Sudoku players hold first national championship

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Sudoku, the numbers puzzle that claims 167 million U.S. players, held its first national championship on Saturday, drawing more than 800 people from as far away as California and British Columbia.

Organizers said the event attracted a larger crowd than expected, and proved the popularity of the puzzle that has been a fixture in many U.S. newspapers since 2005, after being popularized by The Times of London the previous year.

A survey last summer by the Philadelphia Inquirer, which sponsored the event, found 56 percent of the U.S. population had played the game -- invented in the United States but named Sudoku in Japan.

The Philadelphia event was won by Sudoku's reigning world champion, Thomas Snyder, 27, who completed the "advanced" section in seven minutes, eight seconds -- about three minutes ahead of his nearest rival -- and took home the first prize of $10,000.

Snyder, a postdoctoral student of bioengineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and a Harvard University PhD. in chemistry, said he had been playing puzzles including Sudoku since he was 5 years old but had only been into "competitive puzzling" for the last 2 1/2 years.

Secrets of his success included "note-taking that's designed for speed," he said, adding that he looked forward to defending his world title in India next year.

But he stressed that he treated puzzling as just a hobby, and did not see it as a "meaningful" activity.

Alicia Leshner, 46, an intensive care nurse from Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, was also playing the advanced category but entertained no thoughts of winning.