Listen With Others

I have just learnt that A Kind Of Magic is a song by Queen. That isn’t the only thing I have learnt today as I am pretty good at poker dice but have never played poker. Nor has the other Numpty. That only added to the complexity of this puzzle for us. It was indeed verging on a killer. The frustration of the three-monthly numericals comes from the fact that when we reach a dead end, we have to backtrack so far – usually almost to the start – and there wasn’t even any Listener setter tipply stuff in this one – just poker rules and numbers and suits.

The other Numpty decided that a real pack of cards was essential for this and set up a super-sized grid with all the data around the margins. My role was to provide the TLC and get out of cursing range as  attempt after attempt failed to work.

I kept a photographic record of each of the stages so that some of the working rows and columns could be repeated without a complete return to the start. I have to wonder how many solvers simply took out their pencil and used their mental faculties to solve this. It was certainly easier with the real cards in our hands.

We were perhaps lucky that those five cards whose locations gave us the title to be optionally written below the grid slotted into place fairly quickly and with FI MG CI AN AK and OD and the assumption that the 1-letter and 2-letter words were going to be A and OF, A KIND OF MAGIC emerged. That sort of confirmed the position of those cards too.

We were told which of the two players won each round, and had to learn, for example, that three of a kind would win over a flush, so we laboriously worked through possibilities until, with disbelief and immense relief, we had a fit. Then came the laborious double checking. Of course, we were amazed that gwizardry was able to be sure that this was a unique solution (well, we hope it was!) and thank him/her for a tough work out.