The Matching Pair Strategy

Make you custom with the nomenclature used in our tutorials

Introduction

If you are completely new to sudoku, you will get an explanation of the simple rules for a standard sudoku containing 81 cells (9 rows x 9 columns) here. You can see all sorts of sudoku variations around, but this is the most common one and it's the one you can solve direct on this web site or print if you use the Home button in the menu above.. First we will explain the nomenclature that will be used in future published tutorials. See image 1 below.

Candidates are numbers in empty cells like the small numbers in the image below. They are there to show what numbers can go into an empty cell. When you solve a Sudoku by using candidates, it's all about eliminating the candidates. There are a lot of strategies for doing that. The Single Strategy is one of them and described here.

The Matching Pair Strategy

A Matching Pair is easily spotted if you are using Candidates in the empty cells.

When there are candidates, like the red numbers 4 and 5 in the image above, which are the only numbers to go in the two cells, you have a matching pair. You know that the two cells will eatch contain the number 4 or 5. That means that you can just eliminate the other 4 or 5 among the candidates (green 4 & 5) in that box.

There are ramifications of this in other cells in this box. When you remove the green 4 and 5 in the box, 6 and 9 will become the real numbers I those two cells.

There may be ramifications of this outside this box, in other cells in the Sudoku. You can eliminate all candidates 4 and 5 outside this box in the row with the matching pair.

I hope this explained the Matching Pair Strategy so you have an understanding of how It works. Don't hesitate to bookmark this article, we may come back here later to ad a few more examples. For the moment you can just click or tap Home in the menu so you can solve a Sudoku Puzzle. Maybe you can apply The Matching Pair Strategy. Thank you for reading this and good luck!

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About the author: Olov Forsgren is a retired software engineer with lifelong experience in marketing. He has been in network marketing over six years. His hobby is social media marketing and attraction marketing. His 80K+ followers on Twitter, 2,5K+ friends on Facebook and 7K+ followers on Google Plus indicates that he even master the most modern social marketing techniques.

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