Sudoku masters vie here Saturday

The champ is playing it cool for now.

National and world Sudoku champion Thomas Snyder, 28, a bioengineering postdoc at Stanford, practices only 20 to 30 minutes a day, going on Web sites, comparing his best with the best in the world.

But Snyder is about to start cramming big time. Saturday brings the Philadelphia Inquirer National Sudoku Championships at the Convention Center. A few days before Snyder boards his plane, he'll "crack open the Sudoku books and do 300 or so puzzles, go as fast as I can and make no mistakes, just to be in the right frame of mind."

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."

Sudoku is quite a story. There had been puzzles like it before. Famed mathematician Leonhard Euler set the basic rules for "Latin squares" in the 18th century. But it was an American, Howard Garns, who began contributing proto-Sudoku games, then called "Number Place," to puzzle magazines in the late 1970s.

Maki Kaji, president of Japanese game company Nikoli, brought the game, which he named Sudoku, to Japan, where it became a mania. From there, it spread to aficionados in New Zealand, and then to Britain, which it swamped in no time, prior to vaulting the Pacific and becoming an obsession here.

Why the wild ride? Shortz says three things make Sudoku so popular: "One, the rules are very simple - you can state them in a single sentence. Two, a Sudoku puzzle is small enough that you can do it in a few minutes, fit it in a daily schedule. Three, every game is different, and behind the game there can be a mysterious, sophisticated logic, something intriguing."

Nick Baxter, a veteran puzzler and international competitor, is the competition director for the Philadelphia event. He will oversee the judging and choose the puzzles, provided by Nikoli. What's interesting is that Nikoli's puzzles will be "handcrafted" - designed by people, not (as in mass-market Sudoku) by computers.

What criteria does he use? And why prefer the human hand? "The first thing I look for," Baxter says, "is consistency . . . and the second thing is fun. Handcrafted puzzles are more likely to have that. They're more likely to have a feel to them, a philosophy, a path they're pointing you toward." Snyder says that "handcrafted puzzles are more beautiful, more elegant, less random than computers', more likely to 'speak' to the solver."

There can be designs and themes, as well. At last year's competition, some of the puzzles represented the team logos for the Flyers, 76ers, and Phillies.

What makes a Sudoku master? Baxter admires Snyder's "ability to see the entire grid and sense where the numbers go."

Shortz praises the healthful utility of puzzles. "Puzzle-solving," he says, "not only makes you feel good, but it's good for you, exercises the mind, and makes you better able to tackle other challenges."

The second annual Philadelphia Inquirer Sudoku National Championships will take place Saturday at the Convention Center, 11th and Arch Streets.

On-site registration will begin at 9 a.m. and competition at 11 a.m.

Entrance fee: For Inquirer subscribers, it's $35 for adults, $15 for students and seniors (65 and older), and $7 for spectators. For nonsubscribers, it's $50 for adults, $20 for students and seniors, and $10 for spectators.

Preregistration: For more details and online registration, visit www.philly.com/sudoku.

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