Cryptic crossword king wins over a new generation of puzzlers (2024)

Traditionally, the knack of solving cryptic crosswords was learnt at a grandparent’s knee. Without the guidance of an experienced solver, beginners attempting the arcane puzzles often give up in a rage.

The widespread frustration with such crosswords has become the source of one man’s success after his videos explaining cryptic clues attracted more than 300,000 followers.

Angas Tiernan, 37, from Melbourne, now counts the lexicographer Susie Dent and the comedian Jon Richardson among the followers of his Instagram account devoted to explaining one clue a day.

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Angas Tiernan’s engaging explanations have increased in popularity since he uploaded his first video on YouTube in April

Solvers can attempt a daily clue themselves on his Minute Cryptic website and either rejoice in success or learn the secret by watching Tiernan’s explanation video afterwards.

Thursday’s puzzle, “Butcher store hosting university courses”, was attempted by 64,000 people. The solution, they learnt yesterday, was “routes”. Tiernan explained that the clue was asking people to find a synonym for “courses” made up of letters from “store” and the letter U from “university”.

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Tiernan’s engaging explanations, delivered in a broad Australian accent, have quickly increased in popularity since he uploaded his first video on YouTube on April 28. The bulk of his audience are from the UK and America and include Taika Waititi, the Kiwi film director behind two of Marvel’s Thor films and the Oscar-winning drama Jojo Rabbit.

Tiernan, whose day job is with an Australian electricity company, had always regarded cryptic crosswords as “weird and inaccessible” until the pandemic lockdowns, when he watched long-form YouTube videos of someone solving a complete puzzle. “It was The Times Cryptic Crossword, actually,” he said. “Through absorption, through watching someone else solve, I was able to pick it up.”

Sunday Times clue writing contest 2027: Ptarmigan

He realised that while solvers were uploading long videos, no one was regularly posting bite-size videos to explain single clues. He decided to post a video on YouTube every other day discussing individual clues, believing he could sustain that for a year even if the venture proved a flop. After two weeks he had amassed fewer than 20 followers. “I got no traction at all,” he said. “Then I thought maybe I should try TikTok.”

He posted videos daily for nine days with little success but then “all of a sudden, the algorithm kicked in” and his work began appearing in people’s video feeds. He gained 1,500 followers overnight, rising to 22,000 a fortnight later. On May 31, he chanced his arm on Instagram.

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He remembers going out for dinner with his mother and sister and telling them with excitement that he had gained 100 followers in a day. Would it follow the same pattern as TikTok? “Over the next few days it was 20,000 and in a fortnight it was 100,000.”

He now has 260,000 followers on Instagram, 37,000 on TikTok and 11,000 on YouTube. Less than a week after his Instagram following exploded he launched the Minute Cryptic game with the clue: “Very little time (6).” The solution was a reference to the website’s name: minute can mean “very little” or the unit of time.

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The lexicographer and Countdown stalwart Susie Dent is among the followers of Tiernan’s Instagram account

Tiernan said he was inspired by the addictiveness of Wordle, the word-guessing game that offers one puzzle a day. He said Minute Cryptic’s success came from a positive feedback loop. People who liked his crossword tips videos would want to try his game and share their successes on social media. Their friends would then try the game and, if they were unsuccessful, could watch his videos to learn how to solve the puzzle.

Tiernan said he had learnt the hard way that there was no point in creating a good tech product if there was no built-in audience. His biggest entrepreneurial failure was to build a fashion search engine designed to learn a person’s taste and show them clothes that fit their budget. The AI tool would ask users to pick one of three pictures (or reject them all) and show them further sets of three until it was ready to start showing clothes that fit their preferences. “We had 16,000 people on the website but what I didn’t do was think, ‘How do I grow this?’ I had no way to market it to anyone.”

Tiernan’s Instagram fame does not pay the bills, however. He hopes to build his audience on YouTube, which shares advertising revenues with content creators. His current following of 11,000 earns him “a few thousand dollars a month”, which is enough to cover his costs.

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The entrepreneur, whose father is a retired anaesthetist and whose mother is a retired historian, said he owed some of his success to his father. He had been tinkering with idea of crosswords when his father said to him at Christmas: “When are you going to start posting YouTube videos about cryptic crosswords?”

Tiernan recalled that he didn’t answer the question. “I thought, ‘I’m going to have something to show you in a few months’.”

Cryptic crossword king wins over a new generation of puzzlers (2024)
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