How fast can you put together a jigsaw puzzle? Odds are, for most people, not as fast as Gail McCormick.
McCormick, a State College resident, won the Pennsylvania Speed Puzzling Championship in August, and beginning Sept. 18 she will be competing at the 2024 World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship in Valladolid, Spain.
“My main goal is to just make it to the final round. There’s some pretty stiff competition in my preliminary rounds, so if I can make it to the finals I’ll be happy,” McCormick said. “I have some goals beyond that but I don’t know how realistic they are. But also just meeting other puzzlers and competing at such a high level is exciting in itself.”
The world championship runs through Sept. 22 and will be livestreamed on the World Jigsaw Federation’s YouTube Channel.
McCormick has always enjoyed puzzles, but first became interested in competitive speed puzzling when she followed the Instagram account SarahDoesPuzzles. Her interest grew during the COVID-19 pandemic as speedpuzzling.com offered competitions via Zoom.
“Tthey mail you a puzzle, so everyone gets the same puzzle,” McCormick explained. “We don’t open it. We don’t know what it is. It’s obscured. And so we all log into the same Zoom meeting and he counts us down and we see it at the same time and then we race. On Zoom, you’re on mute and you just show your timer when you’re done and if he needs to check the recording he can.”
For online and in-person competitions, the biggest challenge is not knowing what kind of puzzle to expect, McCormick said.
“Some puzzles are just inherently faster than others and some people are better at certain types of puzzles than others,” she said. “That’s part of my nerves going into worlds is I don’t know what I’m going to get. It might be a nature puzzle that’s just a field of flowers and it’s a mess and it’s going to be slow for everyone. Or it could be lots of puppies and lots of fur and that’s challenging. Or it could be a photo; it could be an illustration. So there’s a lot of unknowns there, so preparing for all kinds of puzzles is one of the challenges. And on the easier puzzles there’s just the element of moving quickly.”
After participating in her first Zoom competitions in 2021, McCormick then took a long break until Centre Region Parks and Recreation offered a team jigsaw puzzle competition in 2023, which McCormick’s team won.
Since then, she’s been doing monthly 500-piece virtual competitions through speedpuzzling.com, where she is a “black belt” All-Star with the seventh-best percentile ranking. In the state championship, which was hosted by speedpuzzling.com, McCormick’s winning time was 48:12.
“[The size of the competition] was modest, so I don’t know how much I can brag about it, but I am indeed the PA state champ,” she said.
McCormick has also participated in regional and national in-person competitions, where she competes individually, in a pair and with a team.
At the USA Jigsaw Nationals in March in San Diego, she finished 32nd individually with a time of 52:34, but with her partner in pairs competition finished 13th (1:27:40) and her team took eighth (2:21:24). At the World Championship, she will compete in pairs with a partner from New Jersey, with whom she has puzzled before, and in the team competition with people she knows through the puzzling community.
That community is one of the things McCormick enjoys most about speed puzzling.
“There’s the adrenaline rush, especially when you do pairs and teams,” McCormick said. “There’s kind of this community building aspect and you really have to communicate with your partner and your team. Really, it’s the community that keeps me coming back. I’ve really enjoyed meeting other puzzlers and, even though it’s competitive, it’s such a supportive community.
“I roughly know where I fall. I’m never going to be the best in the U.S., but I’m not bad. When someone else I know who’s probably a friend of mine at this point has a really good day and beats me, I might be a little sad but I’m also very excited for them. And everyone in the community is like that, so it’s really supportive and very unique in my life.”
McCormick, who works in the Penn State Eberly College of Science communications office, is also sharing her love of puzzling — competitive and otherwise — with the local community.
She recently started local puzzle swaps with friend and fellow enthusiast Christina Bennett of Milesburg. Participants meet in a Walmart parking lot, where they have permission to hold their gatherings, but McCormick and Bennett are hoping to find an indoor venue to continue the swaps during the colder weather months.
McCormick is also looking to start up “low-key competitions” for speed puzzling at a local brewery and casual meet-ups to collectively work on a puzzle.
“Maybe we do a 2,000 or 3,000 [piece]. Let’s see if we could do that, or maybe it would just be small puzzles so people can get to know each other better,” she said. “I know there’s puzzlers in the community even if they’re not speed puzzlers.”
To learn more about local puzzle swaps and other potential events, visit linktr.ee/HappyValleyPuzzles.
As one might imagine, McCormick has plenty of puzzles to occupy her at home. She keeps track of them in a spreadsheet and they currently number about 900 — with more than 600 in the “to-do” pile. Others she keeps to do again, and the rest she’s ready to part with.
“It seems crazy, but I’ve done more than 400 puzzles this year alone, which is a lot for me, too,” she said. “So when you think about it that way, it’s like, oh, it’s maybe a year or two of puzzles, It’s constant in and out. But I need to do some purging when I get back. It’s a little much. I’m running out of storage space.”
