Inside the World Puzzle and Sudoku Championships with three-time World Sudoku Champion Thomas Snyder

Welcome to Gametime, a weekly newsletter recapping the past week of games on LinkedIn, what’s new in the puzzles space, and more — brought to you by LinkedIn Games Editor Paolo Pasco . Click 'Subscribe' to join the community and be notified of future editions.

Last month, puzzlers around the world flew into Beijing for the World Puzzle Championship and World Sudoku Championship, both held over the course of one week, to test their mettle against dozens of tough logic puzzles. Among the puzzlers was Thomas Snyder, who you might know from his work on our own logic games Queens and Tango . Thomas put on a great showing — he placed 11th individually in the World Puzzle Championship, 9th individually in the World Sudoku Championship, and helped bring Team USA to podium finishes in the team portions of both championships. I got to talk to Thomas afterwards about the event, his preparations and the results:

Paolo: Very grateful that you’re making the time to do this. To get started: for the uninitiated, what is the structure of the event?

Thomas: It started with the World Puzzle Championship 30-some years ago, which was put together by Will Shortz and other people in the U.S. It’s now an event that gets, often, 30+ countries to come. Teams are as many as four people for the main groups, so we end up with about 200+ competitors. Around the Sudoku boom in the early 2000s, when it took off, the decision was, “we need one of those, too.” So the World Sudoku Championship started as an independent event. Now it’s actually run together with the WPC, so that’s two additional days. It goes: two intense days, a day for tourism, then three more intense days, all in a row. It’s probably the biggest test of brain energy I’ve ever run into in my life.

I’ve talked a lot about the competition in broad strokes. What are those three days about for the WPC? They break down into individual rounds and team rounds across those days, and you start in the morning and go pretty much to the evening. There’s a break for lunch, but it can be as much as eight hours of puzzling in a day, with a few breaks for tea (and commiseration when you break puzzles and want to complain in the hallway after a round).?

But, for instance, an individual round may have forty puzzles that are super fast, and you get twenty minutes to solve them. As much as it can be about solving the puzzles, it can be about thinking strategically about what’s in the round. Like, “I have forty I could solve. Maybe the styles in the back of the book, that are more loop puzzle based, are easier for me than the puzzles in the front, that are more number puzzle based,” and I’ll solve back to front, in some order where I’m trying to maximize my score. It’s not a typical way people experience puzzles. This is not a way to solve puzzles to relax. For some of us, I think we’re sadistic folks — it becomes fun in the competition sense to really push yourself and see how far you can go and how well you can do.

I mentioned “team round,” and I can bring up some examples there. One of the most unique things [the WPC] does, is it tries to have teams think together in different ways, so across the years there have been lots of kinds of team rounds. One round was an octahedron round — eight triangles assembled together into a 3D shape. You’d have eight triangular grids, and there’s something about the edges of those grids that’s meant to match with another puzzle. So we have to talk to each other and work together to make this all come together as one big answer. It’s really testing, how strong is the full group, and how can you as a group figure out when you want to step back and see the big picture? It’s testing your modes of thinking and adaptation, and I think that’s something across these events in general.

Paolo: It sounds like puzzle solving at the WSPC involves a lot of elements that are, like you said, different from how someone would solve a puzzle with their newspaper at home. You’re doing strategy with “what can I solve that’ll get me the most points,” and you have to work in teams. What goes into training for those differences?

Thomas: It starts by just changing your mentality about what you’re trying to do with a puzzle. Maybe the easiest way to start is talking about the World Sudoku Championship. That was the first one I was really training for, and the earliest one I won. I’ve sort of seen what the top can be, and to win the world Sudoku title, it started by just trying to get individually better. What does that mean? Well, I solve 100 puzzles today — which ones am I good at? Which ones do I feel slow at? Then, I take the ones I feel slow at and analyze them. That kind of iterative process is how I’d slowly get better at one of my weaknesses and be a better general solver. Between the first World Sudoku Championship I went to, and the fourth or fifth, I got 30% or 40% better than I was from the start. You’d say that’s not a lot of improvement, but I was already near the top at the start. How does, like, the Michael Jordan of sudoku when it first launches learn to jump an extra foot higher?

