To start with we would like to thanks everyone who participated in the contest. We would further like to congratulate Prasanna Seshadri, Tiit Vunk & Seungjae Kwak for taking the overall top three places amongst the 337 participants and Rohan Rao, Rishi Puri & Ashish Kumar for bagging the next 3 positions amongst the 124 Indian participants.

We got mixed feedback regarding the quality of puzzles and their difficulty level. But overall, the general feeling was that the sudokus were hard. We agree. But our sole aim was to give good but challenging sudokus to everyone. Odd-Even Bridge-2 (9x9) has seen the least submissions. Interesting to note that the original Odd-Even Bridge-2 had lesser number of givens and while finalizing we decided to add few more givens to ease it. But still it turned out to be the least submitted Sudoku. The Odd-Even-2 (9x9) was made easier by adding more clues than what original was having because that is one variant which almost everyone likes whether the solver is a newcomer or an expert. While in the process of finalizing the sudokus for the contest we felt that Antiknight-2 (9x9), even though hard, can remain as it is. It was certainly hard but logically solvable and has some nice deductions which everyone will agree with. A walkthrough for solving the Antiknight-2 has already been uploaded in the site which will provide better insight to it. We felt that Consecutive-2 (9x9) was comparatively easier and can’t be compared with the difficulty of Antiknight-2. But, yes, with respect to points distribution it appears Consecutive-2 and Anti Knight-2 deserved more points than allotted. This is in the retrospective. May be we need collective results of more test solvers while point allotment.

Nevertheless, we will keep the overall feedback in mind and try our best to provide good and interesting sudokus. We would like to thank LMI for giving us the opportunity to author this round of Sudoku Mahabharat 2020. Once again we thank you all for participating in this wonderful event. Last but not the least, we would like to thank Rakesh Rai, who has been so supportive and patient to make this contest happen.

One more thing, though painful & heartening, we would like to remember our beloved friend and great Sudoku enthusiast, Shaheer Rehman, who is no more with us. But we will always remember him and hence would like to dedicate Anti-Knight 2 and Odd-Even Queen 2 sudokus to him. These are our favourite sudokus as an author of SM Round5 2020.

Thanks & Regards

Harmeet & Ramesh

What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Odd Even Sudoku
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Many puzzles were worth too much or too little

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