Naked Pair Practice Puzzles

Every puzzle below is verified to feature the Naked Pair as its hardest required technique — of the 65,284 puzzles in our library, 34,358 require it and 2,381 need nothing harder. New to the pattern? Learn the Naked Pair or see a worked example first.

How to drill the Naked Pair

The Naked Pair is the first technique on the ladder that does not place anything. Two cells in one unit showing the same two candidates lock those digits between them, and the payoff is an elimination elsewhere in that unit — not a digit you can write in.

That makes it the point where a lot of solvers stall, because the move feels like it accomplished nothing. Practise it by treating the elimination as step one of two: find the pair, strike the candidates from the rest of the shared unit, then immediately re-scan that unit for the single you have probably just created. The technique is worth learning for what it unlocks, not for itself.

Both cells must sit in the same row, column or box. Two identical-looking cells that share no unit are a coincidence, and acting on them is one of the fastest ways to corrupt a grid.

Curated Naked Pair puzzles

  1. Practice puzzle #1 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  2. Practice puzzle #2 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  3. Practice puzzle #3 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  4. Practice puzzle #4 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  5. Practice puzzle #5 — 26 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  6. Practice puzzle #6 — 22 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  7. Practice puzzle #7 — 26 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  8. Practice puzzle #8 — 24 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  9. Practice puzzle #9 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  10. Practice puzzle #10 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  11. Practice puzzle #11 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
  12. Practice puzzle #12 — 25 givens · needs Naked Single, Naked Pair
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Naked Pair practice FAQ

How many Sudoku puzzles require the Naked Pair technique?
Of the 65,284 puzzles in the Precision Sudoku library, 34,358 require the Naked Pair to solve, and 2,381 can be completed with nothing harder than the Naked Pair. Every puzzle is verified by a solver that records the exact techniques needed.
A Naked Pair did not let me place anything. Did I do it right?
Probably yes. A Naked Pair never places a digit; it only removes those two candidates from the other cells of the shared unit. The placement usually arrives one step later, when a cell you just pruned drops to a single candidate. If nothing changed at all, check that the pair really shares a unit.
Do the two cells need to be next to each other?
No. They need to share a row, a column or a box — adjacency is irrelevant. A pair at opposite ends of the same row eliminates just as strongly as two cells side by side.