How to win a contest on Steemit – a veteran's walk-through 😉

barcisz (60)in #tutorial • 8 years ago (edited)

A few hours ago I recieved my prize for solving Sentence Unscrambler #28, an edition of a contest organized by @bola. It's my third victory in this contest series (here are the first and the second), so I think it deserves some celebration. I don't know how many victories are required to earn a veteran rank, so treat the title of this post as a joke, not an attempt to sound like a douchebag. 😉

The contest seems to be popular, so maybe there are readers interested in my approach to finding the right (or almost right) answer. And after two victories and one almost-victory in quite a short time I thought I have good reasons to document my process of unscrambling the sentence #28.

All you need is some kind of text editor – as you can see Notepad should do it.

Firstly, I copy-pasted the letters from the post, and above them, I wrote the numbers of letters in the words of the sentence.

The most important letter is the one in upper case. It's the beginning of the sentence and it's the only letter we can be sure where to put from the very beginning – we put it at the very beginning. 😉

We know the number of letters in the first word and we know the letter it begins with. As the previous unscrambled sentence had something to do with Steemit, I decided to try something similar for the upper case S. The five letter word at the beginning could be Steem and my first thought for the next word was power, but of course it hasn't got enough letters. Dollar was another word that could follow Steem, and to fill all the seven blanks in the second word I used the plural form dollars. Then I copied all the letters from the post once again and started removing S, T, E, E, M, D, O, L, L, A, R, S from the copy (it doesn't need them anyway 😉). That way I could quickly go back to the original letters, if I wanted to try something else.

Then I thought that the next two words can be can be. 😉 And the following was quite interesting with its eleven letters. Since steem dollar is a currency, a word transferred came pretty quickly to my mind, as all its letters were available.

Then I tried to read @bola's mind a little and came up with an idea that this sentence could have something to do with their contest – as steem dollars can be transferred to you if you guess the right sentence. And if I had stuck with this idea for too long, the prize of steem dollars could not have been transferred to me. 😉

As you can see I was working on another copy and I was removing the letters in each accordingly.

Things got tough in the second part of the sentence. I realized that the most significant letter was X, as it didn't want to fit into any word that made sense with the rest. Extract? But why? 😝

I thought of something like Bitcurex, but there wasn't any eight letter word. So maybe Bittrex? Yeah, that could fit. My idea for the third word (can) turned out to be a dead end. The second seven letter word could be account and it made sense with Bittrex, but I lacked one C. As you can see I had already started to consider a word any, so I also lacked one N for account. Removing the word can could solve this problems...

I decided to begin with Steem dollars may be transferred and it all fell into place.

Steem dollars may be transferred to any bittrex account turned out to be a correct answer. I enjoyed solving this puzzle, but sometimes I got distracted by Steemit posts anyway and took a few breaks to read them. Maybe that's a good thing, since one of the advices in a Roger von Oech's book on creativity A Whack on the Side of the Head is to take a break. On the side note, this book is filled with interesting puzzles, but it turns out that even taking breaks from solving a puzzle can be helpful in solving it after all. 🙂