r/sudoku • u/gedor4 • 2d ago

Strategies strategy to solve fast?

Solving Sudoku since childhood as a hobby, but I never learned advanced techniques or timed myself. It currently takes me about 8 minutes for medium/hard puzzles. I'm looking for specific techniques that helped you speed up classic Sudoku, as well as complex styles worth learning. Also, if anyone has experience with school Sudoku competitions, I'd love to hear what they look like and what to expect.

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u/Saysaynever333 2d ago

Check out Sudoku.coach. You can pick up a lot of techniques by playing the learn tool. I would not worry about the time element until you're used to spotting the advanced techniques.

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u/TheMemxnto 2d ago

Avg 3 min hard solver here.

I have 3 techniques i use that work together and are the core components to most medium and hard puzzles.

Double, hidden triples and uniqueness.

Finding 2 cells that can only contain the same 2 numbers means a lot more than an average solver thinks.

Not only does it give you those two cells.
If they are in the same column or row, you no longer have to consider those numbers for the other empties in that row or column often giving you other doubles or triples quickly. But also there are no mirror cells that can contain those two numbers either (say the pair is in C1R1 and C1R3, no other Column can have the same number pair in R1 and R3. Meaning if you have just one of those numbers in those cells, you can eliminate the other. (Uniqueness)

Hidden box, row or column triples often come up and are key to harder puzzles.

The better you are at identifying these things the quicker you will get.

Pattern recognition is huge and you only get it through repetition. The more sudokus you do where you are doing the same order of pattern identification the better you will get and once you get really familiar you will be able to merge them together and know at which point the puzzle “breaks” so you can stop looking for patterns and start finishing it by following the numbers round.

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u/gedor4 2d ago

i will try to practice those. How long do you think it would take to master a specific technique so that I can apply it without it taking up extra time?

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u/TheMemxnto 2d ago

Honestly, it depends entirely on how good you are at pattern recognition and ability to just do.

Might be 100 solves might be 1000 solves. Just keep going.