World Sudoku Championship 2016

The 11th World Sudoku Championship (WSC) was held on 17th - 18th Oct, 2016 in Senec, Slovakia.

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Indian Team

The Indian team was selected from the Indian Sudoku Championship 2016 (ISC) and the Times Sudoku Championship 2016 (TSC). We had three complete teams this year.

Pranav was our Under-18 participant, and after a good show at last year's World Junior Championships, he made it to the Top-2 inexperienced solvers of TSC this year.


Preparation
I've been off the grid, primarily due to my work and career aspirations of pursuing Machine Learning, so I didn't have high expectations this year. This might also be my last World Championships as a participant, as I'm one of the organizers for next year's championships in India, after which I'm uncertain of continuing.


Puzzles
The Slovak team have been doing well in recent years, in contests, in authoring, in communicating, and I think a lot of people were expecting these championships to be good fun. And it definitely was. The IB was crisp, rounds were well thought of, themes were really nice.

Retrospectively, the timing of all rounds were spot on, and it was one of my best WSC experiences in the last 8 years.

The puzzles were all well-made, a good mix of easy, medium and hard puzzles, a good variety of standard vs new variants, some really exciting team rounds, and overall it felt like a complete well-balanced WSC. Thumbs up for all the authors and organizers for the excellent event.

I must admit that there were some parts where I felt deja-vu, strikingly similar to some of the ideas we've been discussing for next year's WSC. Well, there's no limit to innovation!


Performance
The Indian team performed average-ish this year. I was the top ranked Indian on 18th, which is our worst 'top rank' in the last 9 years! But as a team, all four of us were ranked in Top-40, which is a first.
Prasanna finished 21st, Rakesh 32nd and Kishore 38th. Rakesh's and Kishore's personal best.

We finished 6th in the team standing, equalling our best team rank in 2014.

The unofficial players: Amit stood 53rd, Gaurav 73rd, Rajesh 76th, Swaroop 85th, Jaipal 93rd, Pranav 94th, Akash 104th and Ashish 141st.

Prasanna has been in tremendous form in the GPs, but had quite a bad WSC this year.
He's doing well in elections too! (Yes, he got elected as a board member in the World Puzzle Federation, but more on that later)


Winners
Jakub Ondrousek (Czech Republic) performed extremely well in the rounds and was on top with a sizeable lead over Tiit Vunk (Estonia) and Kota Morinishi (Japan). The three of them have been consistently topping the WSCs last few years, and this one was no different.

But it was the Estonian who flew through the playoff puzzles and pipped Jakub to take his first title, after finishing runner-up in the previous two years. Hearty congratulations to Tiit! A well-deserved win.
Jakub was second and Kota stood third.

Among the teams, Czech Republic blazed through the playoffs to win it, while the Chinese came in second, with an amazing performance, where three of them were in Top-10 too (let aside the fact that they are all U-18!) and Japan came in third.

View Complete Results


Sudoku GP
I've always enjoyed the GP rounds through the year, but never perform well in them, quite unlike the WSCs. Somehow, it makes me feel I'm more of an offline solver, rather than an online one (Even of the 10 ISCs so far, only 4 were held offline, and those were the 4 I won!).

There was a lot of debate on the new scoring system, and I didn't share my thoughts earlier since I was just uninterested and busy. But, I ended up 14th in the GP, and due to high dropouts in the Top-10, I was invited for the playoffs.

And I decided not to compete. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is, I reviewed my performance and felt I didn't deserve to be in the playoffs. Using some simple normalization, I would lose at least 2 more ranks, which is a fairer position for me. And secondly, the schedule this year had more rounds, and having the GP in between them is just exhausting. Besides the fact that I wanted a decent rank in the WSC if this is my last one, so preferred resting.

I don't want to comment too much on the scoring, but there's no harm in trying new ideas, I'm always in favour of experimenting. Tom Collyer, the Sudoku GP Director, received some slack on this, and I'm not sure its completely fair to him.

It is just my personal opinion and preference that some form of normalization does make a better scoring system. We (LMI organizers) have seen it in the past... we even changed it in the middle of SM and PR, and decided to add normalization after 2 rounds, when we realized it is extremely difficult to curate 8 rounds of 'equal' solving experience.

It remains to see what happens next year. The Sudoku GP Director spot is currently open (Tom stepped down).

Overall, the GPs were still a lot of fun with high-quality puzzles. Thanks to Tom, Hana, Wei-Hwa, all the authors, testers and everyone else who put in effort conducting these year-on-year.

The top-3 in the playoffs were Tiit Vunk (so he won the double), Kota Morinishi and Hideaki Jo. Congrats!


