Could the World Puzzle Championship make your company a star?

"Walk of fame" star marked "your name here"The 23rd World Puzzle Championship and 9th World Sudoku Championship are happening in the UK this year – specifically, in Croydon between the 10th and 17th of August. They are looking for sponsors.

Sponsoring the championship offers very particular targeted publicity to an audience who are sufficiently interested in puzzles to travel around the world to solve them. There is expected to be between 200 and 250 attendees from 25 to 40 nations, representing six continents, of which probably two-thirds will be competing in one contest, the other or both.

Aside from the contestants, most of the other attendees will be representatives of national puzzle bodies but also there will also be people from various aspects of the puzzle business in attendance. The World Puzzle Federation has a list of members so you can see the sorts of publishing companies and other organisations that run national puzzle bodies, and what sort of people you might reach through the World Puzzle Federation members. The connection is particularly strong in China; Beijing Media Network are sponsors of the Chinese team, and provided wide coverage of the events last year. There was also a piece in the Guardian about the 2006 event which may give you a better feel of who turns up and what goes on.

The commonality is that everyone who turns up is massively interested in puzzles, and the competitors are extremely able – at the top end, definitively world class. Many of them are very successful in their outside lives, whether they are competitors or not. Because so many people there have demonstrated a massive commitment to puzzles, they could well have the combination of resources and wherewithal to be considered potential investors or at least making extremely valuable contacts.

Additionally, because there are so many representatives from national governing bodies present, you would have the chance to get your message out to the puzzle communities of dozens of nations at once, and in turn they would pass it on to their own members and local puzzle contacts. It would be likely to be possible for a sponsor to negotiate access and introductions to the people involved, if this were of interest.

In terms of publicity, there are plenty of solutions possible. A lightweight solution could be distributing flyers to contestants for both championships in the arrival packs. More intensively, there could be the scope to brand a logo on question packs, event banners, web sites or to sponsor evening events. At the top end, a title sponsorship of the event could be possible; imagine having the championship trophy presentations in front of a banner with your company’s logo!

If this is of interest, the best person to contact is the chairman of the UK Puzzle Association, Alan O’Donnell. (His phone number is available on request, but it seems unwise to post it out in the open!) He’d be the person able to answer any questions you might have.

UK puzzle contest history

Mixed US and UK flagYesterday, this site discussed the upcoming UK Puzzle Championship, which starts at midday (UK time) today and runs through to the end of Monday. Looking further around the UK Puzzle Association site – and then going a little further and looking “underneath the hood” – there is (apparently an early version of) a UK puzzling “Hall of Fame” page, which is a lovely piece of work.

There are two areas to focus on: first, mention of the results of the past three years of the UK Puzzle Championship. James McGowan won the first two in 2011 and 2012, with Neil Zussman pipping him by 26 puzzles to 25 in 2013. (Neil also had the distinction of being the top global solver out of the 164 entrants from around the world, taking some extremely accomplished names with his accuracy and speed.) Secondly, the chart of UK team members at the World Puzzle Championships is extremely interesting. It still needs a little interpretation; for instance, I am listed with a position in 2004 despite being a non-playing captain, earning my position for solving on a United Nations team – but, on the other hand, that Guardian article I linked to yesterday reminded me that Nick Gardner was captain in 2006 and is yet not listed.

Nevertheless, we can use this to create an all-time A-team appearance table for UK team members. (This does give credit for appearances in 2002, where there were two UK team members attending but no UK A-team as such.) Credit, also, to Tim Peeters’ site for information about the UK team in 1996.

Six appearances: Nick Deller
Five appearances: Nick Gardner, David McNeill
Four appearances: Ken Wilshire
Three appearances: Simon Anthony, Steven Barge, Tom Collyer, Alan O’Donnell, Liane Robinson, Ronald Stewart, Neil Zussman
Two appearances: Chris Dickson, James McGowan, Gareth Moore
One appearance: George Danker, Meriel Lewis, Stuart Madison, Thomas Powell, Nick Savage, Lionel Wright, Chris Yates

We can also put together some stats about UK participation in the US Puzzle Championships, with a counterpart hall of fame as to which UK participants were highest-placed each year:

2014: Adam Bissett (6 participants)
2013: James McGowan (12 participants)
2012: Neil Zussman (22 participants)
2011: David McNeill (24 participants)
2010: Steven Barge (13 participants)
2009: Steven Barge (13 participants)
2008: Steven Barge (20 participants)
2007: Michael Collins and Nick Gardner (12+ participants)
2006: Steven Barge (26 participants)
2005: David McNeill (12 participants)
2004: David McNeill (6 participants)
2003: Luke Pebody (12 participants)
2002: Nick Gardner (4 participants)
2001: David McNeill (6 participants)
2000: Lionel Wright (6 participants) (courtesy of e-mail from Michael Curl of thinks.com)

A sharp fall in UK participation in the US Puzzle Championships in recent years, but this can be explained in part by the rise in emphasis on the UK Puzzle Championships, the USPC’s fixed timeslot, the shift in selection practices for the UK team for the World Puzzle Championship and a fall in the global participation in the US Puzzle Championships. Another interpretation is that there are dozens and dozens of past UK puzzle championship participants who have been lost to time; surely a challenge for the UK infrastructure is to get them involved once again.

