WSPC 22: Day 0

So I was hoping to post a bit more earlier today but now I’ll keep it brief. The official arrivals day started pleasantly with breakfast with old friends from Poland on the organising team. It’s like 3 years of madness that have past since we all last met in 2019 washed away - and pretty much references to “last year” throughout the day as people arrived became an agreed standard. 

It was nice to share stories from fellow championship organisers - our efforts date back a few years now to 2014 - but also a little sobering to hear about the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Poland, particularly with regards to military logistics. Later meeting some of the Japanese team brought tales of longer flight times due to diversions around Russian airspace. This year, there is no Russian presence at the championships as there usually would be, although a good friend from Belarus did manage to make it. These issues of course are far bigger than a puzzle championship, but that doesn’t mean they should not be discussed or shied away from. 

After a walk through some nearby woods in the crisp autumn sunshine, the rest of the day was spent in the hotel greeting a steady stream of arrivals. The UK team is all here now and looking forward to the competition. I’m curious to see how newcomer Jack does at his first competition, and I was pleased to tease Cracking The Cryptic’s Mark Goodliffe that he was probably the most famous person here, with his 500,000+ follows. Probably enough to outdo the likes of Will Shortz, even if he has had cameos on the Simpsons and his I met your mother. 

Perhaps my favourite time of the day was spent well with my good friend of many years now and anlso general all-round Chinese phenomenon Tantan Dai. I’m probably not totally partial here, but I think she is a narrow favourite for the Sudoku title ahead of the likes of Estonia’s Tiit Vunk and serial world champion from Japan Kota Morinishi. Those three are all mind-blowingly talented as well as being really good decent people in a way that it is hard to do justice - whoever comes out on top will be a worthy winner - but this year I’ll be firmly rooting for Tantan!

No surprises in the evenings Q&A - although the team rounds sound like they might be eventful. More to come tomorrow!

WSPC 22: Day -1

So here’s to the revival of detuned radio’s championship reports!  I don't have a laptop with me this year however I’ll see what I can do tapping things out on a phone. I don’t think I’ll be in depth with all the gory details as I once was, and I think I’ll try to be at least somewhat journalistic about proceedings, aiming at an audience who sort of knows what puzzles are but don’t really know what the world championships are all about. 

I am here, finally, in Krakow. About 4 hours late, and sorely missing the company of others I’d hoped to catch this evening who have very sensibly gone to bed. I have sworn many times never to fly Wizz Air again, but I think this time is probably the last. I look forward to an epic fight to claim my rightful €250 when I get back home. 

To set the scene about the championships, I can share some of my day idly spent staring at a phone within the confines of Gatwick airport. 

At both the WSC: https://www.wspc2022.com/wsc and the WPC: https://www.wspc2022.com/wpc there is about as much variety in sudoku and logic puzzle grids that you could hope to throw a forest worth of sticks at. (Maybe that should be pencils?).  I encourage my dearest readers to follow those links, scroll down to view the instruction booklets, and prepare yourselves.

I have been doing these things since 2007, so I reckon I qualify as a seasoned pro at these things by now; but I doubt you will be that much more bewildered by it all than I am. I suppose I’ve done just enough reading to at least understand all the rules now, but there will be more than a few types that I will encounter for the first time when it really matters, in the competition itself. 

I might save more on the puzzles themselves for tomorrow. It’s getting late and there’s a long week ahead. I’m glad to be back at championships for the first time since 2019, to seeing old friends once again, and also to see how well the competitive juices get going again. My thanks also to the organisers for all they have already done in preparation - I was there in 2014 and once you’ve been through that, you certainly have my solidarity!

Times Sudoku Championship 2017

So I suppose I had better write something about winning this year's competition before an article appears in tomorrow's paper if 2015 was anything to go by - although the fact that it wasn't a snotty work experience boy who did the interview this year, and I haven't been woken by a desperate phone call asking "is there anything interesting about you?" I suppose is a good sign.

In previous years I have had to get up very early on a Saturday morning to make it in time for the competition, which takes place at the News building opposite the Shard .  This year is much better as I have recently moved to London and find myself living about a 10 minute  walk away.

Championship Report: 2015 Times National Sudoku Championship

There was a time and place, dearest reader, when posts on this blog (and I really still do hate that word) were given titles of Radiohead tracks.  Whilst some things never change - such as hopefully the continuation of these reports - somethings do and so we'll all have to deal with a boringly functional title.

The build up to this year's championships was a little different from previous years, with organisation behind the scenes being handled by some Times admin staff; the usual suspects David Levy and Tony Corfe were to take over on the day.  There had been one major change however: in previous years the competition format meant that the grand finalists were the best 8 from solvers who had solved two preliminary sessions.  This year reverted to a much earlier format (going back to perhaps 2007 or 2008?) whereby solvers were entered into exactly one of two of the preliminary sessions and the best four from each session would make it through to the solver.

The letters through the post confirming entry were rather delayed, but this little bombshell was something that Mark Goodliffe for instance had initially missed.  I was not the only one pondering this little complication, as it soon became apparent that the top 3 qualifiers from last years competition - Myself, Mark and David Collison - along with two-time champion George Danker had all been entered into the afternoon session.  This seemed to be running the distinct danger of overloading one of the two preliminaries, which I think George took up with the organisers who then promptly asked both George and Mark whether they wouldn't like to take part in the morning session itself.

Anyhow, sticking to the afternoon session was entirely fine by me; I definitely like to have more rather than less sleep on a Saturday morning.  My trip down from Milton Keynes to London was very uneventful, the main highlight being that instead of trekking over to Tower Hill and walking over to Thomas More Square I could instead get the Northern line straight to London Bridge, emerge from its warren of tunnels and emerge at the base of that most delightful Qatari tribute to Barad Dur.  Having been suitably dazzled by that for a minute, I quickly located the shiny new News Corporation building, and decided to check in with the reception.  As it happened I was a little early, but not early enough to get any of the seats, so I decided to head to M&S and get some sandwiches and a bag of mints.

After returning we had to wait another 15 minutes before actually being let up to the top of Times Towers.  Some of the morning session had decided to stretch their legs, including 2013 champion Stephen Gerrard, as well as Mark and 2015's UK Sudoku Champion Heather Golding who I'd not realised was going to be there.  In retrospect it seems that the transfer of George and Mark to the morning session may have inadvertently lightened up the load for the afternoon!  This impression was further reinforced when I got to the top floor, and bumped into general UKPA hero Mike Colloby who had also been there in the morning.  After a good chat with him, and with George + his fiancee Sophie, I was able to digest a little information about how the morning session had gone.  There had been one particularly nasty puzzle, but the top 4 had ended up being Mark, George, Stephen and Mike.  Poor old Heather had had a bit of a nightmare, but those four certainly represented a strong half of the draw.

At this stage the following piece of trivia might help to explain my mind.  Having won in 2007, I made a stupid mistake in 2008.  I then went on to win in 2009 - and in 2010 then went on to make a stupid mistake.  In 2011 I made the grand final, eventually coming 3rd after freezing up in the final, but in 2012 made a stupid mistake (which agonisingly meant I could not go head to head with my great friend Rishi Puri).  In 2013 I stupidly missed the qualifiers so did not take part in the event.  In 2014 I made the grand finals, eventually finishing 2nd to Mark - perhaps you can spot what kind of forecast might logically be extrapolated for 2015?

With the addition of where I judged my form to be based on my performances on sudokucup.com and fed sudoku (check out my results for Saturday 12th), combined the volatility that is inherent to the I think it is safe to say I wasn't expecting too much from myself this year.  That's perhaps not say that I didn't consider myself the favourite - I do most years - but when any one from eight can win over a set of puzzles where any solver might miss something or make a silly mistake I don't think any one individual can have an a priori probability of winning greater than say 40-50%.  With Mark in tremendous form, I think I had my own chances at 25-30%, a little lower than in previous years, where I had not really come close to winning anyway.

So on to the preliminary.  I'm not sure there's a huge amount to say, other than the quirky booklet format remained, which meant that the first thing you see is puzzle 8 (as opposed to puzzles 5, 6 or 7).  Having not apparently recovered from my shaky online solving from the morning, I made a shaky start to number 8 before deciding I'd leave the puzzle half way through and instead have a look at the others.  This was a good idea - puzzles 5, 6 and 7 were much more to my liking and i whizzed through them all with out any incident.  After staring at puzzle 8 for a bit, I went into panic mode and made a "bifurcation" (rest assured that I still love that particular word, dearest reader).  My first attempt met with a fairly quick contradiction; the other route slowly led to the resolution of the puzzle - and after a couple of minutes of very carefully checking the filled grid for mistakes, I handed in after 20 minutes.

Having gone back through both sets of preliminary puzzles, I hadn't missed anything overly difficult in puzzle 8 - just a simple case of a naked triple in box 2.  This seemed in contrast with the stinker (puzzle 3) from the morning session which I think only resolves using x-wings (although please correct me if I'm wrong), and certainly put Mark's finishing time of 22 minutes in a very good light.

At the end of the hour I was very relieved to hear I'd made it through to the grand final.  It also turned out that I was 10 minutes quicker than the next finishers - of whom there were 5 or 6.  Joining me in the final would be Andrew Dyson, David and Ned Walker.

As always, the preliminaries are over at 2pm with an hour's break before the grand final starts at 3.  As always I wasn't particularly hungry, but I forced down a bag of crisps and a chicken and bacon sandwich anyway in one of the meeting rooms.  This was actually reasonably relaxed, with plenty of good banter from Mark and Heather (who will be joining me and David McNeill in representing the UK at the World Championships next month) amongst others in the room.  Nevertheless the excitement does slowly build as the clock nears 3, with the inevitable return to competition.

