NYT Hard Sudoku Walkthrough | May 11, 2026

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello. Let's do the New York Times hard sodoku for May 11th, 2026. There's a link in the description if you'd like to try the puzzle yourself. And I'm going to get started right now. All right, we got 1 2 6 and 9 here. The two ones. Look in putting a one in one of these two vertically. Not seeing anything with ones. In fact, those are the only two ones we have.

[00:00:21]The two um really no help with the two as far as I can tell. I guess in this box two is in one of these two. Yeah, we only have the three twos mark to one of these two since we see it. Uh the six sixes in one of these two so far. Not a lot of help from box one.

[00:00:46]These nines looking putting a nine in one of these two. Um and then wow, this box is just getting a bunch of weird diagonal corner marks. Um, it's interesting.

[00:00:59]Okay. And this box is down to five. Is there any potential for crossings? Maybe the eight. No.

[00:01:05]What about here? The five or the three.

[00:01:07]The three does cross. This three looks in. This three looks up. Oh, and this three looks in. And so, actually, we can place the three in the box. These two threes look down. Putting a three in one of these three. Four digits left in this box. Let's just take a look. We need a four, five, seven, eight. So, this is four, five, seven. This is Oh, this can't be four or five. So, this is seven, eight.

[00:01:28]This can't be five. So, it's four, seven, eight. I think this can be any.

[00:01:33]It does mean the fives in one of these two. This five looks in. Okay.

[00:01:38]Um I think that's all we get for this box.

[00:01:42]Let's move on to the next one. One, three, and five. Already got the one and the three. So, the the threes vertically. Put a three in one of these two.

[00:01:53]All right.

[00:01:55]Um, ones, fives, five looks down, five looks in. That puts a five in one of these two. That points in here with this five. Putting a five in one of these three.

[00:02:10]I'm just looking down here cuz the seven is also not in any of these spots. So, the seven's one of these three. I'm seeing if there's anything more. The eight is eight is placed in this row.

[00:02:22]Not here. Not here. These two eights look down. So, eight is placed.

[00:02:27]All right.

[00:02:30]And these two should be limited. Wow.

[00:02:32]This puzzle feels really familiar. I think I've done this one. Like New York Times sometimes repeats puzzles. This one might have been relatively recent or just rememberable. But anyway, uh these two are uh I don't know why they repeat puzzles. They could at least shuffle them around.

[00:02:50]There's a lot of ways to transform the same puzzle and end up looking a lot different, but it's still the same logic. Anyway, um, what do we need here?

[00:02:59]We need a one, not two.

[00:03:02]This one can be three, four, not five, six, seven. Uh, what about eight? Oh, yeah. Neither of them could be eight. Of course, the eight's right there. Or nine. All right, so they're just down to 1 134. And this one's only one four.

[00:03:15]Okay, let's come back up here. Um, let's do this three and this eight. I think we're on that.

[00:03:22]So, the eights are done. The threes are nothing more threes.

[00:03:28]Any crossings here? The one or the six?

[00:03:30]Nope. We already have the ones down here.

[00:03:34]All right. I'm trying to see if there's anything else with this band. I don't think so. All right. Next band. We have two threes looking in. This three looks down. Placing this three. Okay. And now we can place the three in this box.

[00:03:43]These two look down.

[00:03:46]And so that's not a three. And so now this is down to 1 1457.

[00:03:50]So this can't be one or four. So this is 57 only.

[00:03:54]I think that's all we get.

[00:03:57]Okay. This box we've reduced to four digits. We need a 1 4 69. The nine on top. Yeah. So this can't be nine. Yeah.

[00:04:06]The 29's looking in. That's what does it places the nine in this box.

[00:04:10]Uh I don't see a followup on nines. But this is now what? 4 six is one of these two that points in with this six. Six looks down placing this six. These sixes look in putting a six in one of these three.

[00:04:29]Okay. 1 4 5 7. Um what else we got here? This row I need a one three one three four five. This can't be one or four. So this is 35.

[00:04:50]Uh 1 3 4 5. Um this can't be 1 three. So this is four five. This can't be three fours. This is five. This is 134. Wow. Okay. So the four is in one of these two for the row.

[00:05:08]I don't think that does anything.

[00:05:10]What about this box? Four is here.

