at the national and world competitions that it was also sealed in plastic. And part of the strategy would be, can you get through that plastic wrap pretty quickly?
Miller: Do you have sharp fingernails just for that purpose?
Shields: Yeah, there’s a maneuver called the “Superman move.” It’s not necessary anymore and I’ll tell you why in a second. But you basically put the box up against your chest and then you rip your fingers across the back of the box really fast because the plastic is very light and it gives way pretty quickly. That gets you beyond the plastic wrap really fast without having to have sharp objects, or using your nails or anything like that.
Miller: The Superman?
Shields: The Superman.
Miller: OK, [laughs] but that’s no longer necessary because the plastic has been removed, but it’s still in the box. Wait, so that means that even before you can start putting the puzzle together, you have to turn all the pieces right side up. When I’ve done puzzles, that can take me an hour just to put the pieces right side up.
Shields: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Just real quick, that plastic isn’t there anymore because one of the major sponsors, Ravensburger, who does a lot of the competition globally, moved from using a plastic wrap to little plastic tabs for environmental reasons. Those things you can’t actually get through in a reasonable amount of time. So now, they just cut those seals for you. Otherwise, it’s still in a box. And inside that box is a bag with the pieces in it, so there’s still another plastic bag you have to get through.
Miller: Are you very fast at turning them over?
Shields: I am OK at turning them over, but usually what you’re doing is that you’ll take the puzzle out of the bag, you’ll dump it onto the table or whatever surface. And then as you said, you’re then flipping and often sorting something out at the same time. I would say a typical amount of time is something like one minute per 100 pieces, but that means that for a 500 piece puzzle, which is usually what people are doing in competition for individuals, it takes about five minutes to get through that. World-class people are doing it pretty consistently around two-and-a-half minutes.
Miller: Turning every piece over in two-and-a-half minutes. But it’s not just turning over, it’s also sorting a little bit as they go?
Shields: That’s correct. So one of the things that you often want to do as you’re flipping it over is pull something out that catches your eye that you think you’ll want to work on. Often that’s going to be the edge of the puzzle because edges are easy to spot, especially when they’re upside down. And they are great things to work on if you need to get started. Putting the edge together gives you a boundary in which the puzzle is. So there’s a lot of reasons you might choose that, but usually you’re looking at something.
Miller: Do most people fill in the hole outside first? That seems like a pretty standard thing for non-competitive puzzlers, I know.
Shields: So, ultimately, the world of competitive jigsaw puzzling at the highest levels is about information management. Sometimes, the edges are exactly the kind of thing you want to pull out because they have a lot of information in them, right? There are areas where you can see how they relate to other parts of the puzzle, but also they define the boundary of the puzzle for you. Other times, the edge is maybe a solid color and putting a solid color together doesn’t have any hints as to how it should go together. So you might pull the edges out and then set them aside cause you actually need the rest of the puzzle to help give you hints as to how the edge goes together. So it depends on what the puzzle you’re working on is.
Miller: Puzzles can vary a great deal in terms of the challenge based on what the picture is and how varied the pictures, how the contrast is. I’ve actually heard that some puzzles are just like there’s no picture whatsoever. Can competitions involve images that challenging, where basically there is no image?
Shields: That is rare. The world of competitive jigsaw puzzling, as you might guess, is fairly new. We’re exploring a wide variety of competition forms. So I would say it’s not out of the question, but it’s not typical. Usually, you want an image that most people who are competing are going to be able to make some sort of sense out of and have a good time putting together.
But, there’s a competition coming up here, it’s going to be in Germany at the beginning of May. It’s called the World Series of Jigsaw Puzzling, the Speed Puzzling World Series, and they have six different kinds of puzzles that the world’s best jigsaw puzzlers are going to put together over the course of two days. Some of them are just a gradient going from one end to the other. So it just starts in one color and ends in another color, and there’s nothing else to it. So there are definitely a lot of ways of approaching that kind of competition.
Miller: How did you get into competitive puzzling?
Shields: At the end of the pandemic, when, as you said, puzzles were hard to get because everybody was doing them, we needed something to keep us occupied...
Miller: They were like the recreational version of toilet paper for a little bit.
Shields: Yeah.
Miller: The supply chains could not keep up with people’s demand for the products.
Shields: It was crazy, absolutely. But my wife and I were reading a book by A.J. Jacobs called “The Puzzler.” In that book, he outlines different kinds of puzzles – one per chapter – and we got to the chapter about competitive jigsaw puzzling, which we did not know was a thing. He talks about his experience at the 2019 World Championships, which was the first year the World Championships had run. And we were sort of mind blown by the whole thing. We did some quick internet searching…
Miller: Who is we?
Shields: My wife and I.
Miller: OK.
Shields: Yeah, we did some quick internet searching. This was in September 2022. Found that in October there was the first U.S. national competition in San Jose, and we were like, well, let’s give it a try. It captured our imagination. So we went about figuring out what strategies might work, and doing some practices, and then went down and competed and got trounced but had a great time. The community of competitive jigsaw puzzlers is beautiful. They’re amazing people, welcoming. So we just kind of got dragged in mostly from the peripheral parts of it. And that’s what made us up to this day, continue to be passionate about it.
Miller: When I first heard about competitive puzzling, I thought that people have taken this thing … that many people do because they find it soothing, relaxing, sort of meditative because it’s focused on like, wait, where is that little bit of green with a little bit of yellow, almost like in a trance.
Shields: Yeah.
Miller: But somehow a kind of mental vacation from the rest of the world. People took this thing and then they turned it into a panic-inducing activity [laughter]. At least that’s what went through my mind when I heard about looking at a clock. A clock is ticking and the people next to you are trying to do it faster than you are. Am I right that what could be soothing has been turned into anxiety?