I think it's safe to say that as we were taking our seats all I was really focused on was being pleased that I had a seat in the front row, which removes any temptation to be distracted by any of the other competitors.  It had turned out that in one of the preliminaries, David Balderson had handed in answers to the four puzzles spread over two booklets in a time that would have placed him in the top 4.  I am not sure whether this was the morning or the afternoon session, but having initially been left out of the final David B was then invited to be the 9th man in the final.  This was certainly the fairest resolution to this unfortunate state of affairs, and an option that I sometimes wish was open to us for the 2014 WPC.  But like I say, I wasn't paying too much attention to this.  On to the final.

I started by making a conscious effort to solve the puzzles in order this time.  And things started well!  Puzzles 9 and 10 were both done before 7 minutes were up.  I know this because there was a great innovation for this year's competition: screens displaying countdown timers!  I was solving with good rhythm and spotting the naked subsets almost immediately.  I thought the same was true for puzzle number 11, until I was about 2/3 of the way through puzzle, where a contradiction suddenly popped up from nowhere.  When this happens it is possibly a devastating blow to your solving, because not only is your rhythm thrown completely off kilter, but it also introduces the nagging doubt in the back of your mind that it is perfectly possibly for you to make a silly error somewhere along the line and be totally oblivious to making it - until, if you're lucky - it blows up in your face and you catch it.  If you're unlucky it blows up much later when you think you've correctly solved it, and it turns out you haven't.  This time I did manage to catch it, and after the inevitably temptation of spending a few seconds looking for a quick fix (there is almost never a quick fix) I had to go with the option of rubbing everything out.

Solving a puzzle for the second time can be a very odd experience.  Some of the time, because the memory of key solving steps are fresh in your mind, it can end up being reasonably quick and any time lost is minimised.  However what can equally happen with your confidence shaken is that you completely miss all the steps that you had previously made, worrying about the faint imprints still visible in the papers and wondering whether you might actually be able to use them as a shortcut back into the puzzle (Don't do that!!!). Happily my experience this time round lay somewhere between the two.  I was quite careful up until the point I reached the area of the grid that had yielded the previous contradiction, but on entering in different numbers with no contradiction the adrenaline started kicking in and the rest of the puzzle went into the grid in something of a rush.

Which just left puzzle number 12.  I'm not sure exactly what the clock was showing at this point, but I'm guessing this was roughly 15 minutes in.  What my intuition was telling me was that Mark might well be up with me so the gloves had to be off for this last puzzle and this had to go down as quickly as possible.  Maybe this was letting emotion get a little the better of me, because I got about half way in before my progress ground to a halt.  Panic mode definitely set in and I set about looking for good places to bifurcate.  When you've put yourself under pressure this can sometimes be harder than it should be: all you need to do is go looking for pairs, or else numbers which can only go in one of two places in a row/column/box.  My first attempt looked like it was about to come up trumps for me, until with about 10 empty cells a contradiction loomed large.

I have previously described my guessing technique as "shambolic" in an explanation of why I never used to guess.  What might previously have happened is that I would forget where I had started bifurcating and then simply repeat the same branch - however maybe it's the case that I am now older and wiser and my technique has sured up a little.  What I had done here was for the bifurcation ensure that any entered numbers were entered in lightly and then circled - meaning they can very easily be rubbed out.  In this case this was about 1/3 of the grid so this definitely helped me out.

What can also happen in these circumstances where one branch yields lots of sequential information before getting to the contradiction, is that the other branch gives you sod all and then you have to make another guess.  For a fleeting second I thought this might be the case here - however I soon spotted the next deduction and I was on my way.  I was fairly confident that no-one else had yet handed in as I was filling in the finale few empty cells, so all I had to worry about was the structural integrity of the lead in my pencil which had suddenly seemed to have failed right at the last, with the final number to be placed only going in at the third attempt.

There was no time for doing anything other than a quick empty cells check before handing in, shortly after 21 minutes.

As is traditional, the remaining ~40 minutes sat in silence waiting for everyone else to finish entails a special sort of purgatory.  I attempted to do some killer sudoku from the book in the Times goody bag, but by this stage I think my mental energies were spent and I just couldn't concentrate.  Instead I was mentally preparing myself for the seeming inevitability of having made a mistake.  Indeed, when the hour was up, nothing seemed to happen for about 5 minutes before David Levy announced they needed a further 5 minutes for the final results.  With the 9 of us sat in limbo, I announced that this was indeed a special sort of purgatory, and circulated my bag of mints whilst musing over the afternoon's football scores.

Eventually Tony and David came back, announcing the final results.  It turned out that 3 of the finalists had only solved 2 puzzles correctly, and that 2 of the finalists had solved 3 puzzles correctly.  When it came those who had all 4, with my name not having been mentioned coupled together with the fact I had handed in first, I permitted myself a celebratory punch of the air to confirm my 3rd victory!

And I suppose that pretty much concludes this write-up.  The new Times puzzle editor had made the effort to come to the prize giving, which was very good of him, although I'm ashamed to say I don't recall his name.  There was no one-on-one session with a photographer this time round - alas the picture in the paper has my golden envelope rather neatly blocking the 2014 WSC/WPC logo on my red polo shirt.  And because I'm neither hugely vindictive, nor looking for an "angle", I won't say anything about the journalist who tried to interview me.  With this write-up I firmly believe I have set the record straight!

P.S. If anyone has copies of the grand final puzzles, please let me know!

Kraljevica '12 day 4: World Puzzle Championship I

I was perhaps a touch late down to breakfast, but thankfully not feeling the worse for wear from the previous night.  Team UK were discussing dominoes strategies, led by James, and which mainly involved abusing uniqueness like a boss.  I sort of nodded my head along without contributing too much to the discussion.  Unfortunately I was in my own little world when it was mentioned that rather than the WPC desks being allocated individual names, only countries and teams.

As we all filed into the room, it was quickly apparent that Neil and James has nabbed the best two UK-A seats.  Perhaps this was for the best as those two were always going to clearly be beating both myself and Liane, but all the same after my positioning in the WSC, I can hardly say I was enamoured to be sat with Bram de Laat directly to my left, Ulrich Voigt directly to my right, Palmer Mebane a few seats back at 7 o’ clock and Hideaki Jo a few seats forward at 1 o’clock.  I will not complain in the slightest about having Michael Ley nearby - not because he isn’t a formidable puzzler too, because he most certainly is - but because before rounds he’d turn round and offer people some boiled sweets to help you going through the rounds.  I have made a note of this and I shall be trying something similar for future competitions.

WPC Round 1: Domino Hunt

So I don’t think I’ve described the bonus structure attached to various rounds throughout both competitions.  The idea was to have a relatively short round which the organisers anticipated people would finish.  If not enough people finished during this time, then a 5 minute extension would apply for everyone.  I think Ulrich did manage to finish in time, but I completely forgot about the extension and was guilty of rushing through the 10 point puzzle, as well of a couple of others.  So whilst I thought I had done reasonably well to have finished all but the last puzzle this round, it turned out that in my eagerness to abuse uniqueness I had made several mistakes.  Three in fact, scoring me 24/60 for the round.

Another short break, and then onto a longer round.  A nice two hour round!

WPC Round 2: Blackjack

This round was kind of cute, with lots of 21 themed puzzles.  In retrospect I think I probably got far too bogged down with the giant octopus puzzle, and only got 10 of the 21 puzzles out.  Moreover I made a silly mistake on the Zebra puzzle - a kind of paint by numbers puzzle which a priori had no connection to 21 but as you solved it revealed a giant pictogram of a certain two digit number.  Anyhow, 65/240 points is probably indicative that this is exactly the sort of round I’ll need to improve upon if I want to better my (so far) modest placings!

Onto lunch.  I was back to feeling dazed, and after finishing in the restaurant headed upstairs to the bar (for a lemonade!) and to get out my puzzle notepad.  I was still aiming to get my little killer puzzle completed and ready for publication on the blog for Friday, but the great thing about these championships is the fact you never seem to be alone for long.  Tiit wandered over and gave us some Estonian puzzle magazine.  Inevitably Jason materialised and before you knew it we were racing again.  I wanted a shot at him on a kakuro (unwise), and a killer (also unwise).  I think at this point Thomas - who was in the background somewhere blogging - had spotted a pattern, but I managed to pull things back to 2-1 with a good slitherlink solve.  I can’t remember the order of the other puzzles, but I think he then took easy as ABC, and I got the battleships and the hitori.  I’d like to think that I got the nurikabe to make things 4-3, but I honestly can’t remember.  I have the horrible feeling Jason probably shaded it.

Clearly I already had bigger things on my mind.  Like:

WPC Round 3: Twisted puzzles

This was basically a round of classic puzzles, where each of the puzzles had a solitary instance where the rules were bent slightly.  So think a kakuro with one cell left empty, or tents where one tree had two tens tied to it.  This round I spent a lot of time not getting the magnets out, and getting bogged down with the four winds with one lying clue, but all in all 48/120 wasn’t quite as disastrous as blackjack.

Still, no time to dwell on missed opportunities, the rounds kept a comin’!

WPC Round 4: Easy as ABC

Strangely enough, this featured no classic Easy as ABC puzzles, instead we a fun crossword variation, a cute snake variation and a somewhat clunky hex grid variation.  Three of each and half an hour to get things done.  Oh, except I don’t think any did.  Except maybe Ulrich (his third finished round of the day incidentally) and so we got the 5 minutes overtime again.  I managed all the crosswords and two of the three hexas, sadly breaking the third.  I get the feeling my time might better have been spent on the snakes, but 36/60 was at least better than half the points available, so not too bad.

Time for a coffee.  Get cup, press espresso button.  Press espresso button again.  Spoon in enough sugar to get a dentist twitching slightly.  Get some water so I wouldn’t dehydrate.  Take a trip to a toilet.  Have a bit of small talk with people sat around me, mainly Bram and Vasso.  Prepare for the next 90 minute round.

