How to qualify for the National round.

It is May 13th 1999. It's a lousy Thursday and, as always, I enter our faculty's computer hall at around 11.30 AM. Johan, a fellow math's student is playing some game on his PC. I saw a 9x9 grid with 49 stones on it. "Each stone has a number on his back. A stone has to jump over as much other stones as the number on his
back indicates and land on a free cell in the grid. The stones you jumped over are removed from the board and the numbers on their backs are your points scored. Now you've got a new situation and you jump again with one of the remaining stones. The objective is to reach as many points as possible with only 10 jumps." This is what Nico, the maker of the computer program, told me about the puzzle. Johan was just playing it and had reached a high score of 89 points at that time. Mark, another student was playing it as well, he also got the 89 points. The score for the puzzle however was obtained by deducting 75 of the total gained points and multiplying this result by 5. So there was a score of 70 on both their screens.
I watched them play for a little while and saw them reach 90 points (a score of 75). I wondered where this puzzle came from, since I saw something like that in the qualifying round for the Dutch Championship Puzzelsport a year earlier. Nico told me this was a puzzle from this years qualifying round and that he made a computer program so that "playing" with it was a lot easier. At that time Mark reached 92 points and laughed at Johan, but only 30 seconds later Johan reached 93 and so it was his time to laugh. I asked Nico when the qualification round ended, "next Monday" he told me, "they want the forms in next monday, so you'll have till Sunday 7 PM when the mailbox is emptied". That gave me only four days, although the test was published in March, but at least I'd seen a great score on one of the three optimizers. Johan's effort of 93 points was not beaten in Eindhoven that day.
Johan and  I went to buy "Breinbrekers" at the station stationer's. We both went our ways, he towards Den Bosch and I to Breda. This years qualifying round counted 17 puzzles, 3 optimizers and 14 so called "one-solution-puzzles". After the one hour train journey I had solved 3 of the remaining 16 puzzles. Later that night
Johan called me, he had bettered his score on the first optimizer, 94 points (so a score of 95). I thanked him very much for his contribution and I offered him my help on every other puzzle.
After a night without sleep I solved the remaining "one-solution-puzzles", found the optimum of the second optimizer (a kind of traveling salesman problem) and made a sufficient effort on the third. So the puzzles were
sent to Breinbrekers the next day. My qualifying round was completed within 24 hours. I had done so also the year before, but then it was fatal. I had still weeks to "reoptimize the optimizers" then, but this year only one
day.
On monday I met again with Nico and Johan. Johan had not mailed the qualifying round. Last thursday was his first contact with Breinbrekers. He thought it would not be wise to compete in the Dutch Championship
Puzzelsport if you lack the experience. He would rather give someone else a change. A noble thought! "But next year I will enter the qualification round", he added.
Nico told me his scores, first of all he had stuck with the 93 points at the first optimizer. Also the last optimizer
showed better results for me. But when we compared our results of the second optimizer something strange
happened. Our scores on the last optimizer were different, but the solutions was the same. I had miscalculated my score! I had given myself 10 points to much. (That proved the theorem "mathematicians can't calculate") There goes the qualification round for this year, I thought. And I tried to find a way to rectify my solution. The internet-site of Puzzelsport gave a possibility, I tried to e-mail the redaction of Breinbrekers. Successfully, because 2 weeks later I found an invitation for the Dutch Championship Puzzelsport on the doormat.
Besides me Nico and two other fellow students made it to the finals. As I said Johan, and also Mark, didn't enter the competition. I ended up 21st along with last years champion Delia. So, not a bad result for me, I guess.

How to qualify for the World Championship.

Qualifying for the national round is nice, but the qualification round is not comparable to the national finals. There speed, luck and nerves play a big role, something that the qualification round definitely lacks. How do you prepare yourself for this? Well, a good habit of Puzzelsport is that they publish the puzzles from the National finals as an issue of Breinbrekers. It gave me a chance to compete with the puzzlers who did qualify for the National finals of  1998. At least I could compare my puzzling speed against theirs. I did this test after my bad qualifying round last year and I finished 10th, to my own surprise.
Saturday June 5th was the day of the national finals 1999. Nico and I went to Hoofddorp (Puzzelsport's headquarters are located there) by car. It was raining cats and dogs.  Due to the horrible driving conditions my concentration had long gone when we reached Hoofddorp. But there was coffee, the best medicine in those circumstances.
Round 1 began, 30 minutes of regular battleships. 8 puzzles in total, worth 3, 3, 5, 5, 7, 7, 10 and 10 points. We all started with a desk full of equipment. My pencil didn't seem to work. (Later I discovered how it worked, very easy of course, so another theorem was proved "a study in technology doesn't make you a technician"). So instead of the pencil I used a pen. Big mistake! The first two puzzles were easy. After that I tried the two big ones, but using my pen didn't give me the opportunity of correction. I totally screwed up. After 30 minutes I ended up with 6 points and 3 grids of fat ink some artists would be jealous about. So much for this championship, I thought. At least there was no more tension. Round 2 followed immediately, It was a mix round of 105 minutes. This had to be my round. And it was. 140 points and I was in the race again. Good results in the two bonus rounds brought me a top 4 place, ahead of reigning champion Delia and behind Niels, Jeroen and 1996 champion Paul. I qualified, to not only my own surprise, for the WPC in Budapest.

