The Puzzle That Defeated The World's Best Sudoku Players

[@JPgreekgaming]

Never, ever, apologize for the length of these videos. Even if they were 2 hours long we would still love them! They (and you as well) are incredibly entertaining!... and also very relaxing :)

[@7Lee7]

This exactly. If I see they're a bit longer I can only think "I'm in for a treat".

[@davidstorrs]

Thirded. I don't mind the long ones at all, I'm just glad to see a CtC.

[@garanceadrosehn9691]

No need to apologize for how long it took. I'm sure it would have taken me days to get it - assuming I got it at all. And you did a nice job of talking through the logic you were using.

[@richardstolk9815]

Never realised that this puzzle was done here too. Just found it today. :-) While setting the sudokus for the WSC, I had the 7x7 theme in mind already early on. I was looking for a good combination of clustering a handfull of digits in one corner of the grid and leave it to that. The combination of toroidal and odds worked very well. My intended solving path was a bit different though (but I can't really recall since I wrote it more than a year ago and in the mean time I created quite a bunch of other puzzles.

[@Dingeman_]

1 minute into the puzzle I was like: just put an 8 in there.... then I realised I'm stupit

[@shonuff5297]

Same I was trying to place 8&9s for the first minute😂

[@masheroz]

Exactly what I was screaming at the screen.

[@ariel_haymarket]

I just tried this myself and my brain was thinking of where to put the 8 and 9.

[@yahhav345]

I had it worse: I somehow (successfully) solved this puzzle without realizing the gray squares are odd

[@koenknoef2697]

@@yahhav345 at first i didn't realise that the blcoks were connected so I thought there were only 3 full boxes and the other boxes could be anything

[@Gennys]

"Ahh! How on earth do you do this?" If YOU'RE saying it it must be VERY VERY hard. I love your content always. Please never stop there are many of us that absolutely enjoy watching you talk about and explain all these really great puzzles. Keep solving.

[@littleschnitzel8226]

Without pencil marks this was an absolute killer, but also an unmeasurable joy when I finally solved it, after more than 45 minutes. Wonderful puzzle containing some beautiful chains of logic, thank you kindly for sharing it with us! I especially love that you got to solve all the 6 first, then all the 4s, then all the 2s and 3s, then all 5s and at last all 1s and 7s. Absolutly marvelously composed puzzle!

[@NLTops]

That feeling when you finish the puzzle in a little under 2 hours and the guy doing it in 17 minutes apologizes for taking so long.

[@carlosbyrd4519]

and the actual tournament had a 5 min limit and people still finished

[@MikeysAce10]

I’m actually really proud of coming in just over 20 mins on this one when usually I’m much closer to double the time of the video! I made the observation that in row 7 column 2 you can’t place an even digit as then it has no possibilities in the shape to its right when the 6 is in to set up the 24 pair a bit quicker. As others have said, your presentation is always brilliant and the time is no issue, it’s actually more interesting to me at least to see how long you ponder and where your thoughts track next!

[@12tone]

This was a beautiful one. Only needed a couple observations to crack but they were _really_ hard to find. On the 3s at the end, you can also observe that column 4 is the only place in row 6 that can have it, if that logic feels easier: the pointing pair eliminates c1, there's already a 3 elsewhere in c2, there's a 6 placed in c3, and then c5-7 are ruled out by the 3 in the top.

[@Morphior]

42:48. I'm actually pretty proud to have seen some of these logical ideas.

[@57thorns]

41:18 Which for me is challenging but not hard.

[@JNCressey]

2:21:32 for me. Oof.

[@evonthon]

Found you recently and started trying the puzzles after watching a few videos. Took 43 min. For this one but it started coming undone for me after spotting the 6 logic due to the amount of notation I had.

[@FoolishBubbles]

mindblowing puzzle. some excellent solves. especially on those 3s!

[@privateagentzero6279]

This puzzle took me 2 hours and 30 minutes to solve this puzzle, Video length is no problem. I don't solve to many Sudokus but this puzzle was fun.

