Cal Brennan
Strategy & Speedrun Editor · @cal.b
Anagrams, 7 Little Words, the daily Jumble. If a puzzle can be solved in under three minutes, Cal has done it on the first try and then written the algorithm that does it faster.
Cal writes the strategy column and builds the solver tools. The Jumble Solver that the column links to is his; he wrote the first version in a weekend in 2023 because he couldn’t find an anagram engine that handled scrabble-tile weighting correctly, and the dictionary he uses is one he annotated by hand.
His 7 Little Words review introduces the tile-count-first method, which is the single most useful piece of strategy advice on the site if you measure usefulness in solve-time reduction. He also runs the unofficial “sub-three” Discord, where about forty puzzle nerds try to finish a daily 7 Little Words in under three minutes. Most of them fail. Cal mostly doesn’t.
i Off-duty
Plays competitive Scrabble. Used to compete in cube speedruns, which he says he gave up but the magazine’s Slack still occasionally finds a Rubik’s cube on his desk. Maintains a public list of every typo in Word Freak.