August Beginners' Sudoku Contest is over. Password removed from the booklet. Prasanna will post a summary soon.

The August Edition of the Beginners' Sudoku Contests had 364 participants, including 179 Indians. It seems that the high number of Indians could be due to all the offline contests happening here recently. We hope everyone, newcomers and regulars alike, had a good time of it.

The Top 3 Beginners are Regina (Estonia), sa3664 (Shalini Arora) (India) and beartan (Seunro Joo) (South Korea).

The Top 3 Seasoners are TiiT (Estonia), jaku111 (Czech Republic) and Gotroch (Czech Republic).

Congrats to all the winners, and thank you all for participating!

On a personal note, I was a test solver for this Beginners' Contest. I noted that the Trio is harder than most Trios out there, and I thought thats a good thing, because concentrating on 2-3 numbers at a time is one of the best ways to learn new techniques for a Beginner (in my opinion). If anyone does want to know how to finish off the Trio or any other of the 8 Sudokus, feel free to post in the forum, one of us will help you out.

Oh and of course, Thanks to Jan Mrozowski for preparing these two quality sets :)

Vunk family monopolized the 1rst place in both category, haha !

hey according to my results,I should be promoted to seasoners category but my name isn't on the list of seasoners.

We usually do that before start of next Beginners' Sudoku test. But it is done now. Following players are promoted to Seasoners category after August's test. Congratulations.

gaurav.kjain
pisipaha
distri
dp_94
purzelbaumfan
Ptiguigui

Looks like I got bumped to seasoner status again. Noticed text on logging in: "You have Achieved 100+ in a Beginners Contest. Marking you as seasoner" I'm guessing that's from the Masyu one, so I guess the glitch is still there. Either that, or my assumption that there would be independent sudoku and puzzle beginner status was wrong. :) Regardless, I'll still be here solving everything I can.

The Masyu test was considered, by mistake, as you had guessed. Unfortunately, some of the data is lost. I have tried to restore from the history. I hope (?) it is correct now, for everyone. My apologies.

I found the trio sudoku quite difficult, got stuck once the 1-2-3 was done. I would certainly like some pointers to solve this. Also in the recently concluded ISC, I am afraid I found even a few of the 6x6 difficult. Can anyone help ? Similarly smashed sums, greater than consecutive too.

Lets go one at a time. This Beginners' Trio Sudoku first. About the 4-5-6 - Concentrate only on elminating 4s throughout the grid, you should get a 4 in the 9th box because of eliminations throughout the grid. About the 7-8-9 - Note that 9 can only be in R2C6 or R8C6 for C6. Also, for C7 and C9, 9 can be either in R2C7,R8C9 or R3C9,R7C7. If its the former, then 9 can't be anywhere in C6.

Let me know if this helps, or if you need more help with Trio. If it helps, then I request you to ask the ISC related stuff in the ISC topic, just to not mix up everything.

Thank you very much, the 9-part I could quickly understand, having a slight tussle with the 4-part but will get it eventually. It is amazing how each thing unravels so smoothly. I have a number of questions on the ISC, will ask them in the right forum. Once again thanks.

Hello,

Bigginer here...how and where can I practice(previous puzzles) for upcoming contest...please guide. i would like to practice online.

Rgds.

The image for arrow sudoku is broken.

Fixed.

Good luck to everybody; I hope you will enjoy the puzzles and wish dearly that beginners will find them both interesting and affordable enough. Do your best and have fun!

I did well in classics this time and screwed up in variants. :(
i kept on doing mistakes on diagonal. All sudoku are awesome. Only thing i felt is inequality was hard in respect of beginners :)
but a nice test overall. :)

The inequality was indeed hard. I botched the classic pretty badly. I should have gotten the whole thing in 21 minutes, but alas, I botched the 10 point and had to erase the whole thing.

hey is this test online or offline??

Online. You can either play using the flash interface on your computer screen OR you can solve on paper by printing the pdf.

okay thank you:)

just finished the classic part of the test. the puzzles were nice, and as always with these I used the flash interface.

However, maybe it's just me, but I found the clash in fonts (typeface, weight, size, colour - pretty much everything!) between the givens and what I was entering made the whole experience pretty painful. I had to do one puzzle twice, and another 3 times because I kept confusing digits!

Nice set of puzzles. The inequality was too good with respect to the flow of solving, even though I made mistakes twice in it. It was really seamless in my third attempt. :)

When someone is disqualified, their answer immediately shows up for me (everyone?) on the results page, instead of being hidden until after the whole contest is over. This is probably not intended.