‘I hated my job as an investment banker – so I turned my love for puzzles into a career’

These days there are influencers putting their spin on just about any hobby. As TikTok, YouTube, and other video platforms have infiltrated our lives, not only are people consuming content, but all sorts of people are being inspired to make it as well. It’s easy to dismiss influencer culture as just young women dancing to 20 seconds of a song, or a man flexing his marble-chiselled biceps, but it goes beyond that because we go beyond that. 

People are complex, and they love a wild assortment of things. Those women dancing to TikTok sounds may also have a crochet habit and love sharing their creations. That ‘gym bro’ might also be a mental health advocate. If you like something, or a hobby is important to you, you can be sure that there is a space online for it. Which includes puzzles. 

Puzzles have evolved. The average person might believe that they are only enjoyed by retired individuals with large books of crosswords or sudoku and a pencil in hand, but this is not the case. Speaking to Simon Anthony from the hit puzzles YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic, it quickly becomes clear that puzzles are attracting an increasingly young audience.

Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe created the YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic in 2017, and it has become a hub for some of the most intriguing and complex puzzling conversations on the internet.

Like many, Simon’s fondness for conundrums stemmed from his family: “They got me into puzzles at a really young age," he says. "My grandfather used to cut out the Daily Telegraph's Quick Crossword from his print newspaper and post them to me. The first couple of Across answers in the Quick Crossword always made a phrase, and for some reason that appealed to me as a child.” To this day, many of our crosswords like to hide phrases and puns within them, or even a theme or two. 

What led Simon to create video content about puzzles, however, was a combination of his love of the hobby and his dislike of his former job. “I used to be an investment banker, for some sin I must have committed in a former life. It's a fairly open secret, I loathed my job. I was constantly trying to come up with ideas for doing something else. One year, I was skiing with some friends, and I had what I thought was a sensible idea. I thought loads of people want to know how to solve cryptic crosswords, and I thought maybe I could start a YouTube channel where I would just solve the cryptic crossword and talk through how to do it. 

“I could see that might be a really popular way of people learning how to solve puzzles, because most, I think, most of the law around cryptic crosswords, especially, is either handed down by parents to children, or from aunties to Simon, as it was in my case. It felt to me like YouTube might scratch an itch, and I persuaded Mark Goodliffe, an old friend and multiple Times crossword champion, to come on board.”

However not all content is an instant hit on video platforms. Every content creator has to go through a process of experimentation with their videos and target audiences. Mark and Simon started with their cryptic crossword content and slowly built up to 1,000 subscribers over the course of months. Eventually they weaved in Sudoku content and that opened a whole new audience to them.

“Eventually, we started to do variants on Sudoku. I think that was the breakthrough. People like Sudoku, people love Sudoku - but the fact that there are different types of Sudoku surprises people." It was clear that there was an enormous appetite for different variations of puzzles. 

"Now, we have Sudokus with rules like Schrödinger cells where a cell has to contain two digits at the same time. Or you've got thermometers in grids. You've got grids that now contain what we call the fog of war, where the whole grid is covered in fog, apart from maybe one or two cells, and placing the correct digits into a cell clears some of the fog. Organically, it's grown into something we could never have imagined, ever.” The figures reflect this: some Cracking the Cryptic live streams are viewed hundreds of thousands of times, which is a huge step up from those early days.

With the advancement of technology with puzzle apps, like our own Telegraph Puzzles app, and new accessible takes on conundrums such as Wordle and PlusWord, puzzle fans are only getting younger. Haven’t you heard? Crosswords are cool again. Simon’s even noticed it among Cracking the Cryptic’s viewers too. “The average age of our viewers is under 30, and coming down. Lots of university students love solving puzzles, and every day we're receiving emails about people getting their kids into Sudoku.”

With larger numbers of puzzle players has also come a bigger sense of community, and amazing tales of even young children enjoying the hobby. “We've had some extraordinary stories. Three- and four-year-old children solving puzzles. We've had a puzzle submitted by a six-year-old. I think that the journey towards the younger puzzle audience is going somewhere.”

Even with the modern technology and games of all shapes and sizes fitting onto our phones, puzzles have persisted as a timeless activity. The wider concept of gaming has moved on to evolve with stories and action sequences and hours and hours of quests. Even with all that excitement, there is something so entertaining about the simplicity of puzzles that Wordle became the most popular talking point of the entire gaming industry when it was at the peak of its popularity. But what keeps word games and puzzles activities so fresh after hundreds of years? 

“I think it's the depth of the subject," Simon Anthony says. "With Sudoku, or cryptic crosswords, there's a certain delight that comes with certain types of answers and there is also the feeling of discovery. 

“When you complete a sudoku puzzle or when you complete a cryptic crossword, you get all those little eureka moments. And they're only small, it's not like you are actually discovering, you know, a fundamental equation of the universe. But in life, those moments where we do discover something new, I think they become increasingly rare as we age. Those little shots of adrenaline you get from epiphanies, they're addictive. There is a sense of satisfaction, it's a journey every day where you get a few epiphanies, and a sense of achievement.”

Eureka moments are important of course, but beyond that there is something to be said for the power of taking a little time for yourself each day. “There's a lot of noise in today's world, there's an awful lot of things to worry about. We get a lot of correspondence from people who struggle with anxiety or insomnia and they’ve found that puzzles are a way of distracting themselves. That's another sort of interesting aspect of the mindfulness aspect of puzzles.”

Puzzles, and puzzling fans, are much more diverse than people might think. Puzzles are cool. They’re played by people of all shapes and sizes, interests and hobbies and ages. At The Telegraph, we celebrate the heritage of our puzzle section loud and proud, but its future may be even more exciting. Last year, our Puzzles Editor, Chris Lancaster, created PlusWord, which is now one of our most popular brainteasers. The new Telegraph Puzzles app takes our puzzles mobile experience to the next level. With much more on the way, the future is bright – for puzzle fans of all ages.