Practice the Naked Pair (Obvious Pair) technique with our practice puzzles. The next logical step to solving this puzzle involved finding a Naked Pair.
You must highlight the correct candidates to complete this puzzle. This involves highlighting the candidates that create the naked pair, as well as the candidates that are able to be eliminated through this technique.
The candidates that make up the Naked Pair should be highlighed in green
The candidate that can be eliminated should be highlighed in red
The puzzle below shows a complete Naked Pair practice puzzle with the candidates that make up the Naked Pair highlighed in greem and the eliminations highlighed in red.
You can find a Naked Pair by looking for two cells within a house that have the same pair of two candidates. The example below shows a naked pair in r3c7 and r5c7 with the values three and seven.
Since these two cells have to contain the two candidates (the pair) other cells in the same row, column or block where these two candidates appear can be eliminiated.
This means that three and seven can be eliminated wherever they appear in the same house which allows for eliminations in r1c7, r7c7 and r9c7. This means that five candidates can be eliminated as indicated by the red shaded cells.
This techniques helps eliminate candidates which can help expose other techniques or obvious singles which can be filled in immediately.
If you would like a more detailed explanation of the Naked Pair technique with a walkthrough example, check out our Naked Pair technique article.
The Naked Pair technique is a beginner sudoku strategy that is the foundation of many easy and medium difficulty puzzles. Now that you have had practice with these puzzles, play a Sudoku game to use this strategy to complete a full puzzle.