Puzzle Competitions and World Puzzle Championships

There are various different puzzle competitions that take place around the world, and of course within many countries there are a large range of national contests.

Probably the most well-known nationally are crossword championships and scrabble championships, which are large established events, and have been running for many years.

In more recent times, there have also been sudoku championships. According to the WSC - or World Sudoku Championship website - the latest event was the 5th sudoku championship and was held in Philadelphia. If you are a sudoku whizz, then take a look at this site for more information:

http://wpc.puzzles.com/wsc2010/

Another puzzle championship that has been around for longer but is probably not that well known is the World Puzzle Championship, or WPC. This has a large range of puzzles, although they are all language independent logic puzzles, typically variants of existing puzzle types or novel puzzles where the competitors must understand the rules and quickly work out deductions or inferences that can be used to help them solve puzzles - or sometimes be adept at guessing at speed and using as organised a notation as possible to help them to crack a puzzle. These puzzles seem to favour those of a mathematical bent and indeed often appear to be written and attract maths students, graduates, teachers and those in academia.

The 19th world puzzle championship has just finished in Poland, and is run by the world puzzle federation. Each country has different selection criteria, so again if you are a logic puzzle hotshot and can solve at speed, then it might be worth looking up who is the official WPF representative in your country and finding out what the selection criteria are where you live!

If you just enjoy doing puzzles for fun and would like to do so competitively without having to turn up in person, there are now quite a few online puzzle contests that run from time to time.
Date written: 22 Nov 2010

Category: puzzle competitions | Keywords: world puzzle championship | world sudoku championship | puzzle competitions

Puzzle Videos: Learn to Solve

How to solve a Sandwich Sudoku
If you know the rules of sandwich sudoku but aren't sure how best to tackle a puzzle, this video walks through a puzzle and how to solve it to get you started. Highly recommended, as it's a really fun puzzle type to solve...

If you've never solved a sandwich sudoku, then a 6x6 puzzle is a good place to start. You can have a go at solving the puzzle featured in the video here: 6x6 Sandwich Sudoku Puzzle Online

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