The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[Max]

I am wondering what the standard will be for people entering the championships. I am what I think is a reasonable player ie difficult, fiendish and very hard consistently take me about 30 minutes or just under. However, I use carpet bombing pencil marks combined with using the normal logic techniques along the way. This means that I do not have to pencil mark every cell as some are solved along the way.
I have definitely reached a plateau in terms of my times using this technique as it takes that amount of time just to be filling in all the boxes !!
People are claiming times of under 20 minutes and even 10 minutes for solving problems of the above difficulty which is way better than my humble efforts
I would be interested to know how long people are taking to solve the more difficult problems and whether you have to be a "By inspection" solver who does not use many pencil marks to get down to really low times Is that the mark of champion solvers