Jessa is a lifelong puzzle lover based in the Pacific Northwest who has been speed puzzling for the past couple of years. She competed at the USA Jigsaw Nationals 2025 speed puzzling competition in Washington D.C., which took place April 4-6 as part of Awesome Con. Joyce aka Joyce Puzzles sat down with Jessa to talk about how she prepared and practiced for the competition, how she manages the mental game, and specific strategies she uses. Read on for some great tips, techniques and encouragement for new and pro speed puzzlers alike!
To watch the full video interview, click here.
[Interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
Jessa: Good! It was amazing to be there, be around all the other puzzlers. I loved most of the puzzles. Some of them were a little trickier, but they were still good. It was overall a wonderful experience and I'm glad I went.
Jessa: I feel like I didn't know quite what to expect the first time around, and it was a lot. Just the overstimulation, all of the noises, lights, people. So I knew what to expect going in this time. I think I was more prepared mentally. I brought noise canceling headphones to help me deal with all of the stimulating noises. Although there's only part of that you can expect because you don't know what puzzle you're going to get. You don't know what other outside factors are going to be part of the competition. But, yeah, I knew there was going to be cameras on me, there was going to be some level of noise and lights.
This last year, I've worked a lot on my confidence going in. I think I still struggle with imposter syndrome. Like, "I don't belong here." And so working through that this past year and just practicing more at home, but then also going to more in person events locally also helped me just like, "Okay, I can do this. I know how to put together a puzzle." It depends on what type of puzzle it is, whether I do really well or not, but just mentally, I was a lot more prepared this time around.
Jessa: Yeah, I feel like the mental part of it is the hardest part of it for me and a lot of puzzlers could say the same thing. I've puzzled my whole life, I know how to put pieces together, but battling with the self doubt, the "Oh, this puzzle is hard. I don't know what to do next." Those are all things I'm probably going to always have to wrestle with to some extreme or the other. So I don't know if I have a miraculous "this is how you should do it and you'll always have good thoughts" tips but I do know what has worked better for me.
I think over time having the experience definitely helps. Practicing different strategies, practicing how you organize the pieces, whether you're going to sort the edges out and do them first or not. You can't always have the perfect strategy set up because you don't know what puzzle you're going to get. But having some kind of, "this is where I'm going to put my pieces, on the left side, the right side," some kind of strategy that works best for yourself. And you figure that out by practicing a lot at home.
One thing that I would say has helped me in my "mentalness" is talking about the puzzle in my mind instead of - I tend to wander, especially when I first let the pieces out and I'm flipping because it's not something you have to think about necessarily. So my mind likes to go to La La Land and be like, "Lah dah dah, what am I gonna eat today? No, focus on the puzzle." So if I give myself words to repeat to myself, that helps me stay focused. So when I'm doing the edges, I say in my mind, "edge, edge, edge, edge, edge."
With this puzzle [Washington Blossoms], I started with the water. So I was like, "water, water, water." And then that didn't go well, so then I started with this fountain part. And you just say it in your mind. I think there's probably more things that I'll figure out to say to myself. But right now I just repeat the same thing over and over, that I'm doing, to keep myself on track.
Jessa: There are some things that you can watch others do that you can get faster at. The initial flip and sorting out the edges can be something you can get faster at with practice. I remember watching Alejandro [Clemente Leon] in the World [Jigsaw Puzzle Championship] and seeing him go so quickly, then learning his tricks on how he did that. He was tucking in edge pieces underneath his hand and just flipping with these two fingers. So I'm like, "I'm going to try that." It was a little awkward at first, but now that I've done it so much, it's not awkward anymore. I set myself a goal this past year to get my flip and sorting out the edges under three minutes. And for the most part, I can do that.
