A basic clinic is concluding  for those wishing to make assembling candidates an entertaining task. It is Sysudoku basic on Will Shortz’ Hard Sudoku v.1.  The solution detailed this week is Beware! Very Challenging 185.

Here is the basic trace to within a few obvious moves of the solution.

The bypass grid shows what clues and closed subsets of candidates can be identified before any other candidates are sought.

The box marked grid shows the strongly linked pairs of candidates, the ones most affecting  the placement of clues and other candidates.

Beware 185 is solved after five lines are marked. The challenge for all of these puzzles is in the bypass.

Beyond that, there’s nothing hard about Hard Sudoku v.1.

The solution of one last Hard Sudoku review puzzle, Beware 195, will be traced out next week. Try for a bypass solution.

The next post also begins a series of posts reporting on update results on earlier reviews. It is time to apply seven years of Sudoku experience to the whole blog. The series begins with KrazyDad Insane collection. Six of the review puzzles have now been updated, the entire series running from 7/16/2013 to 9/10/2012. It’s easy to pull them up with the monthly archive list to your right.