[@meko750]

17:20 That was identifiable much easier than that. On row six, the first column couldn’t have a three because of the pencil marks, the second would contradict the other three in column two, the third column already has a six, the fifth column is in a shape that contains a three, the sixth is already filled by a four and the seventh is blocked by the other three in column seven. Four was the only possible spot.

[@hyperactvehuman]

55:13 Wonderful puzzle. Had to take help from you for identifying the formation of 2 at the bottom corner.... brilliant!

[@Martykun36]

This one took me surprisingly little time for my level. What did the trick for me was going over each number and highlighting all positions that were banned by it. It was quite easy to see the pointing pairs and the hidden singles that way.

[@dcnole]

One tip solving these puzzles is using the "colour" function to shade each box a different color. With the wrap-arounds and off shapes, it can be easy to lose track. Coloring really helps.

[@stuartmcconnachie]

12:45 Why the complex round the houses logic for the 2’s? The bottom row already has a 2 locked into on of the cells in the bottom right corner. The 2’s can ONLY go in column 2 for that shape.

[@damianimmortalcomics]

Moments into the puzzle, I knew that 7 and 1 went into the bottom grey squares on the utmost right side of the board. Great video

[@thesolarfutureenthusiast1102]

21:37 just over the length of your video with explanation of how it works and where it comes from and apology for taking so long but still I'm happy. This is by far my best finish time as a % of your video length :-)

[@TheWaddler]

The hidden 3 at 17:20 stumped me for so long!

[@shonuff5297]

Never seen this type of sudoku. Cool style of puzzle for sure. Took me a few minutes to wrap my head around the rules.

[@LazyMonkey24]

I feel like a small minority of people would consider 20 minutes a long time to complete that puzzle. But it’s good that you want to push yourself to go faster.

[@Reb0rnLP]

In terms of the World Tournament, around 4-5 minutes is considered to be needed.

[@Kingcob7]

It is amazing these players are able to complete so many of these puzzles in 25 minutes.

[@wisdomcats]

It would me take me like 30 minutes just to do this puzzle wrong. So it is really amazing

[@Playerx19]

36 minutes for me. Quickly filled in 6s then 4s, then almost all 2s. Had to resort to using trial and error on the 3s to crack the puzzle, using colours in your software helped for that.

[@3laserbeam3]

Around 23 minutes. It feels like I'm cheating while using your software, turned out to be really easy after I started taking things 1 digit at a time and just highlighting every cell where that digit cannot go. I am apparently cheating at sudoku without asking for hints, and I didn't think this was possible.

[@CallumLerigo]

23:48 - Had to use a pen and paper for some scribblies at one point of logic but OTHER than that, really fun. Thanks for giving us access to some great puzzles :)

[@tomluo147]

10:37. this sudoku honestly felt less like something on wsc and more something from wpc :)

[@grahamcase]

Great puzzle. Took me a little over an hour (!!!!) Still practicing and learning... I have a bad habit of over pencil-marking.

[@tchoate14]

Lovely video. Thanks for showing us a new puzzle.

[@frankdehobbit8989]

It took me 1:52:52, I split it into odd and even numbers and penmarked that with colors. Looking at your solve I just missed some pencil marks making it a lot harder all of a sudden ;) Nice puzzle!

[@LivingLooneyBin]

36:34 to solve this one, im really surprised i actually got it.

[@kvckelvin7]

Where can I find the competition's paper? Like every sudoku in the formal competition. Or is it impossible?

[@laustar380]

20:34 ... is this so called World Sodoku Championship some sort of computerbattle? How on earth does aynone solve this that fast... i feel like i got a rather quit time myself but holy cow... insane. Mad respect to everybody who solved it

[@albertlyngpetersen8702]

15:04 if you put a 3 in r2c4 you will need to put a 3 in r5c3 too. That makes it impossible to put a 3 in the central box. Therefore r2c4 is a 7. That breaks the puzzle too.

