Tips and Tricks: Sudoku Lesson 1.2 Round-Up

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Sudoku Homework Walkthrough, 1.2

Tips and Tricks: Sudoku Lesson 1.2 Round-Up

On the right you'll find the same Sudoku Puzzle #1005 you found in Lesson 1.2, with four yellow squares added with the relevant numbers. Haven't read Sudoku Lesson 1.2? Didn't print out the game board? Would you like to learn about Sudoku Eggs? Before proceeding, go back and check it out here:

How to Play Sudoku: Tips and Tricks, Lesson 1.2

If you reminded yourself to complete a full Sudoku Sweep (see Sudoku Lesson 1.1) after every successful step, you should now begin to make some progress. The next sweep should help you uncover another two numbers, and the following sweep should add three more numbers to your total without forcing you to pull a muscle. Let's see what our Sudoku Puzzle #1005 looks like now:

The black circled numbers indicate the first Sudoku sweeping round; the blue numbers were found during the second Sudoku sweep.

The solution we are posting here is not the most elegant solution; it is the most straight forward. We solved for the original Sudoku eggs, and then completed two Sudoku sweeps without searching for additional Sudoku eggs. However, there are several. If you felt confident enough with your Counting Your Sudoku Eggs skills to follow them through on every step, then we salute you. In later lessons on this site, you will find our solutions relying more and more on the Sudoku Egg method; when that happens, you will be a step ahead of everybody else.

Sudoku Homework 1.2: Proceeding with Sudoku Sweeps

This is the ground-level, the foundation of our Sudoku strategy. Learning the basics will help you solve any Sudoku puzzle, however difficult.

Sudoku sweeps and Counting Your Sudoku eggs - at first these will feel like two different techniques. Soon, however, you will use them both interchangeably without flinching. As you become comfortable with these early methods, we suspect that you will learn to rely on Counting Sudoku Eggs more and more. This is a good thing. Just remember this: when you reach the most advanced puzzles, the Sudoku Sweep will help you keep your Eggs organized without requiring you to muddy up the paper of your Sudoku puzzle. It will remove all the guess work from your gaming.

As usual we separated the following sweeps by color, so take a look to the right. How are you doing? If you have used our method, relying on the basic Sudoku sweep, your board probably looks like ours does. Perhaps we should try to Count Sudoku Eggs instead of attempting another Sudoku sweep. Without much effort, we can identify some potentially attractive Sudoku Eggs. The ninth column has only a single remaining empty square, so let's fill it with a 4. Afterward, the center-right 3x3 box will also have only a single empty square, giving us another easy solution: the number 3.

Now take a look at the second row: two empties remain (4 and 5) and we can easily solve them if we sweep the board for those numbers. Additionally, the center-middle 3x3 box has two empties in a single column (3 and 9). Even though we cannot solve those squares yet, we can use them to sweep the board, allowing us to solve a square in the top-middle 3x3 box (9); and thus another square at the bottom of the column, in the bottom-center 3x3 box (2).

Time Out.

What do you say? You're a short, down-hill jog to the end, aren't you? The question is rhetorical, but the answer is yes. You are nearly done. Perhaps you felt the road was bumpier than the last lesson's path. There's no shame in repeating this lesson. One exercise you might try is this: return to the original lesson and print out a new Sudoku Puzzle #1005. Pretend we didn't find those original eggs. Instead, focus on the seventh column. In that column, there are four empty squares (1,2,7,9). Using the Count Your Sudoku Egg method, you should be able to solve for one of those squares immediately. In the end, your solution will be the same as ours (see below), but your path will look somewhat different. At any rate, regardless of the road you chose, we are providing you with a clean, beauteous solution to Lesson 1.2, Sudoku Puzzle #1005. Where is it, you ask?

The Power of the Sudoku Egg

Right here. Done and done. You're probably feeling pretty good about yourself. Well, you should. Maybe you're asking yourself, "What does Sudoku Tips and Tricks want me to do next?"

Lesson 1.3 will develop the power of the Sudoku Egg. Learning how to manipulate those Eggs into potential solutions will bring you into the higher realm of Sudoku puzzling. Successfully solving Sudoku Lesson 1.3 will earn you some status, too. White Belt no longer. Yellow Belt you shall be.