10 Sudoku Tips for Beginners

Updated 15 October 2026

Good sudoku play is mostly a handful of habits repeated in the right order. These ten tips take you from a blank first move to the pair and fish patterns that open harder puzzles, and every board below is checked by the same solver that powers the hints in Suuudokuuu.

1. Start with the nearly complete houses

A row, column or box with eight digits placed needs only the ninth. That move is a full house, the cheapest deduction in sudoku, so check every house for a single missing digit before anything else.

2. Scan by digit

Pick one digit and ask where it can still go in each box, row and column. When only one cell in a house can hold it, that is a hidden single. Working one digit at a time, starting with the digit that appears most often on the board, finds most early moves.

3. Scan by cell

Look at one empty cell and cross out every digit already in its row, column and box. If one digit survives, it is a naked single. Cells in crowded areas, where a row, a column and a box are all nearly full, are the best places to look.

4. Re-scan after every placement

Each new digit changes what its row, column and box can hold. Before hunting for anything clever, run the same two scans again around the cell you just filled: placements often chain into more placements without any new technique.

5. Write candidates only when singles run out

When the scans stop finding moves, note the possible digits in each empty cell. In Suuudokuuu the notes mode does this by hand and a show-all-candidates button fills them in for you. Candidates are what make every technique below visible, but keeping them up to date by hand costs time, so earn them with a stalled grid first.

6. Use pointing pairs

If a digit can only go in one row or column inside a box, it cannot appear elsewhere in that row or column. That is a pointing pair, and it clears candidates from cells outside the box.

7. Use box/line reduction

The mirror image: if a digit in a row or column can only sit inside one box, it is removed from the rest of that box. See box/line reduction.

8. Spot naked pairs

Two cells in one house that share the same two candidates must hold those two digits between them, so both digits leave every other cell in the house. See naked pair.

9. Spot hidden pairs

Two digits that appear in only two cells of a house own those cells, so every other candidate in them can go. See hidden pair.

10. Learn the X-Wing, and never guess

When a digit is confined to the same two columns in two different rows, the four corners form an X-Wing and the digit leaves the rest of those columns. Beyond that, the technique library keeps going, and every puzzle here can be solved by logic, so a guess is never the answer. If a board stalls, paste it into the step-by-step solver to see which technique is next.

Where to go next

Practice the first habits on Newbie puzzles. New to the rules? Read how to play first, or follow the learn sudoku path. To see which techniques each difficulty actually asks for, read the technique frequency by difficulty data. Want to practice on paper? Print a blank sudoku grid.