[00:05:16]257. Interesting. Something going on with this box. But let's um let's backtrack a little bit. We were doing this 38. If I recall this seven now, because we got this three, this seven now has a crossing here that puts a seven in one of these two. That points in here with this seven. Putting a seven in one of these two.

[00:05:37]3 47. So this Yeah, we got the seven already.

[00:05:42]Let's just move on to this box here. We have three and four.

[00:05:47]So this three looks down. This three looks in. That's a three in one of these two. That doesn't help. We already have this three.

[00:05:55]Two fours look into here. Putting a four in one of these three.

[00:05:59]Want there to be more here.

[00:06:02]I'm not seeing it.

[00:06:04]3, four, and seven. We do have two threes looking down. We got that.

[00:06:08]The four, the seven, then 38 here. No.

[00:06:14]H. Okay. Nothing with that band. This band we've mostly taken care of. Let's make sure we didn't miss anything. We got the sixes.

[00:06:22]So, the eight is in one of these three.

[00:06:26]And then the nine are done. The twos look back. Six. Nine.

[00:06:34]All right. I think that's all we get.

[00:06:40]Uh, okay.

[00:06:43]Are these still 1457? Looks like it. I have so many corner marks in here. What I'm wondering is what what haven't we accounted for right between the givens and the counter mark? The corner marks.

[00:06:55]So, we need a one still. One's one of these three. Remember the six is in one of these three as well. No, we placed the six. What was it? It was the four. The one and the four looking down. But one and four in one of these three.

[00:07:13]Okay. There's um I'm just going to tell you the first thing I noticed. I'm not going to use this. I think there's probably something a little simpler we can talk about. I think there is actually. Um I don't know if simpler is a is the right term, but anyway, let's go through what my thought process was here so you can kind of follow along. It's interesting. I think so. I know that one and four are in these three. I also know that this can only be 1 14, right? So, I can't make this a 1 14 pair, right? I need to put a one in one of these three and a four in one of these three. But if I did the 14 here, I'd have too many 1 fours in this row.

[00:07:48]It wouldn't have place for the other five, seven, right? No matter how you want to put it, you just can't do one four in three cells. Just they don't fit. Um, so that means that if they're in one of these three and they can't be a 1 14 pair here, we're forced to put one here. Meaning, this can't be a two and that places the two and the three.

[00:08:07]So that was the first thing I saw. Um, the sort of next thing I noticed is that well, if we take these four cells together, then within these four cells, we need a 1, four, five, and seven, right? Because the one and four need to be in these three, and the five and seven need to be in these three. And so the overlap is these four cells and we've limited four digits to them. The 1, four, five, and seven. So that's a hidden quad. And so really the thing to think about then is um what's the opposite? The opposite is that there should be a naked pair here. A two three naked pair. Now the fact that this can be five. Yeah. So really what what I've been noticing this whole time is that I have the fives corner marked here because the fives claim in the row but I penciled a five in here and this should only be a three. This should be a naked three. And then that makes this a naked two if I rec you know if I'm right about everything. So it's not one we think it is a two. It's not three four. It's not five. Six.

[00:09:13]It's not seven because we have the claiming sevens here. I also should have put pointing sevens here. So, it's not seven, it's not eight, it's not nine.

[00:09:22]So, it's a naked two. So, lots of ways to find the same piece of logic. Um, but now this can't be a three anymore. So, this is the only place for three. And now this is the only place for seven, only place for eight.

[00:09:37]Um, here we're going to find out that this is only one or four because it can't be 57. So, it's down to 1 14. And then this is still 1 1457. So, we're not going to mark it.

[00:09:48]So, yeah. Um, if you see something complex, sometimes it means, hey, I'm missing something s simpler. But, I mean, had I applied the complex thing, I would have come up with the same answer. So, doesn't really matter. All right, these twos look in here. Putting a two in one of these two.

[00:10:04]Um, 5789.

[00:10:08]So, this is five 589.

[00:10:12]This is any of them.

[00:10:14]No, it's not seven. Seven is claiming and pointing. This is also 589.

[00:10:22]All right. Well, I don't think there's anything else with this band we can touch. Let's get rid of these corner marks to avoid confusion. I don't think we need these sixes here corner marked anymore, either. I don't think they're helpful.