There are competitors who optimized how they interface with the grid, so using two hands for writing and erasing [simultaneously] is a way to improve. One of the things I did was build a large whiteboard to make a sudoku grid on, because every single final of these tournaments would go from a normal-sized grid on paper, to a 1-meter-by-1-meter grid in front of an audience. Well, you’re not used to solving that way. If you’re jumping backwards to see the grid and jumping forwards to write numbers, it’s not going to be as effective. So, I learned to solve large puzzles. I practiced them for a month, and I learned, “I can’t write light and dark in dry-erase marker, but my left hand is much faster to erase,” so I learned to erase and write. Almost like a Karate Kid, “wax on, wax off” kind of approach.?

That’s how, in a given style like sudoku, you get really good at it. You start by being good at sudoku, then you get rid of all the minor weaknesses you may have. It seems extreme, but it’s like the way an athlete trains. What’s your diet? What’s your sleep? These events have you jet-lagged for a lot of the event. Do you practice puzzles when you’re jet-lagged to make sure your brain can still solve? You could go to extremes in doing this, but at different stages, this is the kind of thing you’ve got to prepare for.

For the WPC, the best thing to do is just play every single kind of puzzle you can run into, and even the ones you don’t find fun. A big transition happened probably ten to fifteen years ago, with the internet. It used to be that you could only find most of these puzzles in different national magazines. You could order puzzles from the Netherlands, and from Japan, and from Germany, and from Turkey. Nowadays, you can just go online, and on different puzzler Discords and other places where you can find hundreds of puzzle styles that people are writing. You want to absorb as much as you can and be making those assessments. Which styles am I better at? Which styles am I a little worse at? At the end of the day, you’re still making that strategic choice during a given round of how to go through these puzzles. In Beijing, there were more puzzles in any round than almost anyone could solve. Very few rounds were fully completed. So, knowing where to do certain things mattered.

Paolo: Do you want to talk for a bit about results, and broad impressions of the tournament?

Thomas: There’s often a set of common countries that compete across the top. In puzzles, it’s usually the U.S., Japan, and Germany, and most recently it’s the U.S. and Japan that have been neck and neck. What we saw in puzzles was Japan was tops, the U.S. was second, and the host nation, China was third. It’s impressive to see the host nation, China, dominated across the sudoku tournaments in a set of different ways. We were third, with Japan in second, but China was first in that. They had everyone in the top three [for individual standings] — they had the gold medalist, the silver medalist, and the bronze medalist. Their fourth team member was in eighth place, just ahead of me. What’s impressive in that is: where I’m 44, he was eleven, so an eleven-year-old is competing at just about the level that a former world champion can still hold on to. It speaks to how, when you’re hitting people at a certain age with games that capture their mind — they have programs that put sudoku into schools in China — they almost have a system that’s training people like it’s a mind sport, and we just don’t yet in a lot of other parts of the world.

The thing that’s been more curious about the U.S. individually is that we’ve had a lot of strong solvers come up on the puzzle side first. This is just thinking about how many diverse games people have and how they play, if they’re into video gaming, or even LinkedIn Games. The challenges on LinkedIn Games are great representative puzzles of WPC puzzles. There are people saying, “I want to play this game for a while,” and that kind of behavior in childhood means most of the puzzle team members in the U.S. are college-aged competitors, including second in the world Thomas Luo, who’s half my age.?

It’s great to still be able to compete, and it’s great to have the U.S. still often be near the top. Knock on wood, we’ve been on the podium in every World Puzzle Championship. I don’t want to be on the U.S. puzzle team and not be at least a bronze medalist at the end of the day, but that’s how long and how good we’ve been in the event. But I think it’s going to be pretty soon in time that I won’t necessarily be able to qualify for the U.S. puzzle team given all the strength of competitors that are coming up. So, we’ll see.

Thanks, Thomas! For the full results from the WSPC, see this link .

