U.S. student becomes world sudoku champion

Harvard University student Thomas Snyder become the world sudoku champion in Prague on Saturday when he beat Japan's Yuhei Kusui in the head-to-head final round.

Snyder, 27, who was runner-up in the first world championships of the popular numerical logic game last year, scored 162 against Kusei's 135 points in the final session of the three-day event in which 141 of the world's best players took part.

"I was really disappointed not to have won last year," Snyder, who is also the reigning U.S. world puzzle champion, said. "I do not think people were surprised to see me in the play-offs."

Snyder, a chemistry student who expects to finish his post-graduate studies this year, said the secret of his success was playing "lots of logic puzzles, not just sudoku."

"I started doing mathematical and logic puzzles when I was four or five at the time between crawling and walking," he said, adding that the interest was nurtured by his mathematics teacher mother and his father, a university science professor.

Japan won the world team competition, which was held for the first time this year, with 4,490 points. The United States took second place with 4,328 points, followed by the Czech Republic with 3,690 points.

Sudoku, a sort of numerical crossword where contestants have to fill a nine by nine grid so that each column, each row, and each of the nine three by three internal squares contains only the numbers from one to nine, was revived at the end of the 1980s and has recently enjoyed a worldwide boom in popularity.

Organizers of the second world championship said they choose to mix classical sudoku puzzles with logic brain teasers for this year's world championships in a move welcomed by the finalists.

"That was my aim this year," one organizer, Vitezslav Koudelka, said. He added that the game's popularity has now leveled off following its rocking success.

"As the players said, it gets a bit boring filling in gaps with missing numbers in the same way," he explained.