Organization
Kudos to Zuzana Hromcova and the entire Slovak team for hosting this wonderful event. It was smooth, it was punctual, it was lively, it was fun! Thanks a lot!

This year, there were several prizes (and some spot prizes too!), which is generally nice to have.

There was a prize for guessing the 11th place player (being the 11th WSC), and we analyzed the results after two rounds, to choose the most probable twelve people who'd be 11th, distributing the votes among us twelve Indians.
And we bombed it like anything. We ended up guessing the players ranked 9th, 10th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 18th, 19th, etc. Damn we missed Takuya! :-)


Next Year
Slovakia have set the bar high, and the Indian team will be hosting all you wonderful people next year during the same week (15th - 22nd Oct, 2017) in Bengaluru, India. I look forward to it as much as many of you, and hope it is a successful and enjoyable WSC.

I've got some plans through the year, so, its going to be an interesting next few months and I hope most of them work out as expected. Fingers crossed!

Feel free to write to me: rohanrao88@gmail.com in case of any help/queries/questions regarding next year's event. We'll have our webpage out soon, and the LMI forum is always available and active for other discussions!

And now, back to boring non-puzzle life :-|

P.S. Will be writing an update on WPC by the weekend.

World Sudoku Championship 2015

The 10th World Sudoku Championship was held on 11th-15th Oct, 2015 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Championship Page
Download Instruction Booklet

The Indian Team was selected from the Indian Sudoku Championship and Times Sudoku Championship 2015, where Prasanna Seshadri, Rishi Puri, Kishore Kumar and I form the A-Team.

Prasanna Seshadri, Rishi Puri, Kishore Kumar and Me

"We are the best four players of the country, as we finished in the top-4 of ISC as well as TSC. It looks like a strong team with Prasanna and Rishi in good form, being finalists in the Sudoku GP and Kishore being consistent among the Indian circuit.

The Indian team stood 6th last year, which is the best performance ever, and I hope we can break into the top-5 this year. That's our goal and its probably our best shot at it in the near future, since, Rishi is not planning to continue being an active participant from next year. It will be hard to find a replacement for someone at Rishi's level, but we'll hope for the best.

On a personal level, I'm aiming for a Top-10 finish. Its been a disappointing couple of years, where I stood 14th last year and 16th the year before.
Haven't been in the best of forms lately, with some career changes and travelling going on, but hoping to give my best and make India proud!"


All of us travelled separately. Prasanna and Rishi had to reach one day before for GP Playoffs, I was flying from Mumbai, Rishi was flying from Hyderabad and Kishore was flying from Greece. Well, so much for 'best team'.

The instruction booklet just looked like a shadow of WSC 2014 in London. Very similar structure and rounds and format. I was surprised, but then realized that the main authors of WSC are Richard Stolk (Netherlands) and Yuhei Kusui (Japan) and they might've been called at the last moment to save the event.

Being a big fan of Stolk's sudokus, I was looking forward to the championship.

The rounds and points (My points vs Highest points) were as follows:

Round 1: Classics (265 vs 330)
Classics! This round went fairly smooth, I solved in reverse, attacking the hard ones first and it paid off. I scored 265 and thought that is a good start.

Round 2: Assorted (410 vs 485)
Assorted sudoku variants. That's when the aroma of Richard started. Beautiful sudokus, enjoyable round and I did well.

Round 3: Assorted (395 vs 700)
This was a bad round. I broke Inner Frame and Sum Frame, and was generally slow in a couple of other puzzles. It broke my flow and I dropped a few places.
I spent far too much time on Max Triplet (which was an excellent puzzle).

Round 4: Straight (265 vs 285)
It was expected to be a simple puzzle. It was nice, mostly got solved using row and column non-repetition. Traditionally, I've done well on such rounds (reminded me of the WSC 2012 where the Overlapping round got me into the playoffs), and I'm glad I could finish it fairly smoothly.

Round 5: Assorted (640 vs 750)
The big round! I've messed up the big round in the previous two WSCs and I really really wanted this time to be different. It was. I solved in a very nice flow, cracking one sudoku after another, without a glitch. I got a Classic wrong at the end, but still, it was a solid score, that boosted me up a few ranks.

Round 6: Assorted (375 vs 465)
The dreadful round of irregular variants. It was surprisingly good. I took the safe way, solving the easy and medium ones and leaving out the hard ones. Worked. And worked well.

So, that was the end of the Individual Rounds for Day-1. When the results came out, it was a pleasant surprise to see myself in a solid 5th position. I felt I was closing in on my dream to get into the top-5 this year.