WPC Round 5: Black and White

A round with lots of shading!  I got 9 of 15 puzzles out, although as is always the way none of the really big hitters in the round.  Most frustratingly this included a really fiddly tapa puzzle worth 22 points which I just couldn’t tweak, despite probably spending the last half hour trying and failing to get a solution out.  I claimed at the time that I was going to boycott tapa forever and ever - or at least a few months?  Weeks!? - but I’m sad to report I accidentally did one on croco recently.  No mistakes though, so at least that’s something.  57/180 however is probably a score which undersells me.  Again!

That was that for the individual rounds, but as with the WSC there was a half hour break where the room was set up for the team round.  This second day of competition, and the temptation to go up to the bar and get a nice cool refreshing beer was greater than before, but again I managed to resist, instead guzzling down a bottle of coke.  Perhaps I should have had more of a discussion with Team UK regarding the team round, but I kind of hoped James had a bit of an intuition given his thoughts posted on the UKPA forums beforehand.  Anyhow, we got ourselves into position, right next to the German A team, ready for:

WPC Round 6: Marina

So this was just a giant optimisation puzzle where you had to place plastic boats on a massive grid with a marina drawn out.  Various bits of the marina had different (x5, x3 and x2) multipliers, and there were a few convoluted rules about making sure that every boat had enough space to individually get out.  I’d like to say we had a strategy, but what ended up happening was the four of us took a corner of the grid, filled it up, and then rotated round to start tweaking.  At the time, we had no idea how successful this would be, but I think it worked out OK because despite accidentally placing too many of one particularly type of ship, thus losing easy points, we finished slap bang in the middle of the pack.  Of course we were only to find this out much later; instead we left the competition hall feeling pleased with the detour from churning out puzzle after puzzle.  An optimisation problem of course needs a good sense of what is going on, but there is necessarily a large intuitive component to getting a good solution out.  Interestingly enough, AJ had a different perspective on things.  Since you had no idea how well you had done as a team, there was a lingering dissatisfaction for him.  On reflection I can certainly see how you’d think this.

For dinner, I think other members of team UK were efficient enough to grab a big enough table that we could all squeeze around, which was nice as typically we had to split our rather large contingent over at least two tables.  As per normal dinner lingered on before everyone slowly migrated upstairs to the bar.

Initially things were a bit quiet, Fred and Bastien were chatting away, and Bram was probably sat there with his laptop putting up something for his blog.  I think he’s unrivalled for the amount of practice material he prepared, and I took the chance to catch up with what Thomas and Palmer had had to say on their particular little patches of the internet.  I certainly got a chuckle reading about Thomas sleeping with socks on his hands to stop the insects biting in the night; thankfully I had no such problems with my room.

I had also managed to get the little killer for my blog, and set about formatting it up.  As a professional graphic designer who knows nothing other than Illustrator I got to introduce him to Inkscape, of which I am very fond of, even if you have to run it under X11 on a mac.  Neil was naturally curious and so I got him to have a go at solving it, challenging him to get it done before I came to giving it a rating.  My dearest readers are invited to look back at that particular blog post to see whether he managed this challenge.  Fred and Bastien came over and made lots of useful and helpful and particularly delightful comments about symmetry, and much laughter was had at my expense!

Inevitably the bar session reverted into another puzzling showdown, again with Yuka’s excitingly presented sudoku magazine.  I should mention this was doubly novel for me as the magazine read from back to front!  After the previous night’s experience, I think Bram had rightly been concerned about joining forces with me again, and so instead formed a formidable trio with Jason and Tiit.  My trio, presumably motivated by a desire to laugh at me some more, featured my two favourite francophones.

Having used up the actual relays in the magazine the previous evening, we had to improvise somewhat, and ending up flicking to the back of the magazine.  Or front of the magazine I should say!  We found a two page spread of classic sudoku, ominously labelled with numbers ranging from 40 to 70.  What could these numbers mean!?  Anyhow, the format this time round would be 3 individual solves, 3 paired solves and then 1 with all three of us.

Getting stuck into the puzzles it quickly became apparent that the “mysterious” numbers could only be time targets.  I was up first and so thankfully had the easiest puzzle.  I actually made steady progress through this one, and let out a half-delighted “x-wing” as I managed to get the puzzle up.  My opposite number, Tiit looked up and asked firstly whether I had guessed, and secondly whether I had made a mistake.  I’m not sure he was  totally convinced by either of my denials!  Anyhow, after these puzzles the difficulty ramped up and everyone was using things like forcing chains and other solving techniques that should never see the light of day in competition.  Beyond x-wings, swordfish, xy-wings and simple colouring I’m afraid I’m not much use here - although the x-wing I spotted that led to no digit being placed was met with more (!) laughter from Fred.  I think he was especially appreciative of the help I could offer after he’d cracked the hard part of the puzzle where I would point at the grid and say “two.”

At some point it reached about half 1 in the morning, when Bram said that he’d regretfully have to pull out of our self-inflicted sudoku painfest as he (rightfully!) argued he didn’t want to compromise his 2nd day of competition.  Unless you count the excellent spectator sport of endless mockery directed at me by Fred and Bastien, I can safely say that he missed nothing!

Kraljevica '12 day 3: Excursion

The rest of day 3 was to provide a respite from the intense day of competition on day 2, which I certainly welcomed.  We were to be bussed away on a series of coaches to have a tour of the nearby city of Rijeka.  Waiting for these buses to arrive, I found myself in a brief moment of solitude sitting in the sun, and was joined by multiple WPC champion Wei-Hwa Huang.  Wei-Hwa is something of an oasis of calm within the US ranks, and I can only imagine how much of a pleasure solving the sudoku team rounds must have been for them with him directing the solve.  I asked how things were within the team ranks and how his own preparation was going, and found his reply to be quite telling.  Being on a team with the twin peaks of intensity provided by Palmer and Thomas apparently rubs off on even the most phlegmatic of characters, and so whilst Wei-Hwa stated he was just here to have some fun, he also mentioned he felt a little pressure to get some preparation in just to keep his head above water.  We were briefly chatting about the various travel opportunities puzzling was providing us, when fate dealt a cruelly ironic blow, and Wei-Hwa pointed out that if I wanted to go on the excursion I should probably head over to the buses.

So I was conscious of the fact the tour guide on the bus was saying various things on the bus as we headed towards Rijeka, but as with last year I took the opportunity to whip out my notebook and get working on the little killer I was intending to publish on the Friday.  I’d had a good idea, but couldn’t quite flesh it out by the time we arrived.

There we were, probably in excess of 100 puzzlers on tour let loose in the city, which to be honest was quite a surreal experience.  We were loosely being guided by the tour guides who’d been on the buses through the landmarks of Rijeka, which firstly included some sort of a church which I presume from wikipedia was Svetište Majke Božje Trsatske.  This loosely translates as being a “sanctuary,” but the main church bit was far from tranquil as the puzzling horde invaded!

The next stop off was some sort of fort, with a good view of the city below but which was otherwise fairly unremarkable.  That said, it did provide the first starting of the German Michael Drinking Unit (Ley and Smit), who seemed to be sat down in every bar with a cigarette and a refreshing beverage to hand at every turn during this excursion!  After we’d all had our fill of the castle, we trudged back to the buses to be taken down the hill and into the city proper.  On the walking tour, I can’t claim to have been paying much attention, although I was quite amused when a fairly unimpressive arch was pointed out as having once thought to have been a triumphal arch (I can’t for the life of me think why when you compared this to say, Rome, Paris, or Barcelona for example...) and instead turned out to be an entrance to some Roman building.

Anyhow, I latched on to a group with the Americans and Prasanna.  Being hugely cultured individuals, we decided to pay our respects to another of Rijeka’s magnificent arches - or should I say golden arches?  Anyhow, I was of the opinion that it was quite hot and humid and it was high time to follow the lead of GMDU and find a nice place to sit down.  Whilst apparently Prasanna and Thomas were talking about the slim likelihood of me being able to roll out of the gutter and back onto the bus, later, I was having a good chat with Nick Baxter, Rodders and Will Shortz about far more important things: namely sport!  Not that I care all that much, but apparently the Ryder cup was still something of a sore point for Nick and Will.

As much as I’d have like to have lingered in the bar doing my best to fulfil Thomas’ prediction, we soon had to move back to the bus, to be taken to some hotel for a dinner, and the WSC closing ceremony.  Entering the hotel, we offered a choice of aperitifs (oh how I love mystery Eastern Europea spirits!) before I broke ranks with team UK and plonked myself down on what was to turn out to be the American table.  I should probably state that I’m all for team unity and the rest of it, but these championships come round once a year and I think it’s a waste not to go a mingling with everyone else - and it’s not as if for most of the breakfast/lunches/dinners at Uvala Scott weren’t being spent with the team.  Instead I found myself speaking about “math” with Josh Zucker (JZ mk II!), JZ (mk I) and Anderson Wang.  I think I managed to amuse them with my “talent” for factorising quadratic equations with integral coefficients by eye rather than an anything more pedagogical, but I was definitely pleased to employ some geometric group theory to help confirm an answer to a fiendish triangle counting puzzle Wei-Hwa had come up with.

The dinner drifted pleasantly by with the wine flowing and more puzzles appearing on the dinner table, before it was time for the prize giving ceremony.  The Poles were obviously jubilant with Jan’s victory, and had seemingly managed to acquire several of the aperitif bottles in preparation for a long night!

After the prize giving I thought it was probably best to say hello to Mike Colloby and Alan O’Donnell, who were the last of team UK to arrive having only just been driven in with Stefano.  Alan was participating on the WPC B team, whereas Mike had the important job of presenting the British bid to host the world championships in 2014.  I also managed to congratulate George Wang on the Chinese success.  Rereading an article he penned for I think the 2007 WPF newsletter it is remarkable to think how far puzzling in China has come in the last few years!

