The Times Tables Tricks Worth Learning (And the Ones You Can Skip)

The fastest way through times tables tricks is to stop treating all twelve tables as equally hard. Several of them collapse into one pattern each, doubling covers three tables at once, and the rule that 3 x 4 equals 4 x 3 quietly cuts what's left almost in half. What survives after all that is a short, specific list of facts everyone gets stuck on, and drilling those directly beats grinding through the whole table in order.

Three tables you basically already know

The 10s table is just the number with a zero stuck on the end, no trick required. The 11s table works the same way up through 9 x 11: repeat the digit twice, so 7 x 11 is 77. It stops being free at 10 x 11 and above, where you'd need to carry a digit, but for single-digit multipliers it's essentially free recall.

The 5s table has two things going for it. First, every answer ends in either 0 or 5, so a wrong answer is often obviously wrong before you even check it. Second, multiplying by 5 is the same as multiplying by 10 and cutting the result in half. 13 x 5 is 130 divided by 2, which is 65, and that's faster than counting up by fives.

Doubling covers the 2s, 4s and 8s tables at once

The 2s table is just doubling, which most people can already do without thinking. The useful part is that 4 is double 2, and 8 is double 4, so the 4s and 8s tables are the same doubling move done twice and three times in a row. Take 6: double it once for 6 x 2 (12), double that for 6 x 4 (24), double that again for 6 x 8 (48). Three tables, one skill, repeated.

The 9s table has a pattern in both digits

Multiply 9 by anything from 1 to 10 and the two digits of the answer always add up to 9. It also tells you where to start: the tens digit is always one less than the number you multiplied by. For 9 x 7, the tens digit is 6 (one less than 7), and since 6 plus something has to make 9, the last digit is 3. Answer: 63. Check it against a few others and the pattern holds every time in that range.

You don't need to memorize all 144 facts

A full 12 x 12 grid has 144 cells, but a large chunk of them are duplicates. Because multiplication doesn't care about order, 6 x 9 and 9 x 6 are the same fact wearing two outfits. Once you strip out those repeats and set the square numbers (like 7 x 7) aside as their own single facts, the table's actual size drops to 78 unique products (more on the math here). Nobody frames it this way when they hand a kid a times tables chart, but knowing the table is smaller than it looks is most of what makes it feel learnable.

The facts that don't have a trick

Strip out the 10s, 11s, 5s, doubles-based tables and the 9s pattern, and what's left is a small cluster in the 6, 7 and 8 range: 6 x 7, 6 x 8, 7 x 8, 4 x 8, 6 x 9, and a few neighbors. These come up again and again in accounts of which facts kids get wrong most often, and there's a reasonable explanation for why: the answers are close together (42, 48, 56) and share the same numbers, so recalling one can drag a neighboring wrong answer along with it. There's no shortcut here. This is the part that just needs repetition, so it's worth knowing in advance that getting stuck on 7 x 8 specifically isn't a sign anything else is wrong.

• 6 x 7 = 42
• 6 x 8 = 48
• 7 x 8 = 56
• 4 x 8 = 32
• 6 x 9 = 54
• 7 x 9 = 63

In England, kids are checked on exactly this

England's Year 4 Multiplication Tables Check is a real, national example of how times tables get assessed once the tricks stop mattering and pure recall speed takes over: 25 questions covering the 2 through 12 tables, roughly 6 seconds per question, no partial credit for working it out on paper. It's built around the same premise this whole approach leans on: fluency means the answer arrives before you'd have time to apply a trick, which only happens after the trick has been used enough times to turn into memory.

Practicing the tables you're actually weak on

Working through a times tables chart top to bottom wastes time on the tables you've already got. Multiplication Game lets you pick exactly which tables to drill, from 2 through 12, then runs a 60-second timed round where you type the answer to each fact as it appears. At the end it shows a plain list of which facts you actually missed, which is usually a short list once the doubling and 9s patterns are handled, and it's a far more honest picture of where you stand than a feeling of "the 7s are hard."

If you want to sanity-check the arithmetic itself rather than just times tables, Math Quiz mixes in addition, subtraction and division, and Mental Math Game tests the same recall in a true-or-false format instead of typing an answer, which is a useful change of pace once straight recall starts feeling repetitive.