Solving Tips and Tricks, Part 1

This post is the first of an N-part series, where N is a number between 0 and infinity.

I have been working on a few puzzles lately that involve letter-to-number mappings of A-1, B-2, C-3, etc. Thanks to many years as a child playing Battleship, I still know that H is 8 and J is 10 … but I can’t remember many of the mappings after that. I know that T is 20, but I can never seem to remember the rest without writing out the entire table … is M 13 or 14? And what’s Q? Or V?

Because I’m extremely lazy (it comes with being a Perl programmer), I created a little mnemonic that saves me from having to write out the entire table every time I need it. I write it like this:

A B C D E
F G H I J
K L M N O
P Q R S T
U V W X Y
Z

Written this way, I get a simple visual reminder that the letters at the ends of the rows correspond to the multiples of 5 (E-5, J-10, O-15, T-20, Y-25). It’s easy to just count to the next letter. So Q is 17 and V is 22.