[@Qazqi]

Funny enough, what cracked it for me was what you did with the 3s at 12:22. I had all the 4s and 6s, almost all the 2s, and the 3 in the bottom left, which I knew had to be useful, but I missed the obvious and got super stuck. One thing I found myself doing a couple times before then (e.g., as an alternative to what you did with the 2s) was a sort of finned X-wing, but rather than only eliminating cells that see both, taking the fin and running with it to see if it eliminated other cells along the X-wing rows or columns.

[@bobblebardsley]

Looking back through some old videos from before I found your channel, I solved this one in 28:40 which I'm pretty happy with! I'm not sure you'd even consider this particularly difficult these days :P Very nice puzzle, I enjoyed the toroidal logic.

[@BlueCyann]

I love how the three just appears out of nowhere and boom the whole thing is solved.

[@kendallchaos]

BlueCyann that’s usually how sudoku works you get stuck then the one number you need shows up and then it’s a domino effect

[@G.Aaron.Fisher]

It took me about 15 minutes to solve. Definitely challenging, but at no point in time did I feel stuck on any part. It felt a lot more fair than I expected given the hype. All I can think is that getting your mind around the wrapping of the puzzle pulls from a different skillset than solving the sudoku itself.

[@razacninja]

Took me about 40 minutes, first time doing these puzzles without 8s and 9s and different shapes restricting it, it amazes me to think that these are solved in under 5 minutes in competitions. It was a realy fun puzzle to solve tho, i'm enjoying these more than regular sudokus hahaha

[@draconicdusk5911]

16:00 is my time, but that was with a 5 min break inbetween so 11:00. I didn't have much trouble once I started focussing on where the evens could go and pencilmarked every box that could contain 3 or less. lots of tripples and doubles.

[@RandomBurfness]

This one took me about 15 minutes. I found X-wing like things and chaining worked best for this puzzle.

[@crazypomp927]

You should've colored each of the shapes straight off to keep track of where it wrapped around.

[@yiotatort]

I didn't go half as nicely through that puzzle, tried once and screwed up, so started over without resetting the timer, and basically filled in all of the possibilities and deleted things it couldn't be and then hunted through rows and columns for the number that could only be in one place. It worked, but it was very slow.

[@ashmeera4058]

39:17 This was really fun to do!

[@lightningt12312]

The trick for this variant seems to be focusing on the unconstraind values first, in this case even numbers.

[@Falk_René_Skamiera]

Aren't the even numbers the constrained ones? An odd number can be anywhere An even number, however, is not allowed to be in the grey squares

[@BrunoBarcelosAlves]

@@Falk_René_Skamiera Yeah, as he was solving it I realized that the most significant constraint is not that the grey squares must be odd, but rather that the even numbers must be in white squares.

[@57thorns]

@@BrunoBarcelosAlves Agreed, it is mostly a semantic question but it also show how important it is to understand the constraints.

[@lightningt12312]

The odd numbers are constrained in the puzzle setting whereas the even ones end up being constrained by your logic when you solve.

[@PeterrDDark]

31:29 - very nice

[@AWanderingSwordsman]

Given the title, I'm surprised how easy I found this. I mean, it still took me 50 minutes but some of the other puzzles from your videos have taken me 4+ hours. Maybe I'm just getting better.

[@ohyou_6599]

I feel the same way, this is the first video where I was spotting the next moves first.

[@stuartw969]

Excellent puzzle, excellently solved

[@Max_Griswald]

32:15 - I had to check a few moves in advance at one point (I basically was like "If that's a 2, then that's a blah, makes that a blargh, those two become ummms", etc. I think it was a 6-cell exercise...Before ruling out specific numbers.)

[@Max_Griswald]

Well...I felt pretty good about that having finished in 32 minutes with Simon taking about 20 (Barely 50% longer than Simon) and then he started talking about a 5 minute time limit...

[@florianzellmer8735]

Quite surprising that all the top solvers had difficulties with this one. Compared to the other 2 Puzzles you presented it took me about half the time. (15min)

[@OyvindSOyvindS]

Thank you for your awesome channel, and the way you explain along the way. Was able to solve this somewhat faster than you, but I did not have to explain anything along the way, though :-)

[@eddaumpeddaump4509]

It's hard to keep up with you. Great job.

