Pointing triples techniques

Strategy #11 for solving Sudoku: Pointing triples techniques

"Pointing triples" is a logical extension of the previous strategy, "Pointing Pairs." This strategy is slightly less common in puzzles, but it can also be very helpful when solving medium and hard Sudoku puzzles.

It's quite simple: fill in all cells without numbers with assumptions of possible digits. Then, look for each 3x3 block separately to see if there are 3 cells in it with unique digits. If you find such cells and they are on the same line, it means that there cannot be any more repetitions of this digit on that line (row or column), and we can remove unnecessary digits from the assumptions.

In the image above, you can see two Sudoku grids. On the left grid, you can see an example of using the strategy, and on the right, you can see its result. As we can see, in the third 3x3 block, there are 3 cells containing the digit 6 (highlighted in yellow), and they are on the same horizontal line. There are no more sixes in this square. This means that in this row, the digit 6 cannot appear anywhere else except in one of these 3 cells. Let's remove the extra 6s from the assumptions in this row (highlighted in red).

We hope you enjoyed this strategy and want to try it out. We invite you to play a difficult 9x9 Sudoku on our website and test your skills.