If it's a large piece puzzle, like the large Ravensburgers, there's no way because they're big and I'm clumsy with the bigger pieces. But with most normal Ravensburgers, getting under a certain time limit you set for yourself, if you really wanted to practice, you could take out a puzzle and just practice that initial flip and sorting until you get used to how it feels to grab the pieces and the edges.
I remember looking back at my first Nationals experience, I had the produce from hell [Plentiful Produce] in the heat. I was a scattered mess. It was my very first time ever competing like that, in person, and I just didn't know what I was doing with my pieces. Everything was everywhere. I had no mental check in about why these pieces are over there. Why these pieces? It's just that they were everywhere. They were inside my puzzle.
So one thing I've worked on this past year is where my pieces are going so that I don't have to think about that as much. Sometimes we put pieces randomly in weird places and we find them later. But I'm always going to dump my pieces out on the left side now, and they're going to stay on that left side, and they're going to be on top of each other, because I don't necessarily need them all spread out evenly like some people do, and that's fine, but I need them close together. I need to see all my pieces in one area. So especially if you don't have a lot of space to work on, it just makes it so that you have more space.
Then if I'm grabbing, say, there's a yellow door in the puzzle, I'm gonna grab those pieces and put them in front of me and try to build right away. I don't necessarily have a whole bunch of sorting piles at the beginning. I kind of am a grab and pull in place, unless - I'm so squirrely, too. I'll go to grab the yellow door, and then I'll see, the red polka dot mushroom, and I'm like, "Oh, I want to grab that, too." So that's why I have to say it in my mind, "yellow door, yellow door, yellow door, stick to it.
Then if I can't find where pieces go, my right side is where I place them. So I'm not putting them back into that left side where I'll run into them again and be confused again. I'm placing them somewhere else. Some people use a sorting tray to do that, their emotional support tray, which I haven't practiced with yet. So I'm not quite brave enough to do it in competition. But I think I'm going to start maybe using a small tray to put those miscellaneous pieces on, so at the end I just grab that tray and take it with me and place them. Organization has been a huge part of my strategy this past year.
Jessa: There was in the Pacific Northwest regionals last year that Jonathan of Speed Puzzling did. That was the Cozy Bathroom and it was large piece and we were sharing half of a table. And that was also piece management. I was not at a place where I was good with piece management and I don't know if I still am. But it was almost impossible to put the edge together at all until way later because of all like pieces just took over the entire space.
Jessa: Yeah, I think so. I missed having a larger puzzle to do with a Pairs partner, though. Pairs is my favorite. I love puzzling with another person. I missed having a longer time to do that.
Jessa: I met Kelly last year at Nationals and we just clicked. It wasn't like we hung out all the time, but every time we saw each other, it was like, "Oh, I love you. You're wonderful." So our personalities kind of meshed. And then when I heard about this year and kind of trying to figure out, do you stay with the same Pairs partner that you've always had or do you want to mix it up? I'm kind of at a place where I want to puzzle with different people and experience different styles, learn something from them and get those memories with another. I don't necessarily want to be locked in with someone for the rest of my speed puzzling days, although I do like that too. But there's so many amazing, wonderful puzzlers in this community.
So the first person I thought, if I could ever have a Pairs partner, a new one, it would be Kelly, because I just love her so much. I might have messaged her or someone else had mentioned that I was thinking about it. And we ended up both wanting to be paired up together and agreeing to that. We'd never practiced until we got to Nationals in Washington, D.C. and it wasn't until right before the first competition, we did one little practice puzzle together, and then that was our second puzzle together in the competition.
Jessa: We met, I think, once on Zoom, and we did do a puzzle together and talked a little bit about strategy. She has mentioned and is very good at busier puzzles, and I'm not. I'll do them but they make my head spin. She's very good at pick and place, really busy puzzles. And I love gradients, any kind of color/shade difference, skies, color block stuff. So we knew that that was a good thing that we had going, that we both had different strengths, but a lot of it we did have to figure out once we were there.
