This post traces basic solving on the first of three Labor Day puzzles by Dave Green.  The series is an opportunity to highlight the efficient and uncluttered basic level Sudoku solving with the slink marking bypass.

In keeping with the adoption of the slink marking bypass into Sysudoku basic solving, I’m the tour guide on three in a row that showed up in my Beacon Journal just before Labor Day, from King Features, Inc.  Dave Green gets my Oscar for basic level puzzles every year.  If you haven’t asked for free ©PowerPoint and ©Word  templates, and don’t have your own,  look over the Tools page and send an email request for them.  Try out the puzzle template by dragging in last posts grid of Green’s 4-star of 9/2/16, and filling it as you read the bypass trace.  The grid with the completed bypass is below.  Account for every event in the bypass.  The grid may help.

The bypass leaves the grid with only 28 blank cells, and hopefully, it leaves you with an added source of adventure for basic solving.

From here, slink marking is easy and line marking easier than it would have been.

By its nature, the bypass can be done on the original copy of the puzzle.

In this case, there was no line marking, just a deep collapse.

I said deep, not steep.  My traces are sometimes described as too complicated.  Landscapes are complicated because nature is complicated. Sudoku solving, taken all together, is complicated.  I take it as a compliment.

For an immediate follow up, try to duplicate next week’s bypass trace on Green’s Saturday 9/03/16 4-star.  I call the NSEW box patterns wells.  Before starting, I saw clues in two of them, while looking for naked pairs in all four of them.  That’s the way to react to a well, isn’t it?