Septembers Beginners' contest is over. Passwords removed from booklets.

LMI Beginners' contest September is over. Statistically it is very similar to the August edition. 336 participants and 289 of them submitted at least one sudoku correctly.

The top 3 Beginners this time are Pwned from USA, mtgs from the United Kingdom, and PMarlin from USA(2nd podium finish). From Indians, aashay and prabhadoshi are worth mentioning, finishing 4th and 5th respectively.

jaku111(Czech Republic), Timothy(France) and Kota(Japan) topped the Seasoner standings.

Thank you all for Participating!

I am sure these contests must really be a confidence booster for beginners especially for those who find themselves placed above the seasoners.....

what is the difference between a toroidal sudoku and an irregular sudoku? and in the example provided, some of the outlined regions have 2,3,4,5 etc (arbit number of cells)How do u fill then the digits 1 to 7 in each outlined region.....
PS : Glad that P.S and the glitz and glamour that was missing for 2 weeks is back in LMI. :-P

The regions 'wrap' around the grid. For example: R1C1, R1C2, R2C1, R6C1, R6C2, R7C1, R7C2 is one region of seven cells.
Wherever there is no thick border at an edge, it means the region continues to the opposite end. Look at the 5 at R2C3 and the 4 at R7C4, they lie in the same region.

In Irregular Sudoku, there is no 'wrapping' in the regions.

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hi, can anyone tell me a site to practice some odd sudokus

http://rohanrao.blogspot.in/search/label/Odd%20Sudoku

http://sudokucup.com/node/2127

http://www.worldpuzzle.org/sudoku/sudoku-w26/

http://www.sachsentext.de/en/node/608





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mind block cleared.....Thnks Rohan...

"penalty award" - is that an oxymoron !!

Thanks for another good beginner's contest. The half credit for late submissions to encourage everyone to work all puzzles is an excellent idea.

Beginners Contest for October is over.
Password removed from the pdfs.

Congrats to hjkl18(Czech Republic), momiji(China) and mtgs(UK) for topping Beginners' Contest October. Among Seasoners, F4han(Malaysia), jaku111(Czech Republic) and janoslaw(Poland) top the standings.

Out of 116 Beginners, 102 solved at least one sudoku correctly, and the corresponding numbers for Seasoners is 156/164. Its pleasing to see so many non-zero scores, as that was the main aim with the extended time idea. We have received some good feedback on this, including a comment above, but we welcome more feedback on this and any other aspect of this month's contest.

Thank you all for participating!

Something I'd like to add separately -

There has been some curiosity about the author of these contests. The author so far, barring the one noted here, has been Deb. But, we encourage other authors to contribute too. Obviously, by now, the difficulty expected in these contests is known. The technicalities are -
1. These authors won't be added/updated on the author's page, but they will be given credit on this topic.
2. If at all someone would like to author a Beginners' contest, contact me/Deb and we will let you know the variants for that particular month.

We're pleased to announce that Fred Stalder(Fred76) has already offered to author Beginners' Contest November.

mtgs will be moved to Seasoners category after 2 scores of 75+.

what makes a person disqualified ?i see a person disqualified in the list...what might be the reason?pardon me if i m touching on sensitive topics..but i m curious ..apart from posting ridiculous times like 0:01 for solving all sudokus which happened in the previous month ,does solving all in under 15 or so min warrant a disqualification just because the person might be a beginner?

It is always a difficult decision to disqualify anyone, beginner or seasoner. We discuss it multiple times internally before finalizing anything. I'm not going to share those most-difficult-part-of-administering-online-puzzle-tests here. But "solving under 15 minutes" is not a criteria to disqualify anyone.

Since you are curious, I'll send you an PM regarding why we had a disqualified player this time.

Haha, I'm joking, of course ! I'm glad to have the honor of creating the grids for the next beginners contest !

Fred

There is a small change in image format for the Consecutive Sudoku that appeared last month. Instead of dots, bars will be present between consecutive digits.

I just registered on the LMI site. Could you please tell me where do I get puzzles to practice for this month's beginner's challenge.



Also, could you please share any link on the format how this tournament will be conducted.



I am sure this must be there on the site but being a newbie I am not sure where it is.

For practice you can view the previous Beginners' Contests here - http://logicmastersindia.com/BeginnersSudoku/?test=B201210 . The new types, Outside and No Knight Step(or Anti Knight), can be found, along with other variants if you look through the Monthly Tests, or go to the blogs/sites provided on the links page - http://logicmastersindia.com/home/?g=links . Out of the sites Fed Sudoku, Sudoku Cup and Argio Logic have online solving.

As for format, once the contest page link is shared, there will be a section there giving details of how to use the interface/make submissions. The basic summary is -

You have 40 minutes of "official time", during which you can either download and print a PDF, solve on paper and submit the rows or columns that the arrows show, or you can solve online itself. With each submission the Instant Grading will let you know if you're right or wrong. If wrong, you can re submit but you'll get a penalty of 1 minute added to your time taken for each wrong submission. You may submit after the 40 minutes are done till the contest dates are over, but you will get just 50 % of the points then.