April’s Genius (No 94) by Puck produced slightly fewer entries than of late, 271 with 21 of them on the first day. The ‘coding’ element involved or perhaps too many bank holiday weekends in the month may have been the reason.

By the way the Guardian made a lot of fuss about correcting the letter count for that clue – when it was pretty obvious what was meant and surely it makes no sense to divide gibberish up into two separate words anyway. I wonder if they’d confused it with the “litmus test” word count (8d), which was a far more unfortunate mistake. It certainly wasted some of my time.

I found it a very satisfying puzzle, demanding but fun, but I wonder what I’d have thought if I’d never stumbled on that Egri Bikaver paragraph online.

I have written EGRI BIKAVER on my sheet so I obviously found it somewhere – don’t ask me where! As for 21, I did the same as John H and bunged the letters in – with F and H adjacent, from crossing answers, it was obvious that K was the omitted letter.

I got CORK before entering PORT (I dithered about PORT for ages – too obvious, I thought) so I was trying to uncork my wines by removing the first letter! A whole Christmas tree lit up when the penny dropped – heads or tails?

I also liked the fact that Cork is a port.

There’s enough of a challenge in the tortuous ‘genius’ format without stooping to such obscurities. One or two new words per crossword is fair game, but I felt these two were a bit below the belt.
I wonder how many correct entries there were?

Very enjoyable puzzle and I liked the C or K and P or T devices very much.