Karen Kavett (Karen Puzzles)

For the individual rounds, you're pretty much right.

For the pairs and the teams rounds, it's going to be a lot louder because everyone's talking to each other within their pair and their team.

But for individual, it's pretty silent.

So for most of the big events, you're going to have the three different categories, I guess, individual, pairs, and teams.

And teams is four people.

But for individual, once you open the bag and you dump everything out and everyone is starting to gasp because of how hard it is, or it's like, oh my gosh, it's so cute, or whatever they want to say, then it gets pretty much silent and all you hear is the pieces.

So you'll usually know what company it is going into it.

So you'll know which company is sponsoring that particular competition.

So Ravensburger does most of the major ones.

So like nationals and worlds, they'll do.

And so you know what piece count you're going to get.

So for individual, it's pretty much always 500 pieces.

But from there, it could really be anything.

For the national competition, which is coming up in about two weeks from now, they have all brand new puzzles.

So no one will have ever done them before or ever seen them before.

So when you open the bag, once you're in it, like once the time has started, that's the first time you're seeing the image.

You get an opaque bag sitting in front of you and then you open it up, you pull out the box and it's just, you know, any other jigsaw puzzle box.

So my first ever competition, which was Nationals 2022, pretty close to the beginning, I was working on the edge and I knocked the bottom part of the edge off the table and onto the floor and I had to fully like get down to pick everything up.

But then I ended up getting second place.

So it worked out okay.