Pointing pair practice sheets
One digit, pinned to a line inside a box. Where the box ends, the line keeps going — and that is the elimination.
What this move actually is
A pointing pair is the first technique that makes you look at two units at once. Inside one box, a digit has only two or three possible cells — and all of them happen to lie on a single row or column. The box cannot be finished without putting that digit somewhere on that line, so the line's remaining cells outside the box cannot hold it.
It is often called box-line reduction, and the name is the better description: the box removes candidates from the line. The reverse direction has its own name, claiming, and its own logic — worth keeping them apart, because mixing them up is the most common way this elimination gets misapplied.
Why a dedicated sheet
Pointing pairs are where "I know the rule" and "I can find it" separate. In a book of mixed puzzles you meet one every few grids, usually by accident, after the easy moves have run out and you are already stuck. Here they are on every puzzle, several times, which is the only way the scan becomes automatic.
The grader replays each puzzle with the cheapest technique first and keeps it only if a pointing pair is used on that path. So the sheet is not "puzzles that contain a pointing pair somewhere" — it is puzzles that cannot be finished without one.
What the grader guarantees
Every puzzle needs at least one pointing pair, and nothing on the sheet asks for more than one tier above it: singles, pairs, box-line work, and at worst an X-Wing. The filter never relaxes to fill a sheet — if one comes up short, press New set.
How to scan for it
- Pick a digit. Any digit, but start with one that already appears several times on the board — it has fewer places left to go.
- For each box that does not contain it yet, ask where it could go inside that box. Two or three cells is what you want.
- If all of those cells share a row or a column, the digit is eliminated from the rest of that line, outside the box.
Doing this digit by digit is faster than cell by cell, and it is how the game's hint scans. With Candidate marks switched on, step 2 is just reading the printed lists instead of holding them in your head.
Printing it
Scale 100%, A4 or Letter, default margins. Four per page gives 78 mm boards; two per page is easier if you write large. The settings live in the address bar — bookmark the page after choosing a count per page and it opens the same way.
Where it leads
Pointing pairs are usually the last move before a puzzle stops being solvable by singles and pairs alone, which makes them the natural checkpoint before fish techniques. The full guide to pointing pairs has a worked position plus the cases where the pattern looks right and the elimination is still invalid.
Next sheet: X-Wing practice — the first pattern that needs you to compare two whole lines.