Round 7 (Team): Relay
The team round was interesting. Sudokus were nice, and we were hoping to finish the round. Kishore and Rishi got stuck up on the Irregulars. Rishi gave up on his and Kishore didn't manage to finish his either. Prasanna had to guess on his last grid (since Rishi's Irregular relay didn't come through) which went wrong.
And to make it worse, I left two cells of Extra Region as pencilmarks, thus losing chunks of points :-(

The Great Indian Team Round Debacles continue... year after year.

Round 8: Zodiac (275 vs 625)
Ahh, feel like kicking myself. This was the only big round on Day2, and even with a mediocre performance I would've maintained my top-10 position. But it was not to be. I broke two Arrow sudokus during the round and was never able to recover from that. To make things disastrous, I swapped 6 cells in the highest pointer - Gemini, which screwed my round completely, and I fell way below 10th.

Such a disappointment. We were on track to see two Indians in the playoffs for the first time, but I messed up. Thankfully, Prasanna maintained his calm and managed to be joint 8th before playoffs.

Round 9: Multi Sudoku (140 vs 170)
I was feeling so low... and fortunately this was a low scoring round. I felt like my hands were moving in slow motion during the solve, but it wasn't too bad at the end.

So, that completed the Individual rounds of WSC 2015. I finished 14th (same rank as last year), and certainly could've done better. Maybe next year.
But that also adds to me being in Top-20 in the last 6 WSCs. Only once in Top-10 :-(

Prasanna finished 8th and made it to the playoffs, so there was something to look forward to.

Round 10 (Team): X-Killer
This was a round that most teams were looking forward to. But the organizers cancelled it due to technical issues.
Disappointing, since we had practised this well. In fact, we hosted the practise set as a contest on LMI: X-Killer
Wonderful sudokus by Deb Mohanty.

Round 11 (Team): Fractal
With our first team round going bad and second being cancelled, we had to do well on this one. It was a nice simple linked multi-sudoku, where each of us started solving from the four corners and came to the centre. We finished fairly quickly, but... The Great Indian Team Round Debacle hit us again! We swapped two digits in Kishore's corner, lost 'a lot' of points, including all the bonus.


Playoffs
Nice to see Prasanna Seshadri in the playoffs, we had an Indian there after my playoffs in 2012. He surely is a crowd-entertainer with a phenomenal performance in the playoffs first leg where he finished first among the four, thus taking him into the second leg and guaranteed 7th place.
The second leg was hard, with Bastien in 4th and having a time advantage. Bastien managed to win the leg to join Kota, Tiit and Jakub for the final leg.

Well, the same four finalists of WSC 2014 battle it out again in WSC 2015. Kota having a big lead and time advantage, raced through the playoffs, winning his second WSC crown on the trot. Tiit came in second and Jakub third, all as expected. Playoffs wasn't really exciting.
Congrats to Kota, Tiit, Jakub for the podium finishes.

Download Complete Results

Tiit Vunk (Estonia), Kota Morinishi (Japan), Jakub Ondrousek (Czech Republic)

So, Prasanna finishes 7th, which improves on my best Indian rank of 8th at the WSC. Congrats to him and this made Rishi's (so-called) last WSC memorable. Rishi finished a disappointing 38th and Kishore did well on his debut with 47th.

A-Team
7th - Prasanna Seshadri (2825)
14th - Rohan Rao (2765)
38th - Rishi Puri (1950)
47th - Kishore Kumar (1748)

B-Team and UN-Team
Rakesh Rai (1890)
Amit Sowani (1845)
Jaipal Reddy (1509)
Swaroop Guggilam (1287)
Gaurav Kumar Jain (1185)
Puneet Goenka (900)

Team India finished 9th. This is bad, considering we have been in Top-8 for the last four years. Something to dwell upon and improve.

Thanks to Richard Stolk, Yuhei Kusui, Deyan, Galya, all the other organizers and volunteers for conducting this WSC. Puzzles were fantastic, hall and seating was comfortable and overall a great experience.

Lets hope the WSC 2016 in Slovakia proves to be bigger and better. And I really hope the Indian team breaks newer and more records next year.

And guess what? India won the bid to host the World Championships in 2017! So, hoping to see you all in Bengaluru in two years time!

World Sudoku Championship 2014

The 9th World Sudoku Championship was held in London, UK in August, 2014.

Official Website

The Indian Team for the WSC were the winners of the Times Sudoku Championship: Prasanna Seshadri, Rishi Puri, Sumit Bothra and me.

Prasanna, Rishi and me were in the team last year as well, and we secured 15th, 28th and 16th rank respectively, so, we were hoping to do better this year, in the individuals as well as the team (India were 7th last year). We had a B-Team too, Swaroop, Jaipal, Jayant and Kunal.