Being a little tipsy at this point, I stumbled onto a different bus to be driven back to Uvala Scott, which turned out to be a good thing as on it were both the victorious Poles, as well as a few of the Japanese.  Moreover, there was still plenty of the bottles of spirits going around, and Kuba took itself upon him to conduct the drinking on the bus, walking up and down the aisle inviting everyone to swig with him from the bottle.  Outstanding!  Needless to say, this wasn’t an opportunity the legendary Tetsuya Nishio was going to pass up on, and there were shouts of “Kampai” and “Na zdrowie” all round.

The remaining business of the day was to be held in the bar back at Uvala Scott.  Yuka Noyama had very kindly given me a copy of a rather exciting looking Japanese sudoku magazine - which was in stark contrast to anything you might find on sale here in Britain - and I had suggested that Jason go find so we could set up some racing!  In retrospect, it should probably not have surprised me as to how bad I was going to be, but I thought a relay team of myself, Gaurav Korde and Bram de Laat should have easily had the beating of Jason and the Greeks (perhaps they were Argonauts?).  The early running was good as I finished the first puzzle a minute or two ahead of Jason; I have a picture of him still working to prove this, ;-)  but things were to level out as some drunken idiot kept making mistakes.

The only thing for it was to grab another beer, and chat with the Poles for a bit before belatedly realising there was like some important competition or something due to be starting in the morning, and that we should probably attempt to get some sleep.  Or something!

Kraljevica '12 day 3: WSC play-offs

When I woke up I think it’s fair to say that, despite not knowing the overall results, I was fairly confident I hadn’t hit the heights of the top 8 and so would almost certainly not be participating in the WSC play-offs.  Now, an awful lot has been said about the format of the play-offs this year, but I am going to save any more detailed analysis to a future series of blog posts discussing the matter where I hope to engage the community at large.  Instead, I’m going to focus on describing them from a spectator’s point of view.

Kraljevica '12 day 2: World Sudoku Championship

For previous championships I have the feeling that arriving before about 10 in the evening gives you sufficient time to settle down, because I hadn’t quite woken up on the morning of competition with the usual butterflies in my stomach.  I’d woken up at 8 and was showered and changed and down in the restaurant a half hour later, and still nothing.  I can’t say I was particularly enamoured by the breakfast either.  The whole cold breakfast meats with bread and mustard wasn’t particularly what I wanted so in the end I plumped for some cereal.  It didn’t seem to make a difference between the yellow supposed corn version or the brown supposed chocolate version - both ended up being fairly cardboard-y.  Nothing very liberal sprinklings of sugar couldn’t fix!

Kraljevica '12 day 1: Arrival

So given some of the troubles that my fellow competitors had in getting to the Uvala Scott resort near Kraljevica, Croatia, I’m not going to linger too much on the blissfully pleasant time I had in Trieste waiting for the bus to transfer me.  The sun was shining, it was warm, we had had a gorgeous lunch up in the hills outside Trieste before coming down to enjoy a lingering coffee on the Piazza Unità.  Paradise!  There was momentary concern about whether the bus was actually going to show up at 5pm at the railway station, but after meeting up with a few other equally concerned puzzlers, it was quickly established the bus was at the nearby coach station instead.

Our route to Croatia had to backtrack to Trieste airport, where we picked up a few more puzzlers.  It was great to meet up with some of the Japanese contingent, Yuhei, Kota and Yuka, who had been been making a big detour through much of Italy as part of their journey as well as the Greeks - formidably led as ever by Vasso - and my old drinking buddy Jason of the US.  One of the great things about these championships is the chance to meet up with so many different people from different countries, but it is always nice to speak with someone who as English as their mother tongue.

Our merry busload didn’t even notice the Italy-Slovenia border, but at the Slovenia-Croatia border a chap came on board to inspect our passports.  I briefly wondered what he thought of our particular medley, but was more thankful that my middle names were remarkable for there being two of them rather than what they actually are.  I was also amused by the proliferation of weather symbols dispersed across the new British passport.  There was one further stop at some services, which seemed a little unnecessary given we were about half an hour away from the place, but it did give us a chance to stretch our legs and for Jason to purchase a bag of what I assume were sweets but were entitled something very close to the word scrotum.  Interestingly enough this was the last I heard of this particular bag of treats...

We finally arrived, turning a corner with a sign pointing towards a “sport disco” (my guess was rugby) and Uvala Scott.  Disembarking, we formed a nice orderly queue to receive our room keys.  As it was dark I couldn’t really get a feel for the place, but as I handed over my passport I noticed that this hotel’s key was actually a physical key, and on walking up to my room in the dark that this hotel was more like a concrete version of Butlins.  Oh well.  It’s not like the trip advisor reviews had been glowing, and quite frankly I end up spending as little time as possible in my room at these championships as is possible anyway.

I wandered down to the main bit of the resort, with the bar and the restaurant and the competition hall.  In the competition hall, the Q&A session for the sudoku championship was about to get underway, but I was pretty hungry at this stage and instead chose to grab some food from the restaurant.  As in previous years, the catering model was an industrial scale buffet - albeit one sorely lacking in both quantity and quality of cakes - which meant that the food wasn’t going to be particularly great, but at that particular moment in time I didn’t really care.  I passed over the complimentary glass of bubbly, which apparently couldn’t leave the restaurant, but bought a bottle of beer, which could, and headed over to the Q&A session.

I met up with the UK team, which at this point of proceedings consisted of the official A team, featuring Neil Zussman, Roderick “Rodders” Grafton and Michael Collins, as well as the two ladies, Liane Robinson and Emma McCaughan, who were unofficial B-team participants.  Liane pointed out that with spectacular timing I had arrived just as the questions had finished.  Not that that really mattered, I only had one minor query about whether a diagonal constraint was going to be present on the little killer (more on this later!) but otherwise the instructions seemed to be fairly self-explanatory.

We stayed and chatted on for a bit longer before deciding it was probably a good idea to head off to bed.  And I’d like to say that was that for the first day, but this would be to do discredit to a magnificent thunder storm that manifested at roughly midnight.  I’ve never experienced a thunder storm by the sea before, but I can tell you it’s quite an experience!  The lightning reflects off the sea and lights up the sky for miles and miles, and the thunder booms down, rumbling across across the water until it hits the shore and physically shakes the room.  Needless to say sleep wasn’t going to happen until Zeus, Thor, Perun et al had had their fun, and so whilst they were busy with all of that, I decided to have some fun of my own.  With a puzzle book.  ;-)

2012 Times sudoku championship write-up

Long story short:  a permuted 2 and 8 in R4C1 and R5C1 in puzzle #6 cost me a place in a grand final that, given my subsequent solve on the sidelines in 14 minutes and 25 seconds, I'd have probably won.  Still, I think the long story is worth it, so you'll have to allow me to indulge my writing whims dearest reader, and we'll walk down this cathartic road together.

WPC '11 - update #7

Right, so we’re up to Saturday. I woke up feeling a little rough – perhaps the late nights at the bar were catching up with me, but I think at this stage I was also coming down with something. All I could manage for breakfast was a couple of bowls of tea. Yes bowls, not mugs. The mugs were definitely smaller and had only one handle!

The main attraction of the day was going to be the WPC play-offs, but before this was to begin there was one remaining team round to get through. The “wrong” puzzles! Basically, a set of 8 different puzzles, with a set of 8 4×4 repair patches to fix the broken puzzles. I was quite pleased to quickly get the fillomino sorted out, and then proceeded to struggle for a long time with the nurikabe, reasoning that as a constructor I could feel out which area of the puzzle was broken. I think Neil, David and Gareth each got another puzzle out – which obviously reduces the complexity of the round massively, but we couldn’t really make any further progress. We thought we had nailed down which patch should be used for each of the remaining puzzles, but as it turned out the piece I was trying to get the nurikabe to work with was the wrong one. I briefly had a go at the battleships and lighthouses, but to no avail. Gareth then whizzed through it towards the end, thinking he had it done, but having left something minor out. So not a particularly great end to the WPC for GBR-A – I think it turned out that GBR-B had managed to beat us for this one.

Afterwards, there was a bit of a scrum around the scores. From a British perspective, it was awesome to see that Neil had held onto 10th place, and would therefore be taking a place in the play-offs. A bit further down the list (past countless Germans!) was David, who had faded a little but was still solidly top 50 which is something that he maintained was a good finish. I was next on the list, unofficially 69th, but officially 59th, which I guess I am happy about despite flirting with a top 50 finish myself for a little while. Gareth, the next Brit down the list (not too far behind me), had also flirted with the possibility of finishing ahead of me.

So yeah, having spent lots of previous posts moaning about how mediocre my performance was, this should be tempered by a couple of things. Firstly, I was the 3rd best Brit, which was something that I had put some pressure on myself to make sure I achieved, and secondly, I was not too far off that benchmark of the top 50. It wasn’t a brilliant performance, but not bad either, and with any luck (if I manage to qualify for the team!!) something I can look to beat and build upon in future years. GBR-A had finished in 11th place, a record high, which I guess was mainly by virtue of Neil’s individual score. I don’t think we particularly distinguished ourselves during the team rounds, so hopefully this augers well for a top 10 finish in future years.

Byron felt a little down about his performances – I think he was looking to make the play-offs again – but his personal theory was he hadn’t had enough practice. Equally as inconsolable was Aga, who after what had turned out to be a difficult second afternoon, had just missed out on not finishing on the last page of the print-off. Nevertheless, it was hard to be inconsolable for too long at any of these events, so we dusted ourselves off, and headed into the competition hall for one last time.

Our choice of seating was hardly ideal, right below the big projector screen which had a list of the play-off contenders together with their time penalties based on score differences from the main rounds. A priori, this seemed like a three horse race between Ulrich Voigt – who’d finished top of the pile – together with the Americans Palmer Mebane (2nd) and Thomas Snyder (3rd). Hideaki Jo, Bram de Laat and Peter Hudak, whilst all being incredibly strong solvers, seemed to have too much to do to catch up with the big 3, and the line up was completed by Nikola Živanović, Ulrich’s brother Roland Voigt, Wei-Hwa Huang and of course darling of this blog, Neil Zussman. Michael Ley of Germany could count himself very unfortunate not to be taking part, having finished 7th overall but nevertheless ineligible for the play-offs, seeing as he was only the 5th best German qualifier and therefore not a part of their officially recognised A team.

