It all adds up for new U.S. Sudoku champ

In the last five minutes of a heady day of Sudoku yesterday, the tension in cavernous Hall A of the Convention Center was palpable. About 1,000 onlookers watched as the three finalists - competing in the first Philadelphia Inquirer Sudoku National Championship for $10,000 and a trip to the world competition in India - seemed stymied by the day's most difficult puzzle.

Each finalist stood in front of a large Sudoku board, each with the same puzzle. A camera scanned the play and shot it onto two large screens. Puzzle master Will Shortz provided commentary, but was silent during much of the final confounding few minutes, as the contestants marked numbers in boxes in the game of logic, then stepped back to look, shake heads, erase with palms, and jot new digits.

Then things slowed down for all of them. The auditorium went so still, you could hear a number crunch.

Suddenly, Thomas Snyder, 27, from Palo Alto, Calif. - the world Sudoku champ - made his move: He scrawled a 7 in one box, and, as he said moments later after he won, "the work was done."

Snyder raced through the rest of the boxes after unlocking the one that had been thwarting him. He stood back, checked each of the nine-space rows and three-by-three boxes. Yes, each now contained the numbers one through nine, with no repeats. Snyder raised a hand - I'm done! the gesture said - and the audience burst into applause. The postdoctoral student in bioengineering at Stanford University, who had received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University, was still at the top of his Sudoku form.

In March, Snyder had won the world championship in Prague. Now, The Inquirer will send him, as part of the American team, to defend the title in Goa, India.

Until yesterday, Sudoku had a world championship, but not a U.S. one. The idea to launch a national contest for the phenomenally popular puzzle came from Brian Tierney, chief executive officer of Philadelphia Media Holdings, owner of The Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com.

He contacted Shortz, the puzzle editor of the New York Times and the nation's leading puzzle expert, who manages American teams of competitive puzzle solvers, and the rest of the story played out yesterday.