Beijing International Sudoku Tournament 2012

Time 50 - 58 minutes, during which 8 sudokus had to be solved. I had 52:42. The sudokus were as follows: 1: Classic 2: Classic 3: Classic 4: Extra-Region 5: Odd sudoku 6: Blackout sudoku 7: Palindrome sudoku 8: Windmill sudoku I deliberately left Blackout sudoku for last, so that if I got stuck with it, at least the others might be ready and give me points. It kind of went like this, the further I went, the longer it seemed to take (except maybe the palindrome, which came quite easily). Janek Mrozowski finished when there were still 20 minutes left, which is a great time. Kota finished when there were 8 minutes left, and Ondrousek when 7 minutes left. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Kota finish - I was already doing Blackout. I finished 5 minutes before the end, and seeing that the first 3 were finished, and Snyder was still solving, I quietly had hope for 4th place (of course, if there weren't some stupid mistakes). Yuhei Kusui finished fifth, who raised his hand at the same time as the final gong was sounded. Unfortunately, both Janek and Yuhei made a mistake, so he came in 3rd place. If you also take into account the time gap that was before the final with the first ones, you can believe that I essentially won the semi-final. I reduced the gap with Jakub considerably, Kota was more or less equal and Janek made a mistake. Since the 3 solvers all finished correctly before the end of the time, that's why the gap between the first three was extremely small. The time bonus was 0.1 point per second. Janek made a mistake in a relatively cheap sudoku, so he still got 4th place. Hideaki and Yuhei had to share the place, Hideaki still got 5th thanks to his superiority in the preliminary rounds. Snyder couldn't finish and only finished 8th, and Florian probably had a really long night last night, so he ended up finishing 10th.

Kota and Jakub went to the finals, where they had to solve 6 sudokus, and the fastest (Kota) won. Before the finals, it was clear that 2 classics would be entered, and then they were given 8 sudokus, from which they each chose 2 that would be in the competition, and they each chose 2 that they did not want in the competition. They made their choices one after the other. So in the finals, they were 1: Classic 2: Classic 3: Special shape 4: Diagonal consecutive 5: Diagonal 6: Killer Kota did the special shape amazingly fast, and Jakub did it amazingly slow, and that essentially decided the final result.

Interesting read, nice that you shared. It was surprising to hear about Mrozowski, he must have started practicing now, since the last World Championships were a failure. I still think it's a flaw in the competition system that this can happen.

It would probably have been sensible if, after completing the sudoku, someone would check it for 30 seconds or 1 minute, and then you could move on to the next one. And if there was a mistake, it would be possible to fix it. With such a system, Janek Mrozowski would definitely have been the first to reach the final.

Very interesting and quite a lot of different sudokus! I've seen some of them (or similar ones) on CrocoPuzzle, I joined there a few weeks ago. But how big were the prizes (I still don't feel like checking them out myself)??