I’m a little hazy on the details, but essentially the play-offs started off according to the form book, with Ulrich leading from the front, Palmer seemingly catching him and Thomas not far behind. Further down the field, Wei-Hwa was beginning to make up ground from his starting position of 9th (what was it with being in 9th?), but Neil seemed to have tripped up on the first puzzle. By the time the first cut was reached, again after the first puzzle, Neil had unfortunately fallen along with (I think – I’m sketchy on the details here) Roland and Nikola.

At various points during the proceedings, handouts of the puzzles were given out. The first was a quirky no 4 in a row, and the second a battleships puzzles. Against the trend of my puzzling form, I had both these puzzles out in 2 or 3 minutes and the rather misleading feeling that these play-offs couldn’t be so bad! Anyhow, by this middle stage Thomas had seemingly lost a little ground on Palmer and Ulrich. On puzzle 5, I think a borderless something or other, Hideaki pulled off a solve which seemed in the order of about 30 seconds, which left him best of the rest by the time of the second cut. Remarkably it was Wei-Hwa who took the 5th spot – continuing the trend of the 9th starter surging forward. This meant that it was good-bye for Peter and Bram.

With 3 puzzles to go Ulrich still had the lead, with Palmer hot on his heels. Thomas hadn’t managed to recover and with puzzles running it out it was becoming apparent that the three horse race was now a direct competition between Ulrich – still the favourite – and Palmer. Heading into the 8th puzzle, which was apparently a divide and conquer, Ulrich seemed to hit a mental block. They were now close enough to see exactly when they were applying rigorous use an eraser. Or so I thought! I saw Palmer erasing out of the corner of my eye, and whispered to Aga and Byron that he was struggling too – except that what I must have seen was in fact a quick checking gesture. As the rest of the room was gasping at the sight of Palmer handing in first, they were laughing and informing me that I was stripped of any commentating duties I had bestowed upon myself. More importantly, Palmer had now taken the lead with one puzzle to go!

There was to be no further twist in the tail – as Palmer says you simply can’t not solve a password path – and as he handed in the last puzzle and waited an agonising minute for everything to be okayed, he put his head in his hands. Ulrich retained his composure after his stall on the 8th puzzle to take 2nd, just in front of Thomas who had belated caught up a little ground. Wei-Hwa had managed to overhaul Hideaki to ensure there were three Americans in the top four, capping off a dominant US performance which had also see them claim the team title. It seems Will is left in the shade here, but there’s no doubting what a great solver he is too, and completes an American team every bit as stellar as the Germans.

It was interesting talking to Thomas afterwards – I rather got the impression that he didn’t feel he had much hope of winning beforehand given the 5 minutes he was conceding to Ulrich, but he didn’t seem too upset with 3rd. Given his general dominance in the online LMI tests, not to mention that clinical WSC performance, it seems a little crazy that he’s still waiting on a first WPC title – but I suppose he’s really going to need to earn it with Palmer and Ulrich in this kind of form. Palmer remained calm and emotionally level during the aftermath – it struck me that if I were in his shoes with a maiden world title to my name that I’d be a little excited, but Palmer was barely even cracking a smile. On the other hand perhaps it is this level-headedness that is exactly what makes him a great solver – not phased when he hits a sticking point in a puzzle, and not carried away as he blasts his way through another set. Anyhow, I tried to inject some jollity into affairs and stole a picture with the 1st place trophy. All this achieved was a near miss with the 3rd place trophy!

At lunch I wasn’t feeling particularly great, and I don’t think I made it much further than a bowl of soup. Affairs seemed so bad that I thought I was going to have to pass up on some cake, but eventually I was brought to my senses and managed to squeeze down one piece. By this time I was beginning to get excited about the afternoon programme, an organised game of football in a nearby sports hall. David had earlier mentioned that various people at previous championships take this very seriously, and especially the Eastern Europeans. I wasn’t so phased by this, reasoning that I’m a pretty handy player myself and not nicknamed “twinkletoes” for nothing. This definitely amused Jason when I mentioned it to him.

As a big crowd gathered by the hotel lobby at 3pm, I was beginning to eye up who might be the danger men but not really coming to any conclusions. I was perhaps a little more apprehensive about the team I might end up, but no matter. We walked on over to the hall, and then various organisational chaos broke out in trying to form everyone into teams. This seemed easier for contingents like the Turks or the Poles, but it seemed that an Anglophone team was beginning to break out. And by anglophone, I mean me (GBR), Byron (CAN), Dave (CAN), Julian (CAN – although admittedly living in GBR) and Jason (USA) – which was I’m afraid to say a little disheartening as I get the impression soccerball isn’t such a huge deal on the other side of the Atlantic. Our team was completed by a Romanian guy whose name I didn’t catch, and Tatsuya, a member of the Japanese puzzle A team. I was especially pleased to have him on board because he was kitted out as goalkeeper and therefore resolved the tricky issue of deciding who amongst the rest of us was best qualified to go in goal (or as is usually the case with these things, the least qualified to be out on pitch). Our remaining team members included Martin (CAN), equipped with a camera in the stands, and I think I’ll claim Vasso (GRE) for moral support as well. Yes, I did say stands by the way – there was a fairly sizeable pitch, and on the sides there were maybe 10 rows of tiered seats for spectators. What a great idea!

A total of 6 teams roughly emerged, including a team made up of the Hungarian organisers, who got the fun and games going against a mixed team. The standard wasn’t particularly impressive, and I suppose this is where I started breaking out into a commentary in the stands, which swiftly became a lesson in tactics from Sports Coach Collyer to Team Anglophone as I pointed out where (in my humble opinion) the simple mistakes were to be avoided. The first of my utterly invaluable nuggets came as I noticed that various efforts on goal were very comfortable for the keeper, and therefore that the thing to do was to always keep your shots on goal low and on the ground. This definitely impressed Dave, who mentioned that similar wisdom also applied in hockey.

The second match involved the Poles and someone else – and the Poles were quite impressive. Jan M looked very composed in goal, and both Tomasz’s looked very composed on the ball. They strolled to an easy win in their 15 minutes, by which time I was positively itching to get out of the stands and on to the pitch. Our game would be versus a rather young and energetic looking Turkish team, and I vaguely set out a 3-3 formation, with Jason and Byron staying further back alongside our rather cultured – not to mention impressively moustached – Romanian sweeper, and myself, Julian and Dave pushing further forward. I am naturally a bit of a goal poacher by trade, but I also recognised that I was probably going to have the edge on fitness on the team so I thought it’d be best for me to perform a sort of manic role in the middle whereby I’d also try to make myself an option for a pass when our team were in possession.

Miraculously this seemed to hold to a plan as our defence held up reasonably solidly as the more assured Turkish team had the best of the initial play. When we had the ball as well, I was pleasantly surprised to see that rather than hold onto the ball too long and get caught in possession – another common mistake that Sports Coach Collyer had warned against – we were actually passing it quite nicely, albeit without too much quality in the final pass. And then!? On one such foray forward, the ball broke loose but I had managed to anticipate where it was heading. After cutting inside one defender I found myself with an opportunity to have a low snapshot with my left foot, and to my immense satisfaction I made a clean contact, putting the ball beyond the keepers left hand. Against all the odds team anglophone had the lead!

Naturally the Turks began to press forward more, but our defence was still looking quite comfortable and there was more space up the field to exploit. Twice we hit the frame of the goal as firstly I was sent through, and slid the ball past the keeper agonisingly onto the post, and secondly as Dave hit a ball that bounced up onto the crossbar (keep it low!! Although this one in fairness was nigh on impossible to do so). As we gained in confidence we over-stretched and let the Turks in, and via a couple of unfortunate deflections they had an equaliser.

At about 10 minutes, whatever it was that was keeping me under the weather was beginning to take its toll, and breathing became markedly difficult, and my mad running around the pitch stopped as instead I tried to recover by resuming my role as a goal poacher. The Turks perhaps looked the more likely winners as the 15 minutes drew out, but in the end we held on for a rather creditable draw. I was definitely pleased with how everyone had played, and rather than be exceptionally tense and competitive I was feeling remarkably chilled out. Or at least struggling for breath.

I should perhaps say at this point that I normally get immensely wound up for one reason or another whilst playing football (at least this is usually the case playing with the rather inept Maths mailing list – I can safely say puzzlers make for far better footballers than mathematicians) but the closest I came to spilling over was the rather short sighted decision to permute the first two games of the next round of matches between the four teams who had played the first two games in the first round of matches – leaving us to presumably play the Turks for a second time.

Anyhow, we eventually got on for a second time (after letting the Turks play someone else first), playing a team featuring some of the Croatians. We seemed to be holding up quite well, but conceded a few unfortunate goals continuously. Unfortunate, as in our team stopping play as a door opened at the side of the pitch whilst the opposition played on. It was all a little bit disappointing after our heroic efforts in the first game, but I got a consolation goal right at the end where I picked the ball in a fairly advanced position, shuffled about a little with my feet making room for an opportunistic pot-shot that caught the keeper off guard. I think the match ended 3-1 or 4-1 or something.

People were beginning to filter out by this stage – as I imagine some of my less committed but certainly no less dear readers have begun to at this stage of this monster post – and those who were left standing essentially kept going. By this stage legs were getting tired, but I had caught my breath back and was now able to exploit the state of affairs. Jason was to comment that he now saw why they call me twinkletoes!

We headed back to the hotel, bruised and grazed as you morally should be after playing a decent game, and it was by now completely dark. I headed up for a quick shower, before agreeing to meet Dave in the bar for a restorative beer or two before the closing dinner and the evening entertainment. We were joined at a table on the first floor (yes via more shocks from the hand rail) by some of the British team. Shortly after the second Restorative Beer we were called in to the competition hall for the dinner.

