A great test indeed! Many quality puzzles, with a surprising lack of stagnation.Rather than routine, quickly became a highlight of each day. I hope we see more like this in the future.

A big thank you for running this - I know it takes a lot of effort, but it was worth it! :)

A Tale of Two Contests:

First of all, congratulations to Palmer. He showed great performance and became the Tapa Master of 2012. In the last years, I was always wondering how Thomas solved all that puzzles in extremely short times; now I feel the same for Palmer. I didn’t make 19 puzzles to be finished. My aim was to force solvers to follow a strategy. But a guy that solves all puzzles in 66 minutes can only have one strategy: Kill ‘em all! :) Once again I congratulate him for his self-confidence and earning the title by defeating this final cruel round.

The top three of TVC 2012 are:

1. Palmer Mebane (USA),
2. Thomas Snyder (USA),
3. Hideaki Jo (JPN)

I am skipping the statistics for TVC XII :)

The file that contains all variation ideas will soon be updated. So you can still share any ideas with me.

50 days has been completed in CTC. I am as satisfied as you. It was a tiresome experience for me, Deb and Gulce. If Deb hadn’t come up with this brilliant idea and say “Let’s do a classic Tapa contest” no one would be thanking me today. At this very point I should say that I am not doing these on my own, that would be impossible. I am just a guy who makes puzzles. It is not unfamiliar for a puzzle maker to get all the credit, but Deb, Ulrich and Gulce who worked as hard as I did deserve applause. You already know Deb is dead set on this; he works round the clock for puzzles. I cannot get through so many tests without Gulce. And Ulrich was a great help with testing all TVC rounds this year. The puzzles are sometimes flawed before they are ready to be presented to you. It is really annoying to send flawed puzzles to a solver that has been world champion so many times :) I should also thank Roland, he was also a tester of the last round, in spite of his lack of time. And Ulrich stil agreed to test the puzzles even he had flu last week.

With all of the above, I bow respectfully before these people. I am just a puzzle making robot, but the puzzles shape in flesh and bones thanks to these people.

Let me mention my favorite puzzles of TVC XII: Borders (b), Compass (b), Sweeper (a) and TAPA TAPA.

CTC puzzles were made by me and Gulce. Until last night, I had no intention on publishing these puzzles after the contest is over. But I changed my mind and the reason for that was the files Palmer has been publishing in his blog. He has published two puzzle packs, containing tons of puzzles and solving tips; and I think these are amazing works. I thought about it and I decided that CTC puzzles now belong to the puzzle community, not us. The complete file will soon be available for download.

The top three of CTC are:

1. Palmer Mebane (USA),
2. Hideaki Jo (JPN),
3. Nagata Yuta (JPN)

As I stated at the very beginning, the top three solvers will receive a classic Tapa book that I prepared. The book is now being tested; maybe we can display its cover here. I will need the addresses of the top three in a few weeks. And later the book will be available for purchase at Akil Oyunlari blog: http://akil-oyunlari.livejournal.com

Our country is famous for a dessert named “Turkish delight”. It has many types; one of them is called “double roasted”, very delicious. Palmer took a “double roasted” victory by earning both titles. I congratulate and admire him.

That is all I can say for now. Thanks everyone for getting involved in what we did.

Best,

Serkan

Thanks for all the effort for the CTC - it was a real pleasure!

Thanks a lot for everything Serkan, Deb, Ulrich, and Gulce. This whole event (TVC + CTC) has been fantastic and I will definitely miss the daily puzzles!

All puzzles will be available online (as long as LMI server has enough space !)

We have added a "Check Solution" button, so you can now re-solve and check if the solution is correct. Thanks once again for bringing it up.

One of my aims for running a daily contest at LMI was to attract some Indian solvers into daily puzzle solving. It was achieved to some extent. I'm really happy with Prasanna's performance, who ended up at 27th overall, and notched top 3 positions few positions.

Before CTC started, I had requested Serkan if it is possible to have Tapa books for top 3 Indians, and he had very kindly agreed to the proposal.

CTC	Overall	ToPo
Prasanna	27	350.726
Rohan	42	315.751
Swaroop	63	283.181

Incidentally, or otherwise, they are also the top 3 players in TVC. Congratulations.

Thank you. Slightly disappointed that I couldn't finish well, but for a first time contest, I'll take that and learn from it. As for attracting the Indians, I think I remember at least 10 who participated almost everyday :) Hope they all enjoyed the experience as much as I did. Congrats to Rohan and Swaroop. A good show from Swaroop, when we were discussing at around the start of CTC we both agreed he had an "outside chance" for 3rd. In the end, his 3rd place was probably the only one among the 3 of us that was never in doubt(Rohan did cross me a couple of times before I had my top-time-strings :P ).



Woohoo! :D Thanks Serkan.

Thanks a lot,
This was my first TVC experience and CTC anyways was new to everyone. I have a learned a lot especially got to know lots of variations of TAPA's. It feels good to finish at 3rd position in INDIA in both TVC and CTC. Also thanks to Prasanna, who used discuss with me daily and clarify my doubts.
Hope to give tough fight next time. :)

Here is the cover for the Tapa books

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Is it possible to download the puzzles in pdf format? The file seems to give me an error.