[00:10:36]Okay. Um I'm going to keep the five and seven, will I? Yeah, just to remind it's fine. Okay, so uh I I got some digits. Let's follow up on those. So the threes are done. The eight is anything with eight. Yeah, actually this eight looks up. This eight looks in. So eight's in one of these two. So now we found a hidden 8 n pair here. One of these is eight. The other is nine according to our quarter marks. So there aren't anything else. Uh before I um before I think about this, I also notice the sevens we're looking up. And now that we have this hidden 8 n pair, the seven can't go here because it needs to be eight or nine. Can't be a seven if it's supposed to be an eight or nine. So the seven goes here and then that places the six in the box. And this is now just down to what? A two four pair.

[00:11:26]Oh, there's a four in the column. Okay, so that's two and that's four. Very nice. That places the five here. This is 478.

[00:11:34]All right. Uh the four that we placed looks back down resolving this triple with the five one and four. That can't be a five anymore. So this is down to 147.

[00:11:44]In general, this column is 1467. So neither of these are four. Oh, none of these are four. So where's four in the column? It is right here. And that leaves us with a 57 pair. And this ends up being a one and a one.

[00:11:57]All right.

[00:11:59]So now this seven in this column can only go here. We can just see that from the corner marks.

[00:12:04]So that's our seven for the column. And this is a one6 pair.

[00:12:11]All right. And where's our low hanging fruit at this point?

[00:12:18][snorts] Um, we do have two twos here. I'm going to try to follow up on placed digits. We got the two, we got the six. Okay, so these sixes, put a six up here. In fact, this is just a pair that involves a six.

[00:12:30]It's two six. Ah, the two resolves it.

[00:12:32]That's six. That's two.

[00:12:34]Um would have found that with this two I just placed I guess uh the four and the seven seeing anything with that.

[00:12:46]Okay. Um I want to look at 289 here. Bottom one's not eight.

[00:12:54]Oh, this is this is a single. This is what they call a full house.

[00:12:59]Uh for whatever reason it's given its own classification. We have eight of the digits. We need the ninth. They call it a full house because this is a any row commer box can be generically called a house. So the house is full. We need to finish it. It's a five. Anyway, I don't think I don't know know if it's a reference to poker or not, but it has a justification terminology wise that has nothing to do with poker. So anyway, we need one 689.

[00:13:25]This is 169.

[00:13:29]I don't know.

[00:13:32]All right. There's got to be just like easy looking fruit here. We just got to find the right one to look at.

[00:13:38]Um, this row is down to 1 62. Oh, sorry.

[00:13:43]1 2 6 9. This can't be 1 six or nine.

[00:13:46]This is a naked two. Can only be a two.

[00:13:49]So, it must be that's our nine. That's eight and nine. That gives us the seven and the four and the eight. We had our five. Five. Seven is resolved now. So, that's not a nine. This is our two.

[00:14:02]No fives here. I think we're just cleaning up at this point. This This is a full house. Also, five.

[00:14:10]All right. Five is one of these two.

[00:14:14]This is not a one. So, this is six and one. This is four and six. That's not a four.

[00:14:21]This column is down to Well, we need a two, which can only go here.

[00:14:27]And then we know there's a five. And what else?

[00:14:33]Nine. Five and nine. Right. I don't think it's resolved. Oh, it is. This nine. I missed that. That's five. That's nine. Now five can only go here. That's a four. We get the eight and the nine here. Two digits left here. The one and the seven. Okay, that makes this a six.

[00:14:50]That's a one. This row finishes with a six. This box finishes with a eight.

[00:14:56]All right, we need a we need a four somewhere.

[00:15:00]Okay, there's our four. We need a nine somewhere.

[00:15:05]There's our nine. There's our one.

[00:15:07]There's our seven. We get the one and seven. And we're done.

[00:15:11]All right. Um, I liked the kind of progression from more difficult to easier that I found in this box. And really what it came down to is I had fives marked here and but I still penciled a five here. Had I not done that, I wouldn't have needed any of that. I would have seen the naked three and everything would have resolved without me having to think harder about it. But we play these games to think, right?

[00:15:34]Uh why else would we play them? So it's fun to uh quote overink sometimes.

[00:15:40]Anyway, how' you do