The 28th WPC and 14th WSC took place in Kircheim, Germany last week. The outstanding results from my point of view were Ken Endo’s surprise win of the WSC individual competition, and Philipp Weiß’s amazing win over Ken Endo of the WPC individual competition. Congratulations! My own individual performance was rather disappointing, with offical ranks of 43 (sudoku) and 17 (puzzles), rarely feeling that I was puzzling at speed.

And then there was the WPC team competition, where Michael Ley, Hartmut Seeber, Philipp Weiß and I won the silver medal with a nominally weaker team than in past years, missing out on the likes of Sebastian Matschke, Markus Merker and the Voigt brothers. In a very exciting team playoff (for the players, at least – I don’t know how much the crowd saw), we came from behind to do well on the team puzzles, overtaking Japan and Slovakia and managing to hand in an intuited almost-solution to the final Slitherlink puzzle in the last seconds, giving new world champion USA a proper scare. They were a good half-way through their final Fillomino puzzle at that point – saved by the bell! Congratulations to all the teams, particularly team USA for a deserved win.

Some results can be found on the tournament website, though at the time of writing, the team playoff results are still missing.

I doubt I’ll analyse this championship in as much detail as last year, but expect a few of my preparation puzzles over the next few weeks. At this point I’d like to extend a big “thank you” to organizers and authors for a very well done set of competitions.