[@42kellective]

Loved the puzzle! Took me an hour to solve but very satisfying

[@darklink2300]

2 hours, 21 minutes, 33 seconds for me, including a breakfast break and some hints from the video... this was a tough challenge

[@lievenvanloo6011]

I did it in under 1 hour without looking at the video, honestly pretty proud of myself xp

[@jonathangilmore37]

Good video, such a relaxing way to start the day

[@LearnSciSnippets]

Great watching you solve this.

[@BatteryAcid1103]

47:15, not too bad on my part given my skill level. Very glad to have gotten it without any help :)

[@phs125]

I somehow found it to be easier than most other puzzles in this channel

[@wakaNL]

took me 30:14 to complete. now watching you solve it at 8:22 you were wondering if you could use R7C2 and you couldn't find anything quickly at that point but you could have used it actually. You eliminated 4 as an option noticing it had to go into row 2 of that shape and 6 was next to it but you also had a 157 triple left in row 1so the only 2 options left were 2 and 3. Now try to put a 2 there at that point and put a 2 in the box next to it and you will see you can't due to the grey cells.

[@Kalwei]

around the 9:00 mark, I saw this pattern of fours. Thanks to the 4 in column 4. Got a good bit of pencilmarks out of that.

[@TheDeathcook]

43 minutes but I managed to solve it. It took me way too long to get used to the shapes (and maybe it didn't help that it's 1 o'clock in the morning). But I was so happy when I finally got those 3s and the whole thing just toppled over.

[@ChrisWEarly]

26:49 :D used the vid for just general tips and reassurance of my own thinking. Nice kind of puzzle

[@brianrichter8255]

It was nice that the app was toroidal to match the puzzle!

[@PhilipTa10]

30:35 I’m very pleased with that.

[@Nickle314]

I suspect with practice, you can get very quick at these

[@FriedChckn13]

I agree, it looks like if you get used to the odd shapes you can significantly improve your pace.

[@goldenera7090]

didn't feel like monster. well done Simon

[@DiMono]

This took me about 1:05:00 (I had a dinner break in the middle, so time is wibbly wobbly). I had to test numbers to rule them out towards the end, so my solution was not very elegant.

[@Afterthoughtbtw]

Man, this really stretched my brain. Never tried a Toroidal Sudoku before, let alone a Toroidal Odd one. Took me a shade under 20 minutes, but a lot of that was spent getting my head wrapped around how the rules worked. (See what I did there!?)

[@joseluislopes3956]

Almost 1.5 hours (got a bit interrupted) but still proud. First time I saw one of these actually and the shapes were messing with my head

[@Tehom1]

One tip I found, not magic but it got me a few digits: Since the grey squares are restricted to {1,3,5,7}, try to find other squares that see all of {2,4,6} so that you have a lot of squares restricted to {1,3,5,7}.

[@Tehom1]

Wrote that before watching the solve. Simon's strategy of finding the {2,4,6}'s first is more effective, in that it restricts everything left to {1,3,5,7}.

[@alibabapirce9782]

i look at rules and puzzle you made and i wonder where is dotted part of that puzzle ( apart of outlined areas having nubers from 1-7, and gray areas having numbers from 1-7 there is rule about dotted areas having diffrent 2 digit numbers thats ascend with number of box and you dont seem to have that boxes in that puzzle) so did real puzzle didnt had this boxes or did you forget about them or just couldnt put them on site and ignored them?

[@headoftss]

Yes, Simon, it’s a monster.

[@jdferreira]

25 minutes. But only after some help. At about 12:50 in this video, the 2s on the second columns were enough to get me through

[@chipacabra]

As if I needed more evidence that I'm not world championship material, haha. A really interesting puzzle, there's a few things I did differently in my solve so there's obviously some flexibility but wow that was rough.

