UK Puzzle Association

The results of the 2020 UK Puzzle Championship have now been published.

After a close fought battle, first place is awarded to James McGowan, completing all puzzles successfully in just under 2 hours 12 mins, second place is awarded to Neil Zussman completing just under three minutes behind. Third place is awarded to Freddie Hand who unfortunately had a mistake in one puzzle but finished in an impressive time of just under 1 hour 47 mins.

Congratulations to James for claiming his fourth consecutive UK Puzzle Championship title and 6th in total.

The full list of UK results can be found here.
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The championship was also open to international participation with a large entry from around the world with over 30 countries represented. A total of 11 competitors successfully solved all puzzles within the time. Ken Endo completed all the puzzles in slightly over 1 ½ hours a fantastic achievement, with 2nd and 3rd places going to fellow Japanese competitors Panista and Kota Morinishi respectively.

The full international results can be found here.
Thanks again to the puzzle authors and testers without whom we couldn’t run the event.

Thanks also to all competitors for taking part. It would be great to see you all at our next major event the UKPA Open Tournament that will be held round February / March 2021.

Many thanks to Liane for organising and to the authors for an excellent set of puzzles! Congratulations to James on another UK victory.

It's a little frustrating to make an error on one of the easiest puzzles in the test (namely, the four snails), especially since that was one of the puzzles I actually checked. There's always next year...

Wow, that was close (and fortunate). I predict many victories for you in coming years Freddie, with Neil and I not far behind. Which is great news for the strength of the UK team!

Thank you to Ashish Kumar, Bram de Laat, Hatice Esra Aydemir, David McNeill, Nikola Zivanovic, and Prasanna Seshadri for the very enjoyable puzzles, and to Liane for organising it all.

I must also give special thanks to David McNeill for helping out, both by supplying some great puzzles and for helping with proof reading etc. thus forfeiting his place in the championship. One of his puzzles was created on the way home from the WSC/WPC in Germany last year due to what became a catchphrase of the UK Sudoku Team - Now who was it that was missing that six?

I must also thank Alan for overseeing the start of the competition as I wasn't able to be around and for doing the techy things behind the scenes.

Congrats James. Bad luck Freddie, though I've now doubt you'll win plenty of future competitions at this rate.

Thanks as always to Liane and all the other organisers/ setters.
And I did smile when I read the instruction booklet and saw 'You're Missing a Six', always nice to see clever inventions based on random conversations!
So next year, we'll all be missing a 7?

Neil,

I set one of those at the airport. Just replace 6 by N where N is the size of the grid. It works quite well for N equals 7 or 8. I didn't go any further than that. I tried to set a puzzle called ALAN! but that wasn't working out too well.

I just wanted to post my belated thanks for another fantastic contest.

Unfortunately the main lesson learned for me this year was to always double check the printer is working, but I'm happy to have scored a few points despite technical gremlins.

With everything printed out properly afterwards it's been an absolute joy to solve these puzzles, either by visiting interesting takes on some favourites, or discovering new puzzle types to get stuck into. Last years championship was my first puzzle contest & I've been particioating in the WPF GP off the back of how welcoming & fun the experience was. I will happily recommend people to check out your archives (& hopefully paricipate themselves next year) due to how positive my experience was as a first contest (& repeated this year).

Contratulations to everyone who entered & thank again to everyone who contributed to making this possible. I look forward to coming back next year (printer intact) & learning more about this side of the hobby in the meantime.

We're so glad you enjoyed it. We'd love to see you at next year's Open Tournament too and are sure that you would enjoy it.

Yes printer's can be a real pain - ink, paper problems, speed of printing etc. At the Open you simply get the puzzle booklets as in exams