LSAT Logic Games: From Weakness to Strength

On Instagram this week, we started a series of “My LSAT Journey” videos starring Becca, Matt, and the rest of our team. They all have one thing in common:

Nobody starts at perfect.

Every one of the amazing teachers at LSAT Demon trained their way into the 170s with consistent, focused effort over a long period of time. That’s true for me and Ben as well.

Everyone starts with different strengths and weaknesses. I was pretty solid on Reading Comprehension and Logical Reasoning with just a couple of weeks of study. I’m a strong reader, and I learned quickly that all I had to do was take my time—there’s just one answer that makes a shred of sense on these questions, once you parse them carefully.

But those Logic Games, man! The red clown gets out of the clown car before the blue clown, and the vermillion clown gets out immediately before or after the chartreuse clown, and if the mauve clown gets out last then the goldenrod clown gets out first, third, or fifth… WTF?

Like a majority of LSAT novices, I was bewildered by Logic Games. It’s extremely common. Just last night, I asked for a show of hands in my live class, and almost everyone said LG was their worst section when they first started. But many of these same students will say that LG is their best section once they’re prepped.

That’s how it was for me, too. On my first test, I think I finished two games before the 35-minute bell rang. How the hell was I supposed to finish all four in that same amount of time?

I did a little bit—one or two sections—every day until the games started to make sense. I chipped away at it. I worked no more than an hour or two each day—that’s as diligent as I get—but I did it for a sustained period of time. Six or eight weeks later, I scored my first perfect practice section. Then the floodgates opened. I added one perfect section after another to my study record. On my official test, not only did I score perfectly on Logic Games, but I finished the section in 20 minutes. No joke. I literally sat there twiddling my thumbs for 15 minutes while I waited for the next section. There was no need to check my answers—I knew every one of them was correct.

Think about how much I improved: I went from two games in 35 minutes to all four games in 20 minutes.

Work on your weaknesses. Turn them into strengths.

Last week, I laid out a basic LSAT study plan. This week, I’m going to tweak that schedule for a typical new student with a weakness in Logic Games. If your weakness is in another area, you can do something similar for RC or LR.

This basic plan involves only seven hours a week. That’s enough to make progress in any section, but if you have a particular weakness in games, you have an opportunity to make big improvements right away. It’s a mistake to ignore any section entirely, so let’s stick with the basic plan and add some supplementary work on games.

Demon Free users have access to all four games from the June 2007 test and another two games from PrepTest 65. We’d love to give you more, but this is all we can share publicly under our LSAC license. Free users should do all six of these games and watch all the videos. There are videos from both me and Ben for each of these games. You’ll see some similarities in our approaches, but you’ll also see some differences. Neither of our approaches is the “right” one—or, rather, both are equally right—to be good at the games, you need to learn to improvise. Even when we attack a game in different ways, we’re both going to find the one correct answer for each of the questions.

We love helping all students, regardless of their budgets, as much as we can. That’s why we offer a robust fee-waiver program. If you qualify for the LSAC fee waiver, we can give you a Demon Basic subscription for just $38. We don’t keep a dime of that—that’s the fee LSAC charges us for working with you.

The LSAC fee waiver is probably worth a couple thousand bucks. You get two cracks at the official LSAT, the LSAC Credential Assembly Service, a bunch of LSAC reports, and a LawHub Advantage subscription, among other things, for free. That LawHub Advantage subscription, combined with the Demon fee waiver, opens up a world of logic games for you to practice—and hundreds of our videos to get you unstuck.

Demon Basic students—whether they’re in our fee-waiver program or not—can master a new logic game every day for months without covering the same ground twice. I recommend trying each game on your own before watching any videos. When you do look to the videos for help, I recommend pausing frequently. Take a little guidance from me or Ben, stop the video, and see how far you can get from there. When you get stuck, watch a bit more of a video. But keep returning to your own work. Don’t just passively watch us do it—the real learning comes from solving the puzzle yourself.

Master at least one game every day.

The LSAT’s Logic Games are an excellent test of how hard you can work. No one is even slightly familiar with these games when they start their LSAT prep. But we have almost 400 official games to practice and study. You could do one game a day for a year, or a full section every day for three months, before running out. If you put in the work, you’ll be rewarded.

If you don’t put in the work, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.

That doesn’t mean you have to do it alone, of course. We’re here to help. Demon Live students have several opportunities to practice games in a group setting each week.

• I end each of my Tuesday and Thursday classes with a single logic game. I like to give my classes a tip or two before we start each one—frequently, if I just give students a place to start, they can breeze through the game on their own. I love it when that happens.
• We offer Logic Games Fundamentals, Intermediate Logic Games, and Advanced Logic Games classes throughout the week. Some students attend all of these classes; other students choose classes based on their proficiency.
• Once a week, we offer a timed section of games. Students do the section together, training themselves to focus on accuracy and ignore the clock. Whether they ace the section or crash and burn, our games guru Matt is there to review all four games when time is up.
• For students who want an extra challenge, we offer “Mega-Games” once a week. This is a custom-made section of four hard logic games. If you can get through these four games in 35 minutes, you can surely handle any games section you’ll see on a real LSAT. If you’re stumped, Madison’s there for the review.

However you choose to study, do a little bit every day to turn your weakness into a strength. Don’t neglect the other sections—keep doing your daily hour of rotating topics throughout the week. Just put in some additional work on games each day. I can’t promise that it will click this week, or this month, but I guarantee that the work will pay off in time. It did for me, like it’s done for so many others.