How to finish 2nd (team) and 10th (individual) at the WPC.

October 5th came sooner then I thought. After another rendez-vous with the team in Hoofddorp and exercising last years WPC puzzles I was ready for the championship. Before we left Hans, our team captain, demanded a top-5 finish. But, since the team finished 4th last year he hoped that 3rd place would be possible. We hoped with him.
Paul, who only participated at the WPC in 1996 (Utrecht), also had no experience in puzzling on "non common ground". We were roommates for this years championship. We got along quite nicely. The first day of puzzles came. The tournament opened with a team puzzle. We were supposed to put 5 (we found that out later) wooden jig-saw kind off puzzles together within 35 minutes. We finished in time to take joined 6th place. After this the first of three monster individual rounds began. 2 and a half hour of puzzles. Not my cup of tea, as I found out. A few mistakes slipped into my work which made my first WPC appearance not as good as I hoped, I finished 33rd. Paul did even worse due to a bad night sleep (I snore, he told me! But also the hotel bed couldn't match his waterbed at home.) he only finished 46th. At least Jeroen and Niels did well, both finishing in top ten places. As a team we moved to 4th place.
The second day of puzzles was very full, 7 rounds of puzzling from 9 AM till 5.30 PM. We began with a round of optimizers. We did quite well, finishing 2nd as a team. and moving up to 3rd place overall. (Weeks after the tournament we discovered that some scores were miscalculated, it would have given Jeroen the 8th place in the overall individual ranking. He didn't bother).  The next round was the first of 4 individual bonus rounds. Later champion Wei-Hwa finished first. The Dutch all finished the puzzles in time but not good enough for a bonus.
We finished the morning session with the second monster round. This time I did quite well. 9th place for the round. The third place in the team standings was consolidated. After another good lunch it was time for the second team puzzle. We finished 4th, took 200 points bonus and narrowed the gap to the 2nd placed Czech team to 5 points.
The last three rounds of the day were individual bonus rounds. First off all we got a round of honey islands. Puzzles Paul didn't understand until five minutes before entering the round. Niels shared his tactics with Paul and he understood things instantly. Round 7 began and after 25 minutes a supervisor shouted "one!" indicating that the first puzzler had solved all the puzzles. I looked quickly around if it was someone I knew and to my surprise it was Paul! Half an hour before he didn't know how to tackle the problems and now he finished first. But he was unlucky, he had not looked over his solution before he turned his form in. He made one mistake which cost him not only the points for that puzzle but also the bonus. Niels finished initially 3rd, but after Paul's bonus was denied, he was 2nd, this gained Niels 20 valuable points for the individual ranking.
As a team we were by far the best this round moving up to second place but still way behind the Americans who were still 1218 points in front.
Round 8 was a giant octopus, we had to fill in the 8 arms under certain conditions. I knew beforehand that this was not my round. Because all the arms are linked to each other it was most likely that one mistake resulted in several incorrect arms. I ended up with only one correct arm. Luckily the other Dutchies did better. Jeroen got six arms right and Niels and Paul even managed to finish the puzzle as 2nd and 3rd respectively. (With a correct solution that is, Zack raised his hand in 2nd place, but with an incorrect answer). Despite my pathetic score the team finished 1st with an even greater margin then the round before. The gap to first place narrowed to 478 points.
Round 9, Battleships varia. 10 puzzles, 35 minutes. My experience with battleships were not great as I told before. But this time the puzzles were slightly different and I could use a pencil. So I hoped for the best. For 32 minutes nothing happened, nobody had still finished all the puzzles. The full bonus was still up for grabs when I started the last puzzle. The closer I came to the solution the more nervous I became. I finished it and checked it very quickly. I raised my hand with only 27 seconds on the clock. "One!", the supervisor shouted. I looked round the room and I saw Hans watching us. I waved very triumphant. I could not believe it. Nick, the captain of the American team, congratulated me. I was the only one to finish all the puzzles that round. This formed the base for my 10th overall ranking. Again the team finished 1st, we gained another 350 points on the Americans everything was still possible. But with another monster round and a team puzzle coming up the other day it would be very difficult.
The third and last day. During the last monster round we did well, but the Americans did again very well, they gained 360 points. Niels finished third in the round and that brought him 3rd place, only 3 points in front of Robert Babilon. The 20 points from round 7 were very very helpful. Jeroen finished the round in 20th spot and dropped to the 9th place overall. I consolidated my 10th place, and Paul made the success complete by taking 12th place in the overall individual standings. So all the Dutchies finished in the top-12. A unique achievement.
The team championship was still wide open. There was still a chance for us to go top. We had to finish the puzzle first and hope that the Americans didn't grab any bonus points. This turned out to be impossible, the Americans finished even minutes before us and took first place. It was the first team a Dutch team finished on the podium. We never expected that, not in our wildest dreams.

After the trip...

During the WPC there was also an on line competition on the internet, which featured the same puzzles. Before I went to Hungary I told Johan about this competition. On his turn he passed the information through to Nico, and what do you know, he won the online championship.
As stated earlier we discovered that Jeroen should have had 50 points more on part 3. I also should have had more points, in my case only 10. With the additional 50 points Jeroen would have finished 8th. But he didn't bother, "now there's more space for me to improve", he stated.

Last update: November 15th 1999 by Tim Peeters