The best of the rest

Ornate letter BSometimes issues crop up in the real world with unexpected relevance in the world of puzzle competitions as well. The week before last, the chairman of the Football Association, Greg Dyke, released an England Commission report, regarding supporting the number of English players involved in the game at a high level, hoping to boost the chances of the English national team down the line. The aspect of this which has most caught people’s attention is the proposal to permit clubs to enter second (or “B”) teams into the existing structure. The proposals have largely proven unpopular. However, the world of puzzle competitions has faced similar issues in the past.

B teams at the World Puzzle Championship

Some years, the World Puzzle Championships have permitted nations to enter “B” (and, very occasionally, “C”) teams as well. Officially, the individual ranking order only includes the (up to) four designated “A” team members per country, and the team ranking order only includes “A” teams with four members; if a country enters fewer than four members, they will get individual rankings, but the country will not get a team ranking.

Unofficial ranking orders are also produced, ranking “A” team members alongside “B” team members and sometimes (see, e.g., Beijing 2013) even guests as well. Only “A” team members are eligible to take part in play-off competitions held as grand finals. Sometimes it happens that a non-“A”-team member performs well enough that they would have made the play-offs and are excluded from participation, but there is no outcry against this practice. The theoretical issue comes if a non-“A”-team member outperforms all the “A”-team members and yet still cannot enter the playoffs; people seem reasonably content that this is likely to be only a theoretical issue, sufficiently unlikely to crop up (and risk asking questions about the validity of that year’s championship title) in practice.

Consensus of opinion seems to be in favour of “B” teams; again looking at Beijing 2013, a majority of the most successful nations sent whole “B” teams, and it may well be that many of the “United Nations” teams are made up of incomplete “B” teams. At one point, the World Puzzle Federation board never reached a conclusion on the issue and left it to individual championship organisers whether or not to accept “B” teams; the principle of “B” team and guest participants paying a slight surcharge to subsidise “A” team participation, particularly from “A” teams whose members would otherwise not be able to afford to participate, seems to have proven popular. (Personally, I fully support it.)

B teams in the Croco-League

The issue of “B” teams also appears in the Croco-League online team puzzle competition, as previously discussed. Here, teams can choose to name themselves whatever they like, and some teams choose to name themselves as being the second team of another, established, team in the league. There is no formal tie between the two teams; it’s not possible for a “B” team to send players to the “A” team or vice versa, other than through the usual routes which (largely) only permit players to leave established teams between seasons.

It’s probably fair to compare this to the World Puzzle Championship tradition. It’s also probably fair to say that the Croco-League doesn’t just draw on the tradition of association football leagues, it draws on the tradition of the German league system in particular, which has long featured clubs’ reserve teams at a reasonably high level.

Several of the Croco-Puzzle teams draw their membership from whole countries and name their team accordingly, which is fun. As so many of the site’s users come from Germany, naturally enough, many of the teams draw their membership from specific parts of Germany and name their team accordingly, which is also fun. When there are more solvers from a non-German country than can fit in a single team, some communities have tended to organise themselves into “A” and “B” teams, whereas the UK tradition so far has been to have a Northern UK team and a Southern UK team. (Even then, the distinguishing line is whether someone feels Northern or not, for any other boundary would effectively be as vague and arbitrary – people move, people are not distributed evenly around the UK, and so on.)

I feel strongly that, as much as I support “B” teams in the World Puzzle Championships, I oppose “B” teams in the Croco-League. It’s fun to feel like you’re competing against the best that a country, or a region, has to offer; it’s much more meaningful to feel like you’re competing against the best that a small locality has to offer than to feel like you’re competing against the second (or third, etc.) best that a larger area has to offer.

It’s not for me to tell other communities how to organise their teams, but I definitely have a strong preference for a geographical split. After all, in the World Puzzle Championship, you (barring velvet revolutions and independence referenda) can’t choose which country you represent; in the Croco-League, it’s easy to start a new, more tightly-focused team.

Perhaps my preference for there being many teams with tight geographic bases is a direct reflection of my familiarity with the English football league tradition rather than the German one. I am strongly against the proposal for “B” teams in the English football leagues, so perhaps it is not surprising that I have counterpart feelings about the Croco-League.