Hard One Word Wonder

I'm getting a headache trying to read this...

*cry*

I sure hope the puzzle creator is here for a grain of salt!

[3] Yes I am...

Read the (horse) names, see if you come up with something.

too much info, difficult to read, extremely confusing. pass on this one.

Nice puzzle one I put my blinders on:)

You don't need the bottom narrative to solve puzzle.

OUCH!

Very hard solve.

Better to guess.

[6] You don't need it, but it does contain a few clues.

a little more FMHG, please!

Thanks for the effort, BigSlick, but I feel you buried the actual puzzle in a mass of extraneous info. Pretty much took all the fun out of it.

I feel that several of the unfeatured puzzles are a lot more valid than this one.

Again though, the effort is appreciated and the theme is interesting.

Read the names of the horses in order - that is the key. It should tell you how to proceed.

It's hard when you know 0 about horse racing. And it's very hard to read.

Do I have to understand the chart to do this puzzle? Have to admit I've never been to a horse race.

Edit: I'm not complaining, I just need to know if I need to go learn something new from Wiki!

I've figured out that 3 of the columns seem relevant, but I can't figure out how to combine them / used seed numbers in the relevant names. I came up with a mess of letters that couldn't be anagrammed.

[12], [13] All you really need to know is that "PP" = "Post Position" and "Fin" = "Finish". The numbers M-N at each distance is the position of the horse in the race followed by the lengths they are ahead of the next horse. So, "8-1" means that horse is in 8th place and is 1 length ahead of the 9th place horse.

Edit: and now perhaps, you can put some of the horse's names together with this info to get you started; at least I hope so!

[14] Yes, you are correct on the 3 columns

I'm close but I have six letters that help and six that don't. :(

I guess I should also say that the 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 are the positions at 1/4 mile, half mile, and 3/4 mile. The times for the lead horse at each of these distances is known as the "fractions"

guessed that and still didn't see the glue (no pun intended)

[14] If you do it in the correct order, you won't need to anagram.

It may (OK it will) help if you know what "Equus" means - and if you Google it, it isn't the play.

If you're a puzzle solver and don't know what "equus" refers to.... we're taking away your card. ;)

[22] So martin, do you have the answer yet, or are you still stuck on 6 bad letters?

Still stuck on em. I got 12, the first 6 anagram to a related word, but the final 6 don't do anything :) :)

[24] you shouldn't need to anagram; TG me what you have if you want to.

I think I just don't get how to translate GFIEO into real directions, and that's just life. Sometimes you just don't get how to solve the puzzle. I mean, [24] and I might be on the same track (again, sorry... bad puns), but the fact that I can't even anagram it means I'm not getting the right letters, let alone in the right order.

I finally found the right permutation that yielded the answer.

I think the clues were vague enough to be confusing. Needing to know specific information made this worse.

So you want to share, [27]? :)

Yeh, you could interpret the directions many ways. I found the almost-right answer that needed to be anagrammed.

[26] Well, I am guessing you have the correct 3 columns; so using the number you have in the first column of numbers, "GF" to the other column of numbers and find the matching number representing the order (that was supposed to be the "IEO". Now use the next 2 horse names (slur the first one a bit) to get your Tanga Number. Does that help?

Well I have to give up for the night, maybe I'll try in the morning. At this rate, that'll still be top 100. :)

You solved this puzzle in 31 seconds and were the 23rd Tanga member to solve it. You earned 88 points for solving this.

First time I've ever made a blind guess and gotten it right.
Guessed from the background.

The more hints you give Slick, the more lost I get.

grr

wow... puzzle creator has pretty much spelled it out... and yet I still have no clue. There is waaaaaay too much going on in the image for me to even focus on anything.

Guessing really is the way to go on this one...

[36] ah... and how many single words are there? couldn't be that many. now where did I put my dictionary? lol

Finally guessed it... I already knew how to read past performance sheets, but that didn't help with the solving :(

salt: Do some matching of columns

[36] Thanks, Verve! Without that advice, I was complete toast!

Salt: Use the columns PP, Fin, and Horse. Everything else is irrelevant.

holy crap that was insane. I've got a head ache.

[35] Agreed. I solved more by brute force and luck than by interpreting the clues that the horses names are meant to suggest. The maker seems to think these names are helpful, but it seems few are catching the meaning even with the foreknowledge that the names are (supposedly) clues.

See [40].

By the way, a race horse's name can actually be up to 18 characters.

I like when I can get up in the morning and be in the top 100.

[44] Well see, at least I made *somebody* happy!

Sorry to all who found this one painful. If it makes anyone feel better (which I doubt it will :-) I still haven't figured out the crypto or the easy OWW. I thought there were enough clues in the horse names to figure things out, but I obviously was wrong. Looking back at it, I should have changed a couple of names because there appears to be a few common disconnects that people are having (but changing the names would throw off the Tanga Numbering). I will throw some more salt out here in a minute or two...

Still #65 at 13 hours! I'm not so sad that I couldn't get on last night now.

Took my 3rd interpretation of the instructions to get the right one, but once I had 4 letters the correct way, I knew I had it.

OK, see [40] - that helps a lot. I was hoping I had enough clues as to what to avoid in the puzzle (I was hoping that it was obvious that what followed "Redbaron" & "Herringbone" would be understood as red herrings).

