Congrats to Jakub Hrazdira (Czech Republic), Kota Morinishi (Japan) and Hideaki Jo (Japan) for the top-3 spots in SM Round 2: Irregular Variants.
Congrats to Kishore Kumar, Rakesh Rai and Prakhar Gupta for taking the top-3 Indian spots. Kishore, having topped both rounds of SM comfortably, is way ahead of the rest. Good show.

Being one of the last ones to pick a round, it seems Indian authors don't enjoy creating Irregular Sudokus ;-)
Irregular is not a very comfortable type for a lot of Indians (and maybe others too?), so my approach was to create really easy Classics so that players can spend more time on the variants.

Thanks to Prasanna, Swaroop and Rishi for testing/pre-solving the set.

A lot of players seemed to struggle with the 9x9 Surplus, well, it had a strightforward solving path. Maybe it was slightly under-valued.
The 6x6 Scattered was my personal favourite of the set, and it has a neat little trick of solving if you spot the fixed positions for the same number.
The original 9x9 Chain was too hard and it was replaced by a pretty cool one (which incidently, is Deb's). I was confident this would be the highest rated sudoku of the set.

Participation was lower than SM Round-1, just about 300 participants and a little over 100 Indians. Why? Don't like Irregulars? :-)
Anyway, hope to see you all in SM Round-3 (Odd-Even Variants by Deb Mohanty), which promises to be fun with high-quality puzzles and hope to see more participation.

If anyone found any variant particularly difficult to solve or is interested to learn how to solve any sudoku of this set, feel free to post here. Some of the active puzzlers in this community will be more than delighted to share solving techniques and logical steps to solve these sudokus :-)

Does the concept of innies - outies work in surplus sudoku and torroidal sudoku ?

Solutions appended to sudoku booklet

Sure...
In the surplus sudoku from this competition it works really well. The four "outies" are exactly the four doubled numbers in the four regions that are before the line of cut.

If someone is interested here you can find the screen recording of my solution: http://youtu.be/JqGNO85tq7Y

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
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

@lenzo
That was fun to watch! Though, I wonder how you put the 1 and 6 in Row-2 for the 6x6 Surplus right at the start?

Maybe one of the top-10 players should record one of these. And imagine if we could also have some brain-capturing technology that shows visualizations of what goes on in their brains :-)
I hope technology progresses really fast ;-)

I don't remember what was my thinking ,I now see that the 6 in the first area can only be in r1c1 or r2c1, then 6 is in r6c3 and in r4c6, then 6 can not stay in r2c6 then is in r2c1.
But I saw that I was quick to put it but do not put the other easy 6 in r6c3 and r4c6 then i think it was a lucky mistake because it was my absolute first sudoku surplus...

I loved solving the Chain Sudoku. It was exquisitely designed. Kudos to Deb, looking forward to an exciting Odd-Even round authored by Deb.

I liked the design of all big pointers, kudos to Rohan ! Nice round !! I like Jigsaws, it sounds synonymous with Jurassic somehow.