sudokucup.com

Dear friends!

The beginnings were innocent. They were the fan sudoku competitions on various servers, searching and devouring information on general preliminaries and sudoku competitions all over the world. By all means it was necessary to know languages or to try happiness and leap over language barrier. As such an event wasn’t in the Czech Republic, from my point of view in the big breeding place of sudoku and puzzle talents; there occurred the idea to change that. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t overnight. Some ideas were organized, several people pulled together and the results of their endeavor can be called "sudokucup".

The first Sudokucup has just finished and I can say that at least in my opinion all the happenings have been really high-pitched. It was because the sudoku project, as it can be called, was coming into existence from the very beginning. Maybe it would be a long talk to describe how everything became, but I hope that you have liked our idea to organize an online competition that had attempted to address players in the whole world and that you will find some time to compete with Sudokucup in the future again.

I personally have reached a lot of valuable experiences and impulses what to do with the server and how to develop and improve that. However the server and the competition would not come into existence without the help of a lot of people.

Let me help them that they have dedicated their time and effort for you to enjoy solving sudoku as much as possible.
Pre-solving and advice on the event matters have been made by Blanka Čáslavská, Martina a Tomáš Hanžlovi, Dan Marek, Petr Vejchoda
The players Petra Čičová, Jakub Hrazdira, Michal Chrámecký, Jan Novotný, Jakub Ondroušek, Jana Tylová solved the practice puzzles and provided their times to comparison.
The translations into various languages have been done by Aline Koch, Veronika Milátová, Frederique Rogeaux, Alena Veverková, Petra Voitová, Lumír Witoszek, Jana Zachová
I also would like to thank the pages programmers and Aleš Marek who offered his help in the time it was required most (he has prepared the result for you). Thank you to all of you who helped to bring out the competition to your awareness and all the member of Kabrňáci sudoku club who helped as much as they could.

My greatest thanks belong to two persons:
I wouldn’t write these lines and you would spend the previous weekend with another entertainment not to be good advice, calmness and support of an experienced organizer and a promoter of sudoku in the Czech Republic – Vítězslav Koudelka. I really appreciate his friendly encouragement and willingness to advise or give valuable experience.

And with all my heart I want to thank my girlfriend Peťka who was the person not only pre-solving all the puzzles, not only advising what to change or arrange, but she was the person who has tolerated in patience all troubles, all my heebie-jebbies and pernoctations, and who has gotten behind me.

Last but not least thanks belong to all of you who registered and played. Even the best tournament is nothing without players.
Surely, we look forward to the future when you find some time to come again and to cope with others. Let me introduce some of our visions we would like to bring.
Because of the first Sudokucup I put myself into the new position in the sudoku world – the position of an author. You can asses if I have been successful or not, but the variety is the beauty. That’s why we want to give some space to other authors who are willing to prepare good puzzles and to present them in the competition. Another project we are preparing is a three-member team competition. This idea is at the beginnings, but if you are interested in it, we will try to bring it.

To sum up our concepts and expectances for the future:

• sudokucup will take place twice or three times a year (according to your responses in the discussion below and according to the second item)
• we would like to ask authors who are willing to cooperate with us to contact me via email.
• if you are interested we will try to prepare the tournament for a three-member teams
• we would like to prepare new language editions – Spanish and Chinese ones, we have found sudoku fans who are able and willing to translate into these languages.

Once more thank you very much to all of you and wish you a lot of pleasant moments with sudoku and besides sudoku.

Karel Tesař