Shields: I mean, it is definitely true that one of the things I have discovered about competitive jigsaw puzzling is that it is as much a mind game as it is any other thing. The world-class competitive jigsaw puzzlers I’ve talked to talk about how hard it is when they’re doing an individual puzzle to get through the chatter in their brain, to deal with the stress.
So that is definitely a part of it. But much like you can go jogging for fun or you can do a marathon for competitive reasons, there’s no one forcing you to engage in jigsaw puzzling in a competitive way or jigsaw puzzling in a competitive way. A lot of people who turn into competitive jigsaw puzzlers find it hard to turn back into just what we call slow puzzling … but slow, not in a pejorative way.
Miller: Can you enjoy the purity of the activity at this point, or anytime you open a puzzle, even if you’re by yourself, do you feel a clock in your head?
Shields: Absolutely the latter, yeah. And just to be really clear, I am more of a puzzle enthusiast than a hardcore competitor. I’m never gonna win anything.
Miller: Why not? What separates someone like you, who I imagine is way faster than most of us at putting a puzzle together, from the people who it seems you’re saying are way faster than you?
Shields: A lot of that has to do with innate skill. Nobody was practicing to be a competitive jigsaw puzzler up until four or five years ago. So it’s the people who had that combination of passion, focus and innate skills who became world-class competitive jigsaw puzzlers now. Now, there’s a whole new world of people who are like, I actually want to try this as a thing I’m going to practice for a while.
So people are engaging with it as a sort of competition first. But a lot of those core capabilities that people have that make them world-class puzzlers, I don’t have, including a lifelong passion for doing jigsaw puzzles continuously. There’s something to be said that if you were just compelled to go out and run every day, you’d be a better runner than somebody who decides they’re going to run once a month.
Miller: Leila Jordan, a writer from LA, had a really fun article about competitive puzzling, the championship last month that you went to. She competed for the first time and she wrote this:
“An hour and 20 minutes later,” meaning after it started, “my puzzle is finally done. I feel exhausted. My whole body aches, from my lower back to my shoulders. The room suddenly feels hot. I fan myself with my scorecard for a while, trying to calm down. My fingernails are tinted from the blue jigsaw cardboard.”
Does this ring true to you? Are you drained after a puzzle?
Shields: Absolutely, yeah. It is a classic vision of a jigsaw puzzler that is a little old lady sitting at a table, putting together a puzzle over the course of a week. This is not that at all. World-class competitive jigsaw puzzlers are putting together a puzzle that might take a regular person a week to do sort of intermittent puzzling activity. They’re doing it in 40, 30, in some cases, upper 20 minutes for a 500-piece puzzle.
That kind of work takes all of your brain. It takes a lot of your body. It is as much an effort as anything else that really just drags every part of you into it. In some ways, it’s dragging more parts of you into it than a lot of other things. Crossword probably isn’t dragging you into it physically, but there’s very much a physical component to competitive jigsaw puzzling.
Miller: In that same Guardian piece, a puzzler said that she does core exercises to prevent lower back strain. Do you have a physical training regimen for competitive puzzling?
Shields: Well, again, I’m not the one who’s ever going to be winning anything.
Miller: So you don’t need to do crunches for this?
Shields: But it is definitely true that people at the top tier do consider core training as part of the effort, because often what you’re doing is you’re leaning over some table for 30, 40, in the case of teams, an hour, two hours, even longer. So that is one way of getting competitive advantage, right? Ultimately, because this is now a competition that’s really starting to eke out really high levels of performance, people are putting their all into it. So they’re looking for every advantage to get those few seconds difference.
Miller: In general, do you think age makes a difference?
Shields: Absolutely, yeah. And that’s unfortunate to me as an older individual. It is clear that the sweet spot for extremely competitive people is people generally in college, that college age, so sort of early 20s … Again, we’re sort of moving away from the concept of little old ladies doing puzzles to primarily young women in their 20s, young men. And, as with the competitive Rubik’s Cube community, we’re starting to see maybe the first inclinations that young boys may actually the ones who are going to be most performing at this. But there’s something about fresh brains, fast fingers, sharp eyes and the time that it takes to really focus on something that is a key way of driving who’s on top.
Miller: Have you found that the skills of competitive puzzling – pattern recognition, a keen eye to subtle details – [are] now showing up in other parts of your life?
Shields: I don’t find that myself. Generally, what happens is that people who are good at those capabilities to begin with are the ones who actually can execute on that. So, I’ve yet to – not for lack of trying, not for desperate lack of trying – figure out how to create that kind of better acuity, that memorization that is required to sort of propel you to the top.
Miller: So far, you haven’t achieved that.
Shields: So far, I haven’t achieved it. Yeah, not giving up though.
Miller: What is the Portland puzzling scene like? We have just about a minute left. And also, if folks do want to start competitive puzzling, what advice do you have for them?
Shields: That’s a lot for a minute.
Miller: OK, you can do it though.
Shields: The Portland puzzling scene is amazing. There’s a competition every Tuesday. If you Google Portland Puzzle Company, they have a competition for teams in Portland every Tuesday which you can join. There’s virtual puzzling on speed puzzling.com if you’re not in Portland. And the Oregon Jigsaw Puzzle Association has a list of all competitions going on in the state.
Miller: That was 29 seconds.
Shields: Yeah, nailed it.
Miller: [Laughter] Rob Shields, it was great talking to you. Thanks so much.
Shields: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Rob Shields is a speed puzzling enthusiast and the host of the “Piece Talks” podcast, which in case you missed the beginning, is spelled P I E C E.
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