I think I shall cut short description of the evening entertainment, as I’m beginning to lose a little steam now with this point. Suffice to say there was plenty of wine, lots of applause for the winners of all the various competitions, and a few posing for photos – a lot of which you can see in my relevant facebook album. After the dinner there was a sort of Hungarian country and western band playing, one of Gyorgi’s favourites apparently. More importantly I had reunited with the Poles, who were wondering if I could really drink like they apparently could.

Part of this challenge involved Michael L’s prize for being the top unofficial scorer – he was given one of those 5 litre kegs of Bitburger that he wasn’t going to get on the plane back to Germany. I think it’s safe to say that he got the biggest cheer of all as he went up to receive the prize, and it was really nice to see his “unofficial” achievements (I think I might have created an extra space in the play-offs for him anyway if I were running things) recognised and to have the beer shared out amongst so many puzzling friends. After all, the wine was beginning to run out! The night was concluded firstly by a trip to the bar again, where we were treated to another rendition of Byron’s sudoku song, along with the wonderful experience of having been bought a beer by the legendary Tetsuya Nishio. I was perhaps more than a little merry at this stage, but had one last set of photos with the Poles before they headed off on their 3am shuttle to the airport. Will and Nick were also on this shuttle so it was nice to also see them off.

The last memories of the WPC involved karaoke to the not so small hours of the morning. I’m sure bleary eyed spectators must have been slightly entertained to see me go through a rendition of Karma Police – a surprise thrust upon me by Jason – but there I was in front of a screen with the words “detuned radio” forming my backdrop. Bram tried to get this with a photo, but was a little late, which is probably understandable. As the karaoke also wound down, I was left with Bram discussing the finer points of writing puzzles. I didn’t have my pad with me, but he did and it was fascinating to see some of his ideas and thought processes. If you haven’t seen his blog – it’s linked there I guess somewhere way up to the top left by now – then you should definitely check out his puzzles, they are great! And that was it, the last lingering memories of a really wonderful set of championships. It seemed fitting to see things out by talking puzzles until the cleaners came to chuck us out for their morning shift, all the while ignoring silly little urges like wanting to sleep!

If you’ve made it this far, dearest reader, then I can only say I am most impressed by your stamina, and I’ll begin the round of thanks by saying I appreciate your interest. Since being in Eger, I’ve noticed a massive upturn in traffic to this blog and I can only hope that you’ll stick around for a puzzle or two on future Fridays. I’d like to offer my personal thanks to the organisers for being responsible for certainly one of the best weeks that I’ve had in the last few years. It’s also very sad to have had to have said goodbye to so many good friends from literally all over the world. I guess we will all keep in touch via the magic of blogs and facebook and so on, but seeing everyone once a year is something that I’ve grown to love more and more as I’ve done these championships. Here’s hoping my streak at these things continues, and I get to see everyone for many years to come!

WPC '11: update 6

Right dearest reader, I have a nice and empty Saturday morning to fill and we are going to get through this together!

I think I’ve managed to get this far without describing some of the quirks of the hotel. The first is that the hotel was internally connected to another adjacent hotel, which in particular had the restaurant where we had our buffet dinners and in particular, the large selections of cake. Let me tell you, the three cakes for dinner on the Friday evening (I guess bringing me to a count of circa 250 were an immense struggle and I made Jason take a photo of the finished plate once I was (eventually!) done. I suppose the walk to and from the restaurant helps justify all this cake as I can’t exactly describe it as short!

Another quirk of the hotel was the staircase leading up from the lobby and reception, to the space on the first floor outside the competition hall. In particular, this staircase is directly responsible for a massive phobia of hand rails. Maybe it’s fair to describe me as a highly charged individual, but these blasted hand rails would give me a small static shock every time I even thought about reaching my hands out to them! You’d have thought I’d have learned, but each time I did it I realised my mistake too late to pull my hand away from the inevitable ZAP. Perhaps what sums up my feelings on the matter best is expressed by what happened when I tried explaining this to whoever I was (I think Dave B), who calmly remarked he had no such problem and demonstrated that he could put hi hand on the rail with no such problem. I look on with incredulity, and then try the other hand rail. You don’t need to be a Monty Python writer to know what happened next.

I think in the evening Julian and Jason had planned on going to a nearby karaoke bar, and had maybe even convinced some local girls to come with them – but I remained a little whacked out from competition and instead focussed on finishing my slitherlink. There were no apparent seats or sofas going, so instead I followed Will B’s lead and sat myself on the floor propped up against a wall. This was actually quite fun because lots of people came over at various points to see what I was doing. Luckily for me it wasn’t immediately obvious that the puzzle I had made was verrry broken.

As I was beginning to format everything up on my laptop, I was dragged in to the competition hall for the evening programme. (Are you sure you can use a laptop for this?) This, turned out to be another round of puzzles, this time some out-takes from both the WSC and the WPC. I was still sat at my desk, struggling to turn my 10×10 slitherlink template into a 17×17 template, and assumed that I’d be assimilated into a team nearby, presumably with Aga B and the Poles; but in the end it turned out to be Byron, Jason and Vasso. Which actually forms a pretty strong team now that I think about it. I was handed a page full of sudoku, and struggled my way through these slowly but solidly. I had more fun with the sick kropki, and then even more fun with the borderless skyscrapers. I suddenly understood the fits of laughter that were emerging every now and again when what I thought was a broken puzzle could in fact by solved rather trivially as a 1×1 “grid!” Apparently there was also another trick like this with the borderless islands puzzle. Towards the end, I guess when my puzzle solving abilities were re awakening I was quite pleased to solve what I thought was quite a beastly non-consecutive sudoku by finding a finned x-wing to eliminate a 5 from a set of 589 which then brought some consecutive constraints into play which then solved the puzzle. Will B afterwards assured me that this wasn’t strictly necessary! In the last 3 and a half minutes I thought I’d give the odd/even view sudoku a go, not expecting to get it out. But I did, with barely seconds to spare, which was quite a high point to personally end on.

Much amusement was had later when Jason, who has gone to hand in the papers, swiftly returned to inform me that I had not written my “name” on the paper. I swiftly rectified this sorry state of affair by writing my “name” in the two empty squares I’d left in the non-consecutive puzzle. I’m glad to say that’s the first time all week that I’d actually made that particular dickhead error.

The rest of Team Vasso has also done very well, because we ended up finishing in 7th place, behind the likes of two Japanese team, an American team, a combined Czech and Slovak team and so on. We were also one team up from a certain GBR-A, who informed me that they’d clearly have done a lot better if they had another sudoku solver on board. Whoops!

There was much debate about what to do next – apparently the karaoke bar looked not only dead, but wanted an entry fee as well – however as always with these debates the single line of “let’s go to the pub.” Cue a few more beers, some games of pool, some bowling and much merry-making with by now what was becoming the usual crowd.

And whilst I’m on the subject of pool, and with a doubles pairing with Byron I feel I need to introduce my unofficial role of WSC & WPC Sports coach (and yes sports over sport is definitely a nod towards my North American brethren). Early in the week whilst we’d been bowling, I felt I played an integral part in turning around Jason’s so-so start into his one man show. The secret? A quiet word in Jason’s ear, calmly telling him that what he needed to do was “to bowl it down the middle.” We now move onto the pool, where I again wheeled out my calm-yet-authoritative tones and gently mentioned that if Byron wanted to start potting balls, he needed to “hit the object ball with the cue ball just there.” Again, this seemed to work a charm, as we doubtlessly romped to victory. Or something haha. More from Sports Coach Collyer tomorrow!

I can’t remember how long we were there for, but I guess we were there til the small hours of the morning again. I think that as I was leaving the Poles + others were gathered round a table playing poker. This was probably just as well because I find poker to be quite a dull game and this would certainly have sent me over the edge into some much needed sleep. Incidentally, Przemek has the same opinion, especially with regards to online poker. His approach is to play lots of games at once to keep him on his toes, whilst earning enough money from doing so to, say, not bother with anything quite as tiresome as a job.

Ok this entry is getting quite tangential now, so I am going to break off before I cover the last day in Eger!

WPC '11: update 5

And so, dearest reader, we move ever onwards and towards a finished championship report, of sorts. The second day of the WPC, the Friday started rather late coming down for breakfast, although I was glad of the appearance of some tea bags – even if if they were Lipton yellow labels. The problem with these is although they provide a tasty tea, which is crisp and refreshing, you can’t really make them with milk without the resulting beverage tasting like cardboard. I need a properly robust English Breakfast Tea in the mornings!

The first round of the day, round 8, was a “screen test.” Which means puzzles that appear on a screen for a short while, before disappearing. This was all well and good having read the instructions, but what my bleary head did not particularly need at this stage was lots of moving elements to these puzzles bouncing all around the screen. Ugggh. Mind you, I actually scored relatively well on this round, gaining more points here (130/200) than I did on some of the other rounds.

Round 9 was a “sprint.” Five puzzle types: Ariadne’s thread, numberlink, simple loop, shikaku and yajilin; four of each varieties to do, all in half an hour. Most of these are loop types, and when you consider Palmer’s description of Ariadne’s threads as “basically consecutive numberlink,” they were all things I am pretty strong at. (Although I can’t really recall having solved an Ariadne’s thread before this round.) Indeed this seemed to play out, as I had all but one numberlink and the 4 Ariadne’s threads out with 15 minutes to go. These remaining 5 took another 10 minutes, but I was feeling pretty smug about myself when I was able to declare that I had “finished!” a round of a world puzzle championships with time to spare. As I was finishing off these last few puzzles, I realised my heart was begin to race in much the way it has done in the past when I have closed in on various sudoku victories – particularly in the nikoli.com sudoku time trials. I wonder if the top solvers get something similar at certain times – I guess it must for example in the final play-offs.

