Kiwi quizzers off to battle of the brainiest
Seven clever Kiwi lads have quizzed their way to the brink of glory at the World Puzzle Championships.
This year’s 26th annual event attracts more than 150 people from 30 countries to Bangalore, India, from mid October in tandem with the 12th World Sudoku Championships – and for the first time it will feature a New Zealand team of Finbarr Nobel, 26, Matt Russell, 26, Simon O’Donnell, 25, Sam Shillson, 25, and Jordan Hamel, 25, from Wellington, and George Meale, 25, and Henry Taylor, 25, from Auckland.
The team met during their first year at the University of Otago in 2010, and have lived together onand-off ever since, moving from casual evenings at the city’s many pub quizzes to the brain-teasers they’ll now face at the WPC.
Hamel, the group’s capitan, admits it all started as a bit of fun, and they only decided to ‘‘get serious’’ after hearing about the world champs last year.
But in order to enter, the young professionals, five of whom are lawyers, had to create a new company because world champs competitors have to register through an official puzzle organisation in their country – and New Zealand didn’t have one.
So Aotearoa Puzzles Inc was born in December last year.
O’Donnell, the group’s Sudoku captain, says he practices five times a week and likes to keep things simple.
‘‘I normally start with the ones, then move on to the twos and work my way numerically up to nine – I don’t like to get out of order or my brain sort of gets a little tangled.
‘‘There is a lot of mysticism surrounding some of the more complex strategies of solving Sudokus, the Japanese have been doing it for hundreds of years and they have a few tricks up their sleeves that I just don’t know.’’
Fortunately for the guys, there is one Kiwi that is in the know.
James McGowan, based in Christchurch, is a top world puzzler, who’s been to six WPC’s and got silver in the 2015 individual logic competition in Bulgaria while competing for the UK.