How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.



» Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four »

The sole purpose of Sudoku techniques is to eliminate candidate digits in a cell until you have eliminated all but one digit. The digit whatever remains must be the correct one in that cell.

Solve Sudoku Techniques

To learn fast how to solve Sudoku you should focus on techniques that are most useful to remove candidate digits. The best Sudoku techniques are illustrated below - based on million solved Sudoku puzzles.

69.9% (905451)

Singles 9.6% (96604)

Unsolved 7.7% (76726)

Pointing pair 3.6% (35926)

Naked pair 2.7% (27251)

Y-wing 1.7% (16835)

Finned X-wing 1.5% (14612)

X-wing 1.4% (14201)

Hidden pair 0.9% (9002)

Locked digit 0.4% (4363)

Sashimi X-wing 0.4% (4003)

XYZ-wing 0.1% (1327)

Naked triplet 0.09% (866)

Swordfish 0.02% (227)

Hidden triplet 0.005% (49)

Naked quad 0.004% (40)

Jellyfish 0% (0)

Hidden quad Top Sudoku Techniques

Solve Sudoku in one minute

To solve any easy level Sudoku puzzle you need to know only single techniques, and it takes only one minute to learn single techniques.

Solve 80 % of Sudokus in 3 minutes

You can solve 80 % of Sudoku puzzles by finding just singles, pointing digits and naked pairs. Pointing digits and naked pair look very similar and are easy to learn and discover at the same time. These techniques are good to solve easy and medium level Sudoku puzzles.

Solve hard Sudokus in 5 minutes

To solve hard Sudoku puzzles you need to learn X-Wing and Y-Wing. There are soo many Sudoku techniques, but to solve hard Sudoku puzzles found in newspapers you really need to know just these.

Beyond hard Sudoku puzzles

Most players learn naked and hidden pair first and then move to larger subset techniques due to their perfectly clear logic. That's fine because especially naked pair is one of the best Sudoku techniques, but you should know that common wing and fish techniques are much more useful than triple and quad subsets.

Some Sudoku techniques like hidden quad are very rare but you may want to learn them just for the sake of completeness, and to solve the world's hardest Sudoku puzzles.