Sumit: Eye on Prague

Jamshedpur, Feb. 28: His interest in puzzles from childhood and juggling with numbers helped him bag the second runners-up spot at the National Sudoku Championship held in Mumbai earlier this month. Now, he is eyeing to clinch the world championship.

Meet Sumit Botra, a first-year student of business management at XLRI. This 21-year-old future manager will be a part of the team which will represent India at the Second World Sudoku Championship in Prague between March 28 and April 1. “It’s a great feeling to represent the country,” Botra told The Telegraph.

The Indian team will be led by Ritesh Gupta from New Delhi. The nail-biting finish to the national-level meet, where 60 winners from five regional rounds — Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore and Hyderabad — took part, was enough to boost the confidence of the youngster.

Sumit admitted that from his childhood, he had the affinity of playing with numbers and solving puzzles. “I used to solve puzzles in seconds that appeared in local dailies. I hail from Calcutta, where Sudoku is quite popular,” he said.

Sodoku, invented by an American, Howard Garns in 1979, is a number game where the aim is to fill the squares so that each row, each column and each (3x3) sub-grid contains the numbers from 1 to 9. The puzzles are solved using logic alone and are extremely addictive. It got immensely popular in Japan in 1986, and in 2005, it was an international hit.

Sumit said there would be two types of competition at the world championship. He will represent the country in the individual category, which will have a maximum of six contestants. Players from 45 countries will take part in the event. Before leaving for Prague, Sumit will have to attend two camps at Bangalore on March 10 and 11 and the other one at Mumbai on March 25.