#73 - WSPC recap and practice puzzle set

I participated in WSPC for the first time last week!

Having entered the competitive solving scene somewhere late 2020/early 2021, this moment finally became a reality after almost 2 years of living up to it. I now look back at one of the most wonderful weeks I've had in a long time, where especially meeting people I'd been looking forward to meeting for so long and getting to make many new friends were the most memorable parts for me.

I got 56th in sudoku and 42nd in puzzles. Lower than expected in sudoku, much higher than expected in puzzles. I suppose it makes sense, as my preparation was very heavily focused on puzzles. I was on the B team for both events because of a poor performance in the Dutch championships earlier this year, but managed to get 3rd NL in sudoku (beating 2 A team members) and 2nd in puzzles (beating all members except Bram, who was miles ahead of all of us). A couple of really silly mistakes cost me a couple spots in the overall leaderboard, but looking back I think I got the most out of it I could. The event was a great experience that taught me a lot and I look forward to trying to improve my rankings next year.

As for WPC, the puzzles were fantastic! Great theming all around, lots of variety and something to solve for everyone in every round. The event also felt much more balanced, with the rounds being much more varied in length and amount of puzzles. There is a slight bias here - being familiar with most of the authors and genres, I think it'll be a long time before another tournament comes around where the puzzle selection suits me as well as it did at this event.

I have mixed feelings about the sudoku side of things, where rounds seemed very short, puzzles disproportionately hard and point allocation at times off, making luck and strategy feel much more important than anticipated. For me personally it showed in round 4, which was my best round by far - I opted to go for the high pointers for a change and ended up having correct bifurcations on all of them, putting me tied for 6th overall for that round. Still, I had a lot of fun in this part of the event as well.

Ending on a positive note - a huge compliment to everyone involved, from organisation to partners to support staff to authors. The event was an absolute joy to participate in.

Looking forward to next year!

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To prepare for the puzzle side of things, I wrote some practice puzzles. I mostly focused on genres I wasn't familiar with and genres where we didn't have any practice puzzles available yet within the team (the one exception being Yaji Battle, which was mostly a break from learning new things). Time was of the essence, so they aren't all necessarily good puzzles, but they did a great job of helping me develop a basic understanding of the genres. Some I'm happier with than others, but hopefully you'll enjoy solving them all the same.

PDF with all puzzles, links and solutions:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kTwUUhlZVXfsuLtX6CCINepX2QPngC8w/view?usp=sharing

Round 2
Araf (Singleton) - https://tinyurl.com/2ksvsyx2