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Still likely to give a "WSC4 happened. Flying Home." message this evening. Thought I'd give a scoring update through yesterday. With all but the second mini-classic playoff and the Nightmare in Zilina round, I was in 1st with 224 with Jakob Ondrousek at 203 in 2nd and then about as far to get to 10th as I was ahead of 2nd. Of course, it seems everyone and their cousin, neighbor, and robotic dog are also getting into the semifinals so I don't know if this means much or if I get at least a little head-start in my heat with {1, 8, 9, 16, 17, 24, 25, 32, 33}. This assumes I stay in first, but I treaded enough water on the Nightmare in Zilina round - and took some yawning last minutes to double check - that I should have 4 of 6 clean with the other 2 being rather impossible for me at that hour and puzzles are worth ~10 points each.
So that's the good news. The bad news is errors crept into my late afternoon solving, all at the end of my solutions. In the first mini-playoff on an "Arrow sudoku" with only an internal box (and a decidedly stupid "secret" that only angers me as it unsudoku-ed a sudoku), I had two transversions with a repeated digit - easily fixed but not caught. Much much much worse was that I wrote two 3's next to each other in my first relay sudoku puzzle, not a 39, and while anyone could see and correct this error on the otherwise solved puzzle, my brain was too much mush after doing it to see this on checking. I swear I checked rows and columns. This error completely canceled our remaining 4 puzzle solutions in this round, so our team's good effort was spoiled by me. Anyway, the lesson learned for today is to really check the work, and I hope we can get back some of the points we lost in the morning team round (which is another of the team rounds that is really an individual round, in this case we have 10 puzzles but can only be solving 1 of them total at a time. 3 people around one sudoku does not work, so its likely 2 solving and one checking everything immediately).
Assuming the Final puzzles will include classic sudoku, and knowing how I've found the classics here so far (which are pushing me ever so closer to retirement from competitive sudoku ...), I bet my chance at winning if I make the 8-9 person final are at best 30%. We'll see.
So that's the good news. The bad news is errors crept into my late afternoon solving, all at the end of my solutions. In the first mini-playoff on an "Arrow sudoku" with only an internal box (and a decidedly stupid "secret" that only angers me as it unsudoku-ed a sudoku), I had two transversions with a repeated digit - easily fixed but not caught. Much much much worse was that I wrote two 3's next to each other in my first relay sudoku puzzle, not a 39, and while anyone could see and correct this error on the otherwise solved puzzle, my brain was too much mush after doing it to see this on checking. I swear I checked rows and columns. This error completely canceled our remaining 4 puzzle solutions in this round, so our team's good effort was spoiled by me. Anyway, the lesson learned for today is to really check the work, and I hope we can get back some of the points we lost in the morning team round (which is another of the team rounds that is really an individual round, in this case we have 10 puzzles but can only be solving 1 of them total at a time. 3 people around one sudoku does not work, so its likely 2 solving and one checking everything immediately).
Assuming the Final puzzles will include classic sudoku, and knowing how I've found the classics here so far (which are pushing me ever so closer to retirement from competitive sudoku ...), I bet my chance at winning if I make the 8-9 person final are at best 30%. We'll see.
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