Anyhow, as I’m sure you have previously read, increased satisfaction and smugness came when I heard Ulrich’s voice behind me also declare, some 30 seconds later. In what turned out to be an otherwise mediocre performance, I think this round made my WPC (at least the competitive puzzle solving aspect to it!).

OK, whilst I’d love to linger on that beautiful moment a little more, it’s probably time to move on to the next round – which was “divide and conquer.” This was a novelty to me at least, and the puzzle can best be described as fillomino, with the touching region constraints removed, and with a list of given pieces to fit into the puzzle by the side. The examples I had solved had all a bit of a numberlink flavour to them, what with the solver having to pack in the regions in the optimal fashion. I ended up struggling with this round, with some counting errors creeping in, and generally making unwise puzzle choices which were very far from maximising the potential points I might have hoped to get from the round. Oh well.

There was one final round for the morning, round 11, due to start at 11 seconds and 11 minutes past 11. Can you guess what the date was on that Friday? Why it was the 11th day of the 11th month of the twelfth year of the millennium…wait a second 2011! For a brief, errmm, second? there were lots of 1’s appearing on a digital display being projected to us, but unfortunately the papers were still being handed out so we started about half a minute late. The round itself was another one to forget for me, scoring a fairly pathetic 110 of the available 550 points – again probably due to a fairly poor choice of puzzles to solve. I kidded myself that this round might have been rescued had I got the 66 point nurikabe out, but again another round to forget.

I can’t remember how apparent the scores were at this stage – now that I think about I can at least recall seeing some before turning in late on Thursday night (or technically Friday morning). Anyhow, I think there was enough information floating around that Neil Zussman was in and around the top 10, and in with a seriously good shout of being the first Briton ever to make a WPC play-off. On debut, no less. If I’m not getting across just how seriously impressive this all is, Palmer managed 19th on debut in Poland last year!

I think during the lunch break I’d given up on blogging on my laptop, but was hard at work on the 17×17 slitherlink puzzle I’d started on the way to the caves on Wednesday, with the expressed wish of having a Friday puzzle to put out on a Friday (am I meta-blogging again?) but as always, the start of the afternoon rounds seemed to interrupt everything.

Rounds 12, 13 and 14 formed something of a marathon, lasting respectively 80, 60 and 60 minutes each. I think it’s probably fair to say that by this stage of the week I didn’t quite have the mental stamina required to keep going with this, and bearing in mind the points on offer for these rounds were probably the main reason that I ended up with my mediocre final result. Anyhow, I think I’m really beginning to whine a little bit too much about this so how about I talk about the rounds instead.

The “hungaricum” – I guess this means something like Hungarian collection, because I saw various purveyors of tat at the airport trade under this same name – had some fun moments, most notably the windows puzzle. I’m trying to work out exactly what I spent my 80 minutes on here, because I recall solving fairly well throughout (modulo puzzle choice, haha) but my total of 245/1115 seems more than underwhelming.

I also managed to tot up 245 points for the set of “innovatives,” this time out of “only” 940. Again I’m left with the feeling of wanting to know exactly what I did with my hour – although I guess I spent a fair chunk of time on the sudoku snails. Looking back at the score-sheets, I suppose this was actually a more competitive score relatively speaking, but again a little underwhelming.

Finally, the “best of” round. There was a vote earlier in the day where we were supposed to list our favourite puzzles of the championship, with the implication that these would appear again in this round for us to solve. Under that assumption, I didn’t do anything like vote for which I thought were the most beautiful puzzles, and instead voted for the types I thought I’d be good at solving (so the sprint round again!). This strikes me as a little bit of a shame, because this is not how things worked out, and I missed an opportunity to acknowledge fellow puzzle writers. Maybe when I get a chance to solve all the puzzles I left (there were many) I’ll come back and publicly announce my votes for the best WPC puzzles, for whatever shred of importance that may bear to anyone!

Anyhow, the twist with the round was essentially it was a 60 minute sprint of puzzles featured from all the rounds, generally of quite a small size and of a fairly easy standard, but not always. A flat rate of 10 points per puzzle applied, which is kind of a fun idea as it rewards different people for being good at different things all at the same time. At the end of play I thought I’d counted 33 puzzles solved, but my official score of 30 begs to differ. This was a solid if not spectacular effort, I think on better form I might have managed closer to 40 puzzles in the hours, if not even more.

Anyhow, if you’ve gotten through the end of this post, I think you are some of the way to understanding quite how draining that afternoon was! On the other hand it represented the end of the individual round, which was definitely something of a relief, with only one team round and the play-offs to look forward to the following day. I think I’ll postpone descriptions of the evening’s celebrations til the next post!

WPC '11: update 4

So I’m a little delayed, by approximately a week, but I’ll try and get things wrapped up.

So I guess we’re now past the rest day, ready to start competition on Thursday, the 1st day of the WPC. I’ve started writing this with only the instructions at hand, and without the results or my marked papers, so things will certainly be of a more impressionist nature. That’s the way it goes I’m afraid!

The first round was “in memorium,” dedicated to puzzle writers who recently passed away. Before things actually got going, some relatives were invited to the front to say a few words, and it was all a little poignant and sobering – I definitely felt moved as words were spoken about the puzzle community being a family, and how much it would have meant to the departed to see their puzzles being used at a world championship. Anyhow, the round got under way, and I recall solving a few puzzles which was something of a relief. My WPC campaign was up and running!

Round 2 was an hour’s worth of “assorted puzzles.” Whilst I felt I was solving reasonably well throughout this round I think my mistake here, as with many previous online puzzle contests as well as subsequent rounds in Eger, was my choice of puzzles. Generally I’m not amassing enough points to be making significant dents in the general classification.

The last round of the morning was “cows.” I’m not entirely sure where cows come into things, but essentially it was a round of star battle variations. This is a puzzle type that every time I think I have cracked, I always come across something new to throw me a little bit, and this was the case with this round. After getting the first two classic puzzles out reasonably quickly, I couldn’t get out the third for love nor money, and then proceeded to struggle away with some of the variations. With not much success – I only managed to complete one other during the time. Something of a disaster for me.

During the lunch break I think I finally got a chance to meet long time friend of this blog, Palmer “MellowMelon” Mebane. Palmer has the same sort of puzzling intensity about him as Thomas, and never seemed to be too far away from a puzzle. This probably seems a little vacuous given this much hindsight, but given Palmer’s results in LMI tests, as well as his spectacular victory in the USPC, but I always had Palmer down as a dark horse for the WPC title alongside the more experienced campaigners of Thomas and Ulrich. I also managed a little time to update the blog (wow – I’m blogging about blogging), but as I’m sure, dearest reader, you’ve already seen I had to quickly make tracks for the start of the afternoon session.

Round 4, “borderless,” was one I was more than a little apprehensive about, the idea of the round being you are given some classic puzzle types with outside clues, only the grids are much bigger than necessary, and there are some surplus rows and columns. In the half hour, I managed to get out the skyscrapers (much tweaking), and an easy as ABC which it turned out did use the whole grid after all. After the round it soon became apparent that the other easy as ABC was also trivial, in that it was a tiny 4×4 grid. Oh well. The round certainly could have gone worse.

Round 5 was one that I was more looking forward to, being a round of “evergreens.” Haha, what an evil round it was. I’ve not really had the chance to go over the numerous puzzles I didn’t do this round, but without the time pressure, and with my constructors hat on, I’m fairly sure I will fall in love with this round. Anyhow, basically there were all sorts of lovely twists to the puzzles in this round, to the point where rules to one puzzle were being used to define an almost entirely different puzzle idea. I basically remember struggling a whole lot with this round, maybe solving a meagre 3 or 4 puzzles during the hour – and pretty much on the spot resigning myself to a no more than mediocre debut WPC performance.

Speaking of debut performances, after the round was finished and I was necking several bottles of caffeinated sugar water, I got the chance to ask Ulrich how the round had gone. Speaking with fellow GBR-A debutant Neil Zussman I was astonished to hear that he was in the same ballpark for the round (circa 500 points), and I guess I was beginning to realise that we were going to see something completely spectacular. Certainly any pretensions of keeping up were disappearing rather rapidly!

The remaining rounds in the day were the team rounds. The first one was presumably courtesy of the sponsors, but was nevertheless a lot of fun. The idea is that you had various classic puzzle ideas presented in the form of board games. We were fairly confident we’d got 5 puzzles out, but were subsequently told only 4 were correct. Anyhow, I was fairly sure that the two puzzles I solved during the time were all good – the first was a set of cards with various arrangements of 5 matchsticks to be placed on a grid so that two cards in adjacent positions.

The second team round was also a lovely idea – a massive grid which combined four types: islands, snakes, anglers and lighthouses. Whilst 3 people were working on the main puzzle, the 4th team member was off solving an individual puzzle in return for a set of hints for the big puzzle. A priori, the implication was that these individual puzzles would be pretty easy, but in practice they were still at beast 3-4 minute puzzles. Perhaps what didn’t help was the fact that the first islands and lighthouse puzzles that I’ve ever solved were as part of this individual leg. The team as whole seemed to be making slow but solid progress, but unfortunately something seemed to break and we hadn’t quite done as well as we’d have liked to.

The puzzling done for the day, I was definitely in need of a beer, and was especially glad to grab one with Dave Baines of Canada. Dave has been angling for a mention in the blog, and I really like his idea of numberlink, except you are given that X cells in the grid aren’t going to be used so definitely keep your eye out for something like that in coming weeks. We were then informed that the evening entertainment was going to be a crossword tournament, which was good fun whilst I entering answers into firstly the American style square grid and then a more European style crisscross grid – but eventually both answers and beer dried up, and we left. I still have no idea just how well I did with this, although again with hindsight I can tell you that the Croatians were very good at this, taking 1st, 2nd and 3rd!