[@jdyerjdyer]

The puzzle wasn't too difficult. That said, I was 11 times slower than championship pace and just over 3 times slower than your pace, coming in at exactly 55 minutes. I probably could have done it in half the time if the cages were easier to see. I constantly had to highlight the cages to visualize them because on my screen the cage lines were barely differentiated from the cell lines in quite a few areas. If the puzzle was in a different arrangement (not geometrically similar/mirrored) this puzzle would have been a real nightmare. In retrospect I probably should have just colored each cage a different color, lol. Oh, well. Also, I did waste a few minutes because I didn't see the pattern with the 2s. Instead I saw the 4 pattern when that only half unlocked I moved on to the odd digits instead. I did rather enjoy the challenge though. Unique, beautiful puzzles like this are great fun!

[@yellowhero5413]

34 min, I was stuck for a long time until I saw all those sixes lining up nicely and then it was ez after that

[@1Girl248]

took me almost 19 mins which i'm not proud of but i really enjoyed this puzzle! made me nostalgic for strimkos (chain sudokus)

[@DDvargas123]

it took me about 20 minute and it took him about 17 minutes. youre not far off the ball here. and some of the best were stumped under 5 minute time pressure . idk if that counts for anything

[@kendallchaos]

I feel like the difference quadrants should be color coated so laymen like me can try it and not get confused by the rap around effect

[@JYPark1101]

29:18 Fun puzzle!

[@palfly1864]

You could have ruled out the 2 in r7c2 by looking at the bottom left box that isn't cut off (by the edge of the grid). Basically the same logic as you found out the 2s in the bottom row

[@Hephaestus_God]

I was stuck until this move at 11:25 which helped me finish the entire thing

[@neomorphicduck]

I loved the puzzle, took me 25 mins though, because I placed a 3 on two different sides of the box the first time through. Still, amazing and beautiful logic!

[@AdamRidley11]

I'm surprised you didn't use displaced numbers for this, would have made it much easier because numbers were displaced in pairs both vertically and horizontally!

[@zakariatouati6767]

you are good, keep it up ! but no need to apologize

[@inv41id]

I'm astounded that I'm able to see things faster than you in this puzzle, since that never seems to happen in any of your other videos.

[@laserbuddha]

This is so difficult that I don't even get what the rules are.

[@theashen]

Took a while to get my head around (pun intended), but great puzzle.

[@angli5896]

where can i get these puzzles？

[@myfunnybabyvideos4590]

It was very interesting to watch. You have a wonderful channel. Like & Signatures from a new Friend. You are truly talented. Well done

[@Magetank4445]

Had to come look for how you solved one of the 2 pencil marks at the bottom right. I didn't catch that. Other than that I managed to complete it from that point onwards in 43 minutes.

[@bigfatkittymeow5237]

This is a real challenge. But thank goodness I solved it.

[@ShadowTheAge]

Maybe regular sudoku are toroidal too?

[@Anthony-vu8bl]

What if you showed on video how to create a handcrafted sudoku ? :) great channel btw, love the work, subscribed now !

[@livedandletdie]

I think that this is one of the puzzles I'd solve faster than you. These Toroidal sudokus seem to play a lot nicer than regular sudokus specially this one with the odd cells.

[@odolany]

took me half an hour, much bifurcating though which wouldn't be as easy with a pencil as with an online app ;) off to see how it should be done properly. great puzzle

[@TheErusPrime]

They had 5 minutes. It took you ~15. I took ~60 overall (with 2 resets cuz I messed up). I'm gonna count it as a win though because I was able to get through it by myself as long as I stared at the board long enough.

[@TheErusPrime]

Also that was really fun. The "a-ha!" moments were super satisfying.

[@KeyboardNewbie]

Is there any way to try this on the go? ie in a phone or tablet?

[@CrackingTheCryptic]

It should work if you just click the link... (perhaps I've misunderstood the issue?)

[@wepped482]

Do you ever get the sudokos like in these books that cause a square pattern of unsolvable answers? Like it could be a 4/2 or a 2/4 with no contradiction because it is a square of circular answers? I don't like those.

[@Kurgosh1]

80 minutes later it's solved, but I am clearly not cut out to be a world champion.