I've been on a long break from solving puzzles, but after ISC, I decided to prepare for the WSC. I received a jolt with a pathetic TSC performance, but I was glad I made mistakes in TSC, rather than ISC and hopefully WSC.

When the WSC IB was released, I was a little disappointed. And after the WPC IB was released, I spent all my time in preparing for WPC. Well, so much that I organized the WPC (World Practice Championship) on LMI.

So, what was wrong with WSC? Nothing wrong, it was just that the WSC looked a little bland. All the usual variants, some repetition among types, no hard Classics and nothing specifically to practice or prepare for. The rounds felt easy-ish and finish-able, and it did turn out that way.

Round 1 was good, I missed a couple of low-pointer Classics.
Round 2 was bad. I messed up the Surplus, missed the Killer (and later had a terrible error in Diagonal).
Round 3 was good, just missed the Max Triplet.
Round 4 was excellent, just missed the Inequality (and later had a single cell error in a Classic).
Round 5 was ok, got stuck at Killer Pro and lost some time, but managed a decent score.
Round 6 was a round I was dreading, and I didn't do well. Wasted time on the Toroidal that went wrong towards the end. Few more seconds and I could've finished the Parquet.

Round 7 was a team round, where we finished with bonus. We made a single digit error and lost half the puzzle points and all the bonus :-|
Round 8 was a team round that we royally screwed up. Well, we certainly didn't prepare enough as a team.

So, that was Day-1. I was 12th after the Day-1 results were out. Felt OK-ish. Playoffs chances were bright, but had to do well on the second day.
Prasanna had a terrible Round 5 and Rishi had an average day, pushing them outside the top-20.

I was all set for Day-2.

Round 9 was the 'big round', the longest round with maximum points. During last year's WSC, there was a similar 'big round' on the morning of the second day, which I totally messed up and dropped a few ranks. This year, I didn't mess up, but I didn't do my best either. I broke Clone and Cylindrical. Didn't have time for Between. And later had a mistake in Diagonal. Why can't I solve Diagonal Sudokus this year?
After this round I knew I didn't have any chance for playoffs. So, my goal was to at least improve on last year's rank (16th).

Round 10 was the last round, an overlapping sudoku (similar to last round of WSC 2012), and I like these. I finished WSC on a high by completing this round in 8mins, securing a 12-min bonus. Only 3 players finished better, with a 13-min bonus.

Round 11 was a team round where we had to solve sudokus that were linked. We were confident of doing well in this round since we all had 'different' variants that we liked, and we did well.

So, that was my WSC 2014. I stood 14th. Better than last year, but still a big gap between 10th and 14th. I'm happy I've been performing consistently over the years, with/without practice: My last 5 WSC ranks are: 14, 16, 8, 12, 15

Prasanna never really recovered from that bad round 5, and finished 21st. Rishi's performance was below par, 36th. Sumit made a couple of mistakes towards the end, and dropped out of the top-50, with his 55th.

Our Team was swapping between 7th and 8th over the rounds, and we thought we'll be 7th (again!). But, special thanks to the French team for making a goof-up in the last team round. They lost nearly 2000 points, and that pushed us to 6th, which is India's best team rank ever.

The playoffs format was different from last few years, and even though there were 10 in the playoffs, it was mainly a fight between the top-4. I found this format better than most other WSCs especially since, the worst case scenario for the preliminary toppers is 4th place.

Tiit and Kota were going head-to-head, it was a very close contest between the two, which Kota eventually won. (If he had lost, he would be WSC runner-up for the 4th consecutive year!). On the other hand, Tiit has won the preliminary twice but still can't call himself a WSC Champion. Well... that's life. Maybe next year.
(There was some problem with Bastien's and Jakub's papers during the playoffs, but I think, the organizers found a way out by awarding them joint 3rd place)

Congrats to Kota Morinishi for winning WSC 2014, Tiit Vunk for 2nd and Bastien-Vial-Jaime and Jakub Ondrousek for joint 3rd. They have been performing well consistently and they are the deserving winners.

View the complete WSC Results

Overall, I think this was a much easier WSC than the last few years. I enjoyed the sudokus, the rounds and the experience. The team rounds were fun and easy. The playoffs were good and fair. So, that brings an end to a good and successful WSC, but a little bland one. Yes, the only little negative is that too many standard variants, and some unnecessary repetition. But, I guess that's what made it feel easy and fun :-)

Thanks to UKPA and the UK Organizers and Volunteers for conducting this wonderful WSC. Thanks to all the authors for the enjoyable sudokus and hope to see more in future.

This was my 6th WSC, and it would be in my favourite two.