Time for some sleep? Not a a bit of it! We headed downstairs to the bar, which was also equipped with larger than normal pool tables and smaller than normal 10 pin bowling lanes. I flattered to deceive with my first bowl, hitting a clean strike whilst kissing the air but it went downhill from there. Jason again proved to be the dark horse, easily winning. Meanwhile, in the lane next to us, Alan O’D was once more winding up his international standard hammer arm, flinging bouncing bombs down the lane. I get the feeling Alan regards the speed gun at a bowling alley as more legitimate challenge than that of knocking mere pins down!

At about 1 or 2 or something we decided to leave the bar. To sleep? Don’t be stupid! To use the hotel table tennis and foosball facilities. Being a little tired and a few beers down I don’t think I impressed Jan M very much, but with a little warm-up I was playing some reasonable stuff with Sebastian M of Germany and Vasso of Greece. Finally I decided to call it a night, but not before chatting a little with Przemek of Poland. He is remarkable for any number of reasons, but two which came to mind were the fact he’s massively short-sighted without actually resorting to any sort of correction, and secondly that he enjoyed the evergreens round a lot.

Right, time for a break in blog posts. If nothing else, I need a pee.

WPC 11: update 2

The first WPC day is over and it’s been a little bit all over the place for me, but more on that later. By the by, the latest cake count is up to 22, although the bombshell this evening was that a set of 3 cakes appeared towards the latter part of the dinner period, replacing an earlier set of 2. !!!.

With the WSC over and done with it was probably just as well there was a rest day the day after. With the play-offs over and done with, there was then a Q&A session for the WPC. In practice this turned out to be the start of an evening of puzzle racing, with the first set being determined by a Japanese newsletter packed with what turned out to be devilishly fiendish takes on some classic puzzle types. The first round was a fairly tricky kakuro, with Thomas and Byron joining in too. As questions were being fielded, we were manically scribbling away with Jason eventually confirming his inevitable victory. We tried further examples from the newsletter but these turned out to be a little tricky for the purposes of racing.

We thus retired to the bar for a beer, before finding some sofas and some copies of a Turkish puzzle magazine and we set to work. We were fairly evenly matched on the numberlink in that one of us had managed to have the relatively small puzzle out before the other had blinked, but the treat came with the slitherlink where I put in a pretty rapid solve. By this point we were being observed by Ondrej S and Lenka V of the Czech republic, who were most impressed that I was filling in bits of the loop with no hesitation where there was no apparent logic. It would later turn out hat Ondrej – aka Cert – was also most impressed with my apparent 51 second diagonal sudoku solve on fed; alas I had to inform him the timer was broken and there was no chance I could even do a classic in that time.

Will B then joined the show, and he and Jason then began to start beating me into the ground with some of my less favoured types, such as easy as ABC and skyscrapers, before I started to pull things back on things like Nurikabe and Fillomino.

Anyhow, what had started as a series of sprints was swiftly turning into a marathon, and by the time we made it to 2am I had to tap out, and swiftly dodge the Indians who were playing some Indian poker (one of the highlights of the Beijing trip). Creeping back into the room, I thought that David must have been asleep…in reality I should have known better as he wasn’t back in til 3, having been puzzling with the Dutch.

A great start to the rest day then, but we had agreed to met over breakfast at 8. Perhaps this is a good point to introduce the other British protagonists to this tale. The rest of the A team includes David M, Gareth M and Neil Z, whilst we also have numbers for a B team, which includes Alan O’D, Nick G, Emma M and Liane R. I managed to get up for this, but was feeling the lack of sleep and hot water and missed out on the walking tour of Eger, instead choosing to make a couple of updates for the blog, as well as showering and generally attempting to wake up.

In the afternoon, the whole touring party was loaded up onto 5 coaches and taken on a bit of a mystery tour. The journey started becoming a bit of drag after the first three quarters of an hour or so, although it’s always entertaining to be sat alongside Byron as he hums away. After a bit of a nap I thought it’d be a good idea to start on a Friday Puzzle, using the back of the fiendish Japanese newsletter for a grid given that I’d manage to leave my notebook in the hotel room.

It turned out that the place we arrived to eventually was the entrance to some caves, which we were led through for a while to the great amusement of the on-looking bats, before we arrived at the ceremonial erm cave. There were lots of chairs laid out, and we were treated to a light show and some music before we were treated to a prize giving ceremony. Cue some flag waving from Tiit, broad smiling from Kota and a rather forced grin from Thomas. Of the teams, the Americans seemed a bit meh (Nick Baxter aside), the Czechs downright depressed and all smiles from the victorious German team.

I’m not entirely convinced this ceremony was worth the round trip although it was nice to take a nap after catching up with Aga and Przem…Psyho from the Polish team, and meeting Julian W from Canada.

The night was wrapped up with a visit to some wine cellar place in Eger where we had dinner and wine and fizzy water from dispenser-cum-fire extinguishers. Byron managed to get extraordinarily drunk (whilst still solving quickly), and I extraordinarily managed to find my way back to the hotel. And that was the rest day. Perhaps you can draw some conclusions from the fact this entry is by far the longest so far, and has nothing to do with puzzles. Haha…

WSC '11: update 7 / WPC '11: update 1

Ok So I’m running a little behind with the blog posts so I’ll try and be a little more concise recapping the WSC play-off. The qualifiers were in first, Thomas Snyder, then Jan Mrozowski, Tiit Vunk, Florian Kirch, Jan Novotny, Nikola Zivanovic, Michael Ley, Hideaki Jo and finally Jakub Ondrousek.

The play-off format was really good: 9 puzzles to solve, with competitors moving forward as they completed puzzles (which also included a 1 minute checking time). After three puzzles 10 desks became 7, after six 7 desks became 5 and from there a race to the line. Competitors were also given time advantages based on their total scores from the rounds. This translated into Thomas starting 3 minutes before Jan, and so on until Jakub started with a 10 minute penalty.

In the event Thomas started out front and stayed out front, right to the end. I believe the affectionate nickname “The Machine” has been used on this blog in the past, and that’s exactly what this performance was. Cool, calm and clinical – although I dare say the chairs were feeling a bit of punishment as he moved between desks. In contrast for example, Kota languidly strolled between desks, and was (very briefly) level with Thomas. It was as close as anyone got.

The main shock came with the elimination of Jan M after the first cut (maybe this was part of Thomas’ 2 year plan too?) – although perhaps almost as surprising was the fact that Hideaki, together with nearly a 9 minute penalty, did manage to make it. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising to see Jakub go out either, especially given his body language before finally being allowed to start – slumped out across his desk.

The first cut also claimed Michael Ley, who promptly called over an organiser and ordered a beer. Fair play.

The second cut saw a few see-saws between people who weren’t Thomas, but eventually claimed Jan N and Nikola.

Hideaki’s remarkable run continued, but in the end it was Kota who managed to hang on to 2nd, with Tiit claiming 3rd. Hideaki claimed 4th and Florian finished the list in 5th. Congratulations to all!

The WPC has started today and I have actually solved some puzzles. I have no idea what I should reasonably expect to acheive, but David has said top 50 would be good. I certainly want to be top 100, and preferably at least top 4 on the British team. As the afternoon rounds are about to begin, I should probably leave the shenanigans of the WSC aftermath and the rest day until next time…

WSC 11: update 6

So the last remaining rounds before the WSC came to a close were in the afternoon, by which time it had become apparent that I was up to 23rd, and this without my round 2 being taken into account – which was putting me on course to a best ever finish.

Apparently my tiredness this morning is keeping me from maintaining a coherent narrative so maybe it’s best to just get on with the rounds.

Round 11, as previously advertised, was called “not easy classics”, and to be honest was one of my least favourite rounds. It was all 9×9 classic puzzles, but it wasn’t particularly clear from the relative weightings of the puzzles that “not easy” meant that the puzzles would 4-6 minute solves, or whether this meant that bifurcation was the order of the day. In the end it was a mixture of both – or at least I think it was because once you start putting yourself in the mode for bifurcation then you start missing out on perfectly legitimate – but non-trivial – deductions and you sort of ruin any fun in the solving experience. Yes I solved some of the puzzles, but it was a bit of slog and given the potential weighting of the round I’m not sure I’m happy that those more skilled in that darkest of sudokuing arts, bifurcation, were going to be rewarded this much. Talking to Jana B of the Czech Republic on my left, and Byron on my right seemed to suggest I wasn’t alone in being a bit miffed.

Round 12 was a bit of a novelty round, a 3d sudoku (I think Thomas and Wei-Hwa have called these isometric in their Mutants book) which instead of being projected onto a planar piece of paper, was actually a bit of cardboard folded up, together with two pull-out pieces that revealed a further two alternative grids. To start off with, I felt much like a small child as I pulled the pieces apart and put them back together again, but in the end I started making progress and as is always the case with this particular sudoku type, the puzzle was done without me even realising.

At the time of writing, final standings have been published, but I appear not to have been credited with my 8 minutes worth of bonus points for this round, which is a little annoying as this would propel me from 23rd to 21st.

The last round was a team round entitled “weakest link”. A nice idea where the four team members had to first solve some individual puzzles, before each was given one of four 8×8 grid which interlinked with each other so that even digits in one corresponded to odd digits in another, and then high digits in one corresponded to low digits in some other. Unfortunately these were all inequality sudoku, which are generally a slog for me to solve. 2 of the 10 alternatives on fed sudoku are “greater than” and “GTaK”, and those are the two I usually leave. Maybe I should practice them more. Anyway, as it turned out we had David M, myself and Michael all get our grids, but we weren’t joined by David C in the hour so I can only presume he shares my sentiments about inequality sudoku. In the end it didn’t seem to matter much as we managed to break the 3 interlinking grids that we did have, and only had time to complete two and a half of them before time was up.

A fairly disappointing end in terms of the team performance, but I guess compared to last year in Philadelphia, we didn’t really adapt to the 4 man format rather than the 3, and with individual scores counting towards the team score too it had certainly helped that myself, George D and David M had all finished in the top 50.

This seems like a suitable place to break off before I talk about the play-offs. I could also frankly do with trying to wake myself up with a wander round the hotel.