Oh btw, I placed 2nd in the Times Sudoku Championship National finals here in India, with Rishi Puri winning it, Rohan Rao coming in at 3rd and Jaipal Reddy completing the top 4.
There were a few articles covering us, I’ll just post the ones related to the finals – here (Times of India, 1st page of Times Sport) and here.
The rounds themselves were nicely organized by LMI, with the 1st round being a sprint round of 6x6s (classics and mostly variants), the 2nd round just 9×9 Classics, the 3rd round had 9×9 variants and the 4th round was a piece-placement type mechanical round. It was all great fun, especially since I was competing against 2 of the best Sudoku solvers in the world in Rishi and Rohan. I goofed up bad on the 1st round and so did Rohan (even worse). Rishi was super consistent throughout the 4 rounds. Rohan made up a lot of his deficit in round 2 and a little more in round 3, and I had an excellent round 3, meaning we were all really close come the final round, which didn’t have much separation unless one of us didn’t finish it at all. We all finished, and so there wasn’t much change by that round. In the end, I tied with Rohan, but the 3rd round was prioritized and since that was the round where I excelled, I ranked ahead of him. Rishi was a little further ahead.
So to the puzzle. This Heyawacky has quite a tricky start. After the tricky start, there isn’t a whole lot to it, but still a good flow to the end I think.
Rated – Medium.
Enjoy!
P420
PS's puzzles + 
Even though Heyawakes/wackies hate me I somehow solved it. Was the intended breakthrough determining which cells must be shaded in the 4-region?
Well thats part of it, basically you have a few places along the left and the bottom where you can see that one of 2 cells must be shaded (example – R4C1/2) and that then leads to 2×2 areas where 2 cells must be shaded, which leads to some white cells elsewhere, then its about seeing how white cells can still be connected.
Nice puzzle, I don’t normally do that well on Heyawakes – normally because it’s not always obvious to me where to break in, but this one had quite a nice flow to it.
Nice puzzle. Kept me working even after the breakins. Thanks.
TheSubro
working on it.. me sucketh when it comes to puzzles!!!
Haha, thats alright, if you like them, don’t focus too much on time/speed.