Indian Puzzle Championship 2016

The Indian Puzzle Championship (IPC) 2016 was held on 17th July, 2016 in Chennai.

The championship was an offline event (after four years of having it online), where the top-50 qualifiers of Puzzle Ramayan were invited. Prasanna is undoubtedly the best puzzle solver in India today, and has been last 3yrs.

View Top Qualifiers

Last 2yrs were exciting competing with Amit. He won the 2014 edition and I came in second, while I won the 2015 edition and he came in second. I was expecting him to be the biggest challenger for the title, since Prasanna, being the best Indian at the World Puzzle Championship last year, gets a wild card for the national team this year and hence, decided to organize the national event.


Puzzles
The championship consisted of four rounds. When you have Deb and Prasanna authoring puzzles, you know you're in for a treat. Really nice set of puzzles.

The 3rd round Sprint was my favourite, and also, the only round I topped.
The 4th round was Casual-type puzzles, many of them visual, and supposedly one of my strengths. But, I did horribly.

Those of you who'd like to solve these puzzles can purchase it here (Unfortunately due to certain reasons, they are not publicly available this year).


Results
I expected it to be a close fight between Amit and me. But, after the first two rounds, Amit had a big enough lead over me and it was pretty hard to catch up from then. I did cover up a few points in the third round, but had a terrible fourth round.

Amit won his second IPC and I stood 2nd (for the third time, after 2009 and 2014).

The ever-consistent Rakesh stood 3rd with a strong performance. Ashish's performance was disappointing, but just made it into the B-Team with his 6th place finish.

View Complete Results

The winning trophies were really cool! Custom-made puzzles by Prasanna (and one by me, the second one, which I ended up getting :-| ) printed on the trophy with the themes '1', '2' and '3'. Thanks to Sumit Bothra for getting these made.

Organization
Thanks to Deb Mohanty and Prasanna Seshadri for organizing this event smoothly. Also, a big thanks to Varun, Ezhilarasi, Ashish, Kumaresan, Rakesh, Kishore, etc. and the other folks in Chennai who helped out with the event. It was a big success!