Snyder will join hundreds more puzzle lovers in the second annual competition. Entrants at three levels (beginning, intermediate, and advanced) will compete in three half-hour, three-puzzle rounds. The advanced winner gets $10,000, plus a free trip to the World Sudoku Championships in Slovakia.
In July, Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney, chief executive officer of Philadelphia Media holdings, which owns The Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.com, announced The Inquirer was campaigning to bring the 2010 World Sudoku Championships here. At the World Puzzle Championships, on Nov. 1 in Minsk, Belarus, the World Puzzle Federation will choose the site of the 2010 Sudoku competition.
Sudoku is the most popular game of its kind in the country, according to a 2007 Inquirer national survey: 167 million Americans, or 56 percent of the adult population, have played it.
Will Shortz, editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, famed "Puzzlemaster" at National Public Radio, and host for the Philly event, says the word sudoku is Japanese shorthand for "single digits only." And that encapsulates the fiendishly simple rules of the game, which seems to have taken over the world in the last five years. There's a Sudoku game in this paper and online at Philly.com, and it will tell you to "complete the grid so that every row, column and 3x3 box contains every digit from 1 to 9 inclusively." Although it involves numbers, Sudoku requires no math skills. What it requires is logical and problem-solving abilities, including patience and an eye for patterns.
Last year's Philly championships set a Guinness Book of World Records mark for most people (857) playing the game at once. This year's competitors come from 26 states, plus Ireland and Canada. Adds Shortz: "We're on the verge of setting a new record: the largest paid puzzle event ever held in the world."