Anyway, it appears the biggest problem a lot of people are having is how to connect the pieces. If you are getting a result of "ifhisneoleeb" then you are not applying the link between the columns. When making the puzzle, I actually tried to make that string a meaningful message that would clue you in that something was wrong (I did manage to do that with the Jockey names) but it was too hard to get it to work.

Both values in the "Fin" column are significant. One is the link, the other is the Tanga Number. Again, I *thought* that that would be obvious, since there were two values, but again, I was wrong.

The other (much more minor) thing is to take the horses in the order they are listed, not in PP order. Not really a big deal, 'cause then you would simply need to anagram.

[47] I noticed the "Redbaron" & "Herringbone" names but thought they (and some others) were just puns and humor since most of them stuck out as phrases you might commonly see in a puzzle. I think is was a decently crafted puzzle... but I didn't (and still can't really) see the entry point in the puzzle as it is outlined in your solution. I wouldn't have solved it without a huge brick of salt up side the head. But I can't put all that on you.. sometimes I just don't get it. My only real gripe (as minor as it is, trying not to be "a huge turd") is that the tiny/thin black font over a background image with some dark colors and not muted enough made it very hard to look at all that text for very long. In my opinion the background image was not needed... and it may have hurt more than helped.

Now I have to go find out what the Jockey Names spells out... :)

[48] I went around and around with myself (what fun that was!) about the background image. I originally didn't have one, but thought the plain text was too blaw looking without it. I thought it may also be helpful in some way (I think a few people at least guessed correctly because of it). I did try to fade the background out to make the text easier to read, but I guess I should have made it lighter still.

And, thanks for the constructive criticism - coming from a fellow puzzle maker such as yourself, that really does help.

If you really want to figure out the jockey name message, apply the number into the jockey on the same line as the Fin value; don't go back to the original row.

[48] There, I took the headache-inducing background image out. You're right, it probably didn't add much. At least it should be easier to read now. If anyone coming late cares, the background image was of a horse race.

I ultimately managed to come up with an anagram of the solution. I thought it looked like someone sneezed alphabet soup from his nose, but, fortunately, an anagram solver squeezed the word out of it. 16½ hours after the puzzle opened, I came in at 74th.

Some thoughts:
* I'm not familiar with horse racing forms at all. "PP" was not obvious to me, and nothing at all indicates what "lengths ahead" means. (I could probably have gone off and researched this, but my general lack of knowledge about horse racing meant that the term didn't even appear significant to me.)
* The entry-level clues as outlined in the solution came out sounding much too choppy and pidgin to really sound like they were making much sense if you read them. I understand then intent behind them, sort of, but it's sort of like being given instructions by Tonto. :) The biggest problem with this is that they don't _register_ as instructions and clues because of the choppy nature.

Between the two of these, the solution method just failed to gel (even looking at it now, I'm not sure that what was given would ever actually have occurred to me).

[51] I was going to provide a link to how to read the race results, but unfortunately, I just submitted this puzzle 2 days before it was featured, and I didn't read the TG from renfurdson that it was going to be featured until about 10 minutes before it was posted. By that time, I felt it was easier to just try to spell out what the various things were, especially because it became obvious quickly that people were struggling.

I know what you mean by the name choppiness, but much of it was necessary in order to get the answer out of the names properly, given the parameters of the puzzle. I tried to strike a balance between something that worked to get the answer, and making it close enough to what I was intending as the directions to get you in the right direction. That obviously didn't happen as well as I had hoped. I also wanted the names to sound like they could be actual horse names and not just sentence fragments.

Again, the things I assumed would be more or less obvious and easy to follow certainly didn't turn out that way. For instance, I figured that since both the PP numbers and the Fin order (the first Fin number) both went from 1-13 that it would be "obvious" that that is how to link the two columns together. Well, that was a bad assumption!

Given the feedback, if I was to redo the puzzle, it would probably come out quite a bit different and easier to follow. But constructive criticism is always welcome and will make my next attempts better. At least I didn't get too many comments like "this puzzle just blows!" without telling me why it blows! :-)

I've so far gotten hetodrurgohb and hiioeelmanfs. I'm guessing that's not the correct answer.

BigSlick - I too found the puzzle to be a little too convoluted for my taste, but I admire you for two things you've done with this...(1) you were creative and came up with a different type of puzzle, and (2) you've stuck with this forum for quite some time dropping more and more hints. I look forward to your next puzzle.

[53] Once I figure out how you arrived at those "answers" I will try to point you in the correct direction. Hang on...

[53] Well, I can't figure out how you arrived at "hetodrurgohb" - I can see how you might get "hiioeelebnfs" which is close to "hiioeelmanfs" but off in 2 positions.

So, it looks like you are on the right track as far as where to get the tanga numbers from, but you need to figure out the connection between the PP value and the Fin value pair in order to determine which tanga number to use. You can TG me if you need a bigger push.

[54] Thanks!

[53][56] I think Twench arrived at "hetodrurgohb" because s/he sorted the horse names according to PP value. Twench, go back to the original order, keeping the letters that you got. I think that will work.

[58] Yeah, I ultimately arrived at that same interesting jumble of letters (see [51]). Finding the "correct" order was more of an ordeal than I managed. :)