In the first [pairs round], we had this beautiful Art Studio. We were figuring out things while we were doing this like, "Okay, next time we compete, we'll change that." Like, because of her pick and place amazingness, she would put pieces inside. And I would come along and be like, "What's that piece doing there?" And I would move it. And then she would come across that piece and be like, "I already put this in" and put it back in. And so we talked about that later, and I was like, "Oh, my goodness. I'm sorry." I wasn't even thinking. I was just like, "Oh, this is a random piece. What's it doing here?"
That was really fun, though, to figure that out with her, and I feel like we did a little bit better the next time around. Another thing I was doing was I was kind of hoarding pieces along my side of the puzzle that either I thought, these are all similar colors and I'll get to them, or they were in my puzzle jail. If they were in my jail, they needed to go over closer to her so that she could do them, because there were pieces that I was not able to figure out. So those are things that with time and more practice together, we can really improve our times. Little communication things.
Jessa: Yeah, our team Jiggernauts. Well, Hannah and I paired last year at Nationals, and then we were also on the team with you, and so I knew that I wanted to check in with her and see if there was some way we could still stay together for a team. I had let her know that Kelly and I were thinking about pairing up, and then she was like, "Okay, I don't know who to pair up with." Then I'd heard through Becca [Taylor], that Alice might be available. She messaged Alice and they decided to pair up. Then it was a waiting period of "Are we going to puzzle together as a team?" Then Alice was like, "I'm in." And that's how it was born.
Jessa: Yeah. We had done one meeting online that we were all able to attend and kind of talk a little bit about strategy and do a puzzle together. But then Hannah came and picked us all up from the airport on Thursday and we went to her house, which was so much fun, and met her family. And we did maybe three or four puzzles together. We were all completely exhausted from a day of travel, but she also fed us and it was just really wonderful. It was a good bonding time for us all because it was the first time we'd met in person as a team. But our puzzling times, I wouldn't say that they were very great. I don't think the puzzles that we did, our times were like, "Oh, wow, we're gonna crush this." We're all kind of like, "Okay, this is good to know where we are." But I think we were all just so tired that we weren't at our best individually either.
Jessa: So prelims came along and oh my goodness, it's so funny because we didn't practice together, and we're going up against teams that have been to Nationals before together or even Worlds and done so well. Just been able to practice a ton together. And we were still figuring out our stinking strategy seconds before we started. Even with the prelims, we learned so much about things we were going to change for the next round. So we ended up getting second in our heat, which was so exciting. And Zakco puzzle boards, Zak lent us some trays so we knew we were going to use them. But we didn't efficiently use them, I would say, in that first Teams round.
Kelly and I started on the edge, which was three layers of pieces deep. Hannah and Alice did the inside. And it's so fun to see everyone's different strengths come in, because, I mean, Alice is just a beast. She's gonna put together pieces faster than you can, like, think about putting them together. And then Hannah is incredibly good at sorting and she's really fast in it and she loves it. She practically is singing about how wonderful it is while she's doing it. So it's really fun that she's loving that part of it, but then also feeding us all pieces, and we don't have to go search on our own. Not on this puzzle anyway. Then Kelly she sees the image and she knows where things go. So her ability to understand this and implement it like gold.
So we flew through that and then we got to the second one, which was Dean McAdam's the Ocean Lounge. And that was like, "Okay, this is busy." This is a lot going on, and it's a lot more pick and place, less sortable areas. So that puzzle is where we learned what we needed to do if we ever face something like that again. And that's to really use the sorting trays. We should have had bigger ones of these. So next time, I'll be bringing my bigger ones so that we can have pieces closer to each of us.
At one point, you can even see in the live feed, Alice is sitting next to me, and the pieces are on the other side of the puzzle. So I'm literally reaching over her. She's in my armpit. No big deal, we're puzzling, who cares? She's underneath, I'm on top. And we're just trying to get all these pieces in. And it worked for us for that moment, but we could have been faster if we would have put those pieces on trays and had them in front of us all.
