Congratulations to James McGowan who has won the UK Puzzle Championship his 8th title with the new format over two rounds. On the whole the puzzles were harder this year but James completed 19 of the 30 puzzles across the two rounds.
The UK podium is thus:
1 James McGowan
2 Neil Zussman
3 Josh Bao
The full list of UK results is below:
UK Results.png (44.59 KiB) Viewed 888 times
The championship was also open to international participation with Ken Endo solving all puzzles in both rounds correctly. Two further solvers also solved all puzzles correctly in round 2.
The international podium is thus:
1 Ken Endo (Japan)
2 Christian König (Germany)
3 Chenhao Xu (China)
Thanks Liane for organizing this again, a nice mix of top quality puzzles from the authors. I did many many Japanese Sums in preparation.
Can't believe how close round 1 was, with the top 4 within 18 points of each other and 4 more within range - quite a shuffle once round 2 finished.
Thanks as always to Liane for running everything. Definitely tougher this year, but an interesting change in the puzzle types from previous years, I'm always happy to see new things.
Congrats James. I assume we both wasted a lot of time on the Hidden Words
That said, I'm glad I also messed up the last step of the Lollipops, otherwise you'd have beaten me by a single point
Brief update here - I don't think Josh Bao is from the UK (E.g. he's listed as Singapore on the Puzzle GP rankings, although as USA on the Sudoku GP rankings, which is... weird - or maybe two different people?)
Perhaps we need to make sure that the default country during registration is empty, rather than have it default to UK?
