ThePrint ·
India’s top sudoku solvers rev up for world tournament — IIM student, analyst, NTPC staffer
India’s team is training like athletes for the World Sudoku and Puzzle Championship, to be held in Kolkata from 11 to 18 October—‘building stamina, paying attention to posture’.
New Delhi: Nityant Agarwal’s sudoku routine looks less like a hobbyist’s schedule and more like an athlete’s. The 21-year-old is leaving little to chance in the run-up to the 2026 World Sudoku and Puzzle Championship next month, where he is part of the India team.
“I’m working through past competitions, building stamina with longer sessions and paying attention to details like my posture and stationery,” said Agarwal, who works as an analyst at Bain and Company.
The upcoming WSPC championship is no trifling matter, and it will be held on home ground. From October 11 to 18, it will bring competitors from 35 countries to Kolkata for a week of cutthroat sudoku and logic puzzles.
Agarwal is considered something of a prodigy on the Indian circuit. He bagged a gold in the Under-18 category at the 2022 World Sudoku Championship Junior and set three records that year. His route into the discipline was accidental.
“I got into puzzles at 15 during COVID, when I started solving newspaper puzzles and watching YouTube walkthroughs whenever I got stuck,” he said. “I started competing seriously in 2021 and have since won three international champion titles.”
The Indian contingent also includes an IIM Mumbai student, an NTPC employee and a corporate director among its seasoned solvers. The sudoku team comprises Agarwal, 21; Kishore Kumar Sridharan, 37; Kartik Reddy, 24; and Harsh Poddar, 27. The puzzle team has Agarwal, Sridharan and Reddy again, with 51-year-old Jaipal R. Mogiligundla taking the fourth spot.
Getting there took most of the year. The national teams were chosen through a multi-stage selection process: online qualifiers called the Sudoku Mahabharat and Puzzle Ramayana ran from January to May this year. These were followed by the Indian Sudoku Championship and Indian Puzzle Championship, both held in Mumbai last month.
The championship is organised by Logic Masters India (LMI), the official Indian representative of the World Puzzle Federation (WPF), the global governing body for competitive puzzle solving. This is not the first time India is hosting. The country staged the World Sudoku Championship in Goa in 2008, and the combined World Puzzle and World Sudoku Championships in Bengaluru in 2017.