For more than three whole minutes, Thomas Snyder - twice a world Sudoku champion - sat contentedly on the floor of a Convention Center stage today after he'd finished the final puzzle at the Philadelphia Inquirer National Sudoku Championship. It was the high-voltage $10,000 final round.
Behind him stood a large board with a tough advanced Sudoku puzzle he'd completed in a breakneck 4 minutes, 14 seconds. He looked relieved as his two competitors still worked to complete their boards, with the same puzzle. The next to finish was Tammy McLeod.
And that was when the numbers came crashing down, you could say, on Thomas Snyder.
He'd begun to walk over to congratulate McLeod on coming in second - a $4,000 award - when his board caught his eye. And there it was.
Two sixes in one column. You can't have two sixes in a column in Sudoku, a logic game you complete by filling numbers into blank squares. In a column, you can have the numbers one through nine.
Each.
And once.
Instead of congratulating McLeod for placing second, Snyder motioned to his Sudoku board to show that her (also impressive) speed of 7:41 made her this year's national Sudoku champion. In all, three boxes - or cells, as players call them - of his puzzle were incorrect.
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