But I felt like our communication was so good. All of us are positive and we love puzzling, so we were just encouraging each other and having a good time through it all. So that was the best part of it, the bond that we had with each other through that.
Jessa: So competitive, and looking at all the stacked teams that we were going up against, I wanted to get in the top five but I didn't expect it. And I think everyone else kind of underestimated us, too. Even in the live stream, we weren't talked about as "Oh, the Jiggernauts are gonna be right up there." It was like, "Oh, the Jiggernauts just took a second. Where did they come from?" Well, here we are. I still get goosebumps and jittery thinking about the thrill of it all, because it was so much fun.
That first puzzle [Sacred Lake Tahoe] was so beautiful. We each tackled our own sections. Alice did all of [the top yellow section]. I started on the water, Hannah was doing her sorting thing, and Kelly was doing her stuff. Then we all just came together, but we heard cheering, like, four minutes before we finished. There were a few teams. I don't know how many, but at least two teams had finished before we got to the second puzzle. I think Three and a Half Men finished this puzzle at least four minutes before we finished it.
So we already had that deficit that we had to make up, but we got that second puzzle [Jeweled Jungle] out, and we just were like, "Oh, my word, it's going to be a slog." There is no way you can sort that puzzle, just rainbow of colors all scattered throughout. There were no big areas that you could tackle. But Hannah said immediately, "We're going to need to shape sort at some point." So tuck that away for later. I don't even know how we got through that. It was a blur. It was mind boggling how hard that puzzle was. But we had at least 100 if not more pieces left when Hannah made the call of, we've gotta shape sort.
So Kelly and I went to shape sorting and we put each shape the best that we could fit on each tray. So it had the two ins, two outs, the two by two, however, you call it. And then the one foot and the two footers and all those on different trays. It's amazing how, once we did that, it just flew. It was like, "We have arrived." It is so much easier to find the pieces now. We were communicating, we were on fire. Those last pieces just flew in and we finished eight seconds ahead of that team that had finished before us in the previous puzzle. And so we were just like, "Oh, my goodness, that's amazing!" It was the best. So fun.
Jessa: If you want to start speed puzzling, I recommend starting small with 100 piece puzzles, pretty much any brand. We do use Ravensburger for the bigger competitions, but I don't know if that's going to be always and forever. And smaller competitions use all different kinds of brands, so it's good to get familiar with different piece cuts, whether it's ribbon or random or anything else. Get out a little timer and time yourself.
I think for me, I just have learned a lot from watching the live streams and recaps from people on YouTube from the puzzle competitions. I wish I could have one camera on one person the entire time to watch from start to finish. But that's a great way to learn and listening to their tips and tricks.
I want to encourage anybody and everybody that's interested that the puzzle community is super welcoming. The speed puzzlers, they may seem like, "Oh, they're so cool." My mindset was, I'll be so happy if they say hi to me. But you're part of the family. You show up to these puzzle events and everybody's there for each other. We're all happy to cheer each other on. So if you are a person that has a lot of mental struggles and doubts about yourself, just know that there is a place for you and you deserve to be there and you are worthy. Even if you're slow, it doesn't matter. If you're having fun and enjoying the puzzle and being a part of the community, you're gonna get so much out of that and feel a part of something. So you don't have to be the fastest to attend these events.
Just be kind to yourself. Don't look at other people's times and think, "That's just not something I could ever do." Look at yourself and be like, "I never thought I could finish this puzzle or do a hard puzzle like this, and I'm here and I'm doing it." Be proud of yourself and know that there is a place for everyone at the table - at the puzzle table.
I do want to say thank you, since we're here doing this for Completing the Puzzle, for sponsoring me to go because I don't know if I would have been able to go otherwise. I super appreciate their support of us and that they show up to these events and are just as excited as all of us to be there and love puzzles and support us to get there. So thank you.
