#wsc2019

When a Dream becomes a Reality. 💜💜

The results were posted after the banquet dinner tonight. I entered the day in 25th overall unofficially and I ended up moving up to 21st overall unofficially and 18th overall officially! Our team finished 14th in the official team standings which was an improvement over last year. It felt like a harder competition this year and somehow I only managed to submit one mistake in the individual rounds and one in the team rounds (both of which came late in the day yesterday). It was a lot of fun despite the accommodations at the hotel which are lacking.

I just finished eating lunch but round 10 was half an hour long and worth 300 points. They were linked sudokus and I had a mini crisis averted as I nearly left a grid incomplete but noticed it with 30 seconds left and filled it in just in time. If all is correct I should get 210 out of 300 points.

I started fast in a round of relay sudokus. It was 25 minutes long and worth 250 points, but I stalled on the highest point one and ended the round with 155 out of 250 points. A bit of a disappointment before heading into the last round.

This is the most valuable and longest round for Day 2. It was 45 minutes to solve 10 sudokus worth 450 points. I ended up nearly finishing 9 but settled for 8 leaving 2 low point ones to give me 390 out of 450 points if all correct.

This was a literal 3D puzzle round with sudoku printed onto cardboard that formed a trophy. We were given 6 left and right halves and had to figure out which order they went. We figured that out but didn’t transfer it all to the answer grid in time so we should get 4 out of the 6 (although we finished 5 of them). Next are the final 3 individual rounds.

We had 40 minutes to solve 16 connected sudokus placed in an oval. And the other strong solver for Canada and I worked through it at opposite ends of the sheet. I found one that was solvable in a fairly self contained way and we ended up getting 14 of them finished including a mad scramble at the end of the round where we finished up a couple and needed only a few more minutes to finish it all.

They posted the results in the morning. I’m 25th overall as my round 6 and 7 scores dropped me in the standings. I had one wrong for 30 points and somehow got 1 part wrong in the team submission which is disappointing. I also placed 50 something in Round 2 of the World Cup and failed to qualify for the third part which is disappointing (only top 40 from that round qualify). So it seems like I ended yesterday on more of a low than I realized but I’m still close enough to be able to climb back into the top 20 of the final standings. On a personal level, it sucks to be just behind “Jeopardy Jason” from the US by one spot but somehow I’m the top Canadian as my teammate is around 40th overall (and had a similarly tough finish to the day of solving).