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.
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Competitive puzzle culture in India
The World Sudoku and Puzzle Championship is the Olympics of the “mind sports” world. The 2026 edition will bring together some of its biggest names, including New York Times Games editor and WPF co-founder Will Shortz, LinkedIn Games puzzle and sudoku champion Thomas Snyder, and world sudoku champions Tantan Dai and Ken Endo.
For Logic Masters India, hosting the championship is also a chance to build a competitive puzzle culture in India. It runs online contests featuring puzzle authors from India and abroad, as well as meet-ups in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai. The aim is to get more people to participate in sudoku and logical puzzle-solving, spot talent early and build a stronger Indian presence on the international stage.
The organisers say the event’s Open Day will give Indian visitors a chance to interact with these experts through games, quizzes, workshops and panel discussions. Under WSPC rules, each country may field up to four official competitors per championship.
Getting ‘match-ready’
For Kartik Reddy, 24, an MBA student at IIM Mumbai, the introduction to puzzles came at home.
“My dad’s love for puzzles was contagious, and before I knew it, I was competing in sudoku myself by the age of 15,” he said.
Like Agarwal, Reddy has reoriented his practice around the clock rather than the grid.
“These days, my prep is a mix of timed solves and speed practice, as every second really does matter,” he adds.
Kishore Kumar Sridharan, 37, represents a different profile on the team: an elite competitor fitting training around a full-time career. He works in the procurement division of power utility NTPC, and found his way into competitive solving through a Times Sudoku Championship event.
“I got hooked on Sudoku after discovering Logic Masters India through a Times Sudoku Championship event,” he said. “I keep myself sharp by regularly solving Sudokus and puzzles from puzzle blogs and past/current championship events, which is my way of staying match-ready alongside a full-time job.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)