Sudoku Competitions
The game of Sudoku is very fun and challenging as well. With the popularity of the game, competitions have developed on various levels. You can find them in the local newspapers, on the internet, on regional, state, and even world levels. The craze behind Sudoku doesn’t look like it will be stopping any time soon.
Some newspapers and internet sites offer daily Sudoku competitions to encourage more hits to the website and to sell more newspapers. The prizes for daily competitions aren’t very spectacular but they are prizes still the same. They can be a newspaper subscription, a free book, movie tickets, and small items along those lines.
Sudoku competitions take place all over the world for various reasons. Singapore hosted one to promote mathematics in 2005. They had 250 contestants enter the competition. Many people felt this was a stretch as Sudoku has nothing to do with math. There is no addition or anything involved in the process. However, Sudoku does have to do with numbers and with reasoning - both which are very important parts of math.
The first Sudoku world championship was held in Italy in 2006. The winner was an accountant from the Czech Republic. The second Sudoku world championship was held in Prague in 2007. The winner was Tom Snyder from the United States. There was also a team competition that Japan won.
Some people just seem to have a natural talent for solving Sudoku puzzles in an amazing amount of time. There really is no secret formula, but many people do have their own methods for completing the puzzles. One advantage some individuals have is that they have an unbelievable memory for what numbers could go in a given place on the grid and they don’t have to write them all down. This saves them plenty of time over the majority of us.
The game of Sudoku has been around since 1979 but the craze surrounding it only began in 2004. How long this particular trend in society will last is not known, but since it is one taking place on a global scale it is believed that it will be around for quite some time to come.