THE WEEK IN LINKEDIN GAMES

?? Pinpoint: The Sunday, November 17 things you can turn puzzle was expectedly tricky, with a 73.3% solve rate, and an average of 3.9 clues needed. The clues here (“Heads,” “Corner,” “Tide,” “The tables,” “A blind eye”) were pretty tough, and the giveaways towards the end were more dependent on idioms than usual. Meanwhile, the Wednesday, November 20 things bakers do puzzle was unexpectedly tricky, with a 73.9% solve rate, and an average of 3.3 clues needed. The clues (“Proof,” “Temper,” “Whisk,” “Knead,” “Preheat”) were inspired by a lot of The Great British Baking Show, where I learned about proofing for the first time.

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb: Solve rates and solve times were roughly consistent this week (good for you, solvers!), so I’ll highlight some clues of interest:

• [Animal that Callisto was transformed into, in mythology], BEAR: One of many stories in Greek mythology of people turning into animals. In this case, Callisto was loved by Zeus, leading to her transformation (by Zeus, Zeus’s wife Hera, or Artemis, depending on which version of the story you read) into a bear. Shenanigans, mainly involving people trying to hunt down Callisto because they mistake her for a bear, ensue.
• [Starbucks size that, aptly, is larger than “short”], TALL: Tall (12 ounces), Grande (16 ounces), Venti (20 ounces), and Trenta (30 ounces) are the most common sizes. On the smaller end, there are Short (8 ounces) and Demi (3 ounces), the latter being a size I only learned about while researching this newsletter.
• [Freshwater fish (also, a word for something smart when you add an “S” to the front)], PIKE: Game & Fish magazine gives a list of ten huge pikes people have caught, if you’re interested in learning about both the fish and the sheer size these fish can reach.
• [Headwear for a queen (and the icon that represents a Queen in our other game, Queens], CROWN: Speaking of Queens…?

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: …the Wednesday, November 20 puzzle, “Removed Top,” was unusually hard. Its average solve rate (84.5%) was on par with the previous Friday (82.2%) and Saturday (83.4%). Let’s take a look at the puzzle:

An easy place to start: the pink region takes up the entire top row, so we can X out any other cell in that pink region that’s not in the top row.

Note that, in the second row, there’s only one place for a Queen. We place a Queen there, and X out the appropriate cells.

Now, the blue section takes up the entire third row, so we can X out any cells in that section outside of the third row.

This next step is trickier to spot, but it’s in line with the strategies we’ve learned so far: the blue, red, and purple regions are all fully contained within the rightmost three columns. Therefore, we can X out any cell in those columns that’s outside of those three regions.

This leaves only one option in the brown region for a Queen!

Play today’s Queens

?? Tango: The Thursday, November 21 puzzle, “Symmetry Pairs,” had a tricky break-in, so it took people a bit longer to solve.?

There aren’t any immediately obvious places to place suns or moons, so it takes some more thinking to get started. A good place to get started is in the upper left corner, where the symbol in that cell must (because of the equal signs) be the same as the cells to its right and immediately below it. Look at what would happen if we put a sun in the upper left:

Since there are three suns in the first row, the remaining symbols in the row must be moons. Filling the empty squares with moons, though, would force three moons in a row (this is the same case in the column). Therefore, we can’t put a sun in the upper-left corner, so that square must contain a moon.

Play today’s Tango

Want to be notified when new editions are released? You can sign up for reminders for each of our games here .?

This week’s topic: An unexpected winner of the Spanish-language Scrabble World Championship

The Spanish-language Scrabble World Championships happened earlier this month, in Granada, Spain. The winner was Nigel Richards, who lost only one of his twenty-four tournament games. The unusual thing about this? This was Nigel’s first ever Spanish-language competition. Even more unusual? Nigel doesn’t speak Spanish.

This mirrors a feat Nigel Richards accomplished in 2015 , winning a French Scrabble title despite not speaking French. Nigel, a very skilled tournament Scrabble player, was able to memorize the Scrabble dictionaries for the various languages, and play at a level that outdoes native speakers. It’s a stunning feat.?

What do you think about Nigel’s victory?

Share your thoughts in the comments below??

Know someone who would enjoy Gametime? Share it with them directly or your network by clicking the “Share” button below!