No One True Way.

I said when I began that I hadn't found anyone who solved sudokus (or admitted to solving sudokus) the way I do.  But as I was looking for things to link to for this blog, I found someone who comes pretty close.

His name is John Vousden and he explains his method in a series of youtube videos.  Here's the first one.

His marking style is different from mine, but the principles he uses are the same.  Don't just look for lonely onlies and singularities, look for pairs too, and annotate them.

Peter Gordon admits to doing something similar in his book, which was first released as the Mensa Guide to Solving Sudoku, and has been recently reprinted as the Puzzlewright Guide to Solving Sudoku, but then he turns around and focuses on pattern-hunting with all the "candidates" or unassigned sibs written into the grid.  Early sudoku books mention similar methods, but Carol Vordeman in her 2006 book Extreme Sudoku is vehement about the need to write in ALL the sibs when you stop being able to eyeball your deductions, and she seems to have won the day.

Vorderman was certain that it would be confusing to have some spaces with marks in them that didn't have all the possible marks and other spaces with marks in them that DID have all the possible marks.  And it would be, if we were limited (like every computer sudoku game I've ever encountered) to only putting digits into the unsolved spaces.  But with a pencil, we have more power.  You can distinguish cells that have all the possible candidates by adding another symbol.  I use a "/".  And once I figure out how to get my camera to work I'll show you how it's done.