FANS of the logic puzzle that has captured the nation’s imagination will have the chance to pit themselves against the most fiendish Su Doku yet devised at the first National Su Doku Championships.

The puzzle has won millions of addicts since it was introduced to Britain by The Times last November. For the first time players will be in competition with others against the clock. Wayne Gould, who compiles Su Doku for T2 in which it appears five days a week, will produce his most difficult puzzle for the event at The Times Cheltenham Festival of Literature in October.

The Times National Su Doku Championships will follow in the tradition of the Times Crossword competitions and will involve at least one elimination round eligible for all to enter. There will also be a Su Doku junior competition. Hundreds of schools round the country now use Su Doku in lessons.

Carol Vorderman, the Countdown maths wizard and enthusiastic Su Doku solver, hopes to take part as compere or competitor, or both. “I do about five puzzles a day. It’s like an addiction,” she said. “It takes me about 19 minutes to do a fiendish one. I’ll get it down to ten.”

The Times National Su Doku Championships will follow in the tradition of the Times Crossword competitions and will involve at least one elimination round eligible for all to enter. There will also be a junior competition. Hundreds of schools across the country now use Su Doku in lessons. Full details of the championship have yet to be finalised but will be published in The Times.

Within weeks of Su Doku first appearing in T2, it had become a national phenomenon. Newspapers are taking it up from New York to New Zealand via South Africa.

In Britain the Times Su Doku book has sold more than 120,000 copies. Other newspapers have scrambled to catch up. This week The Times introduced the first Su Doku download for mobile phones.

The puzzles, which are solved by logic and require no mathematical skill, were first published widely in Japan in the 1980s and were spotted by Mr Gould, a former Hong Kong high court judge, about six years ago. He developed a computer program to create them. Despite the efforts of many copycats, his puzzles remain the benchmark of excellence. Unlike others, they are always symmetrical, only ever have one solution each and can always be solved using logical steps, not guesswork.

One newspaper has been forced to source its puzzles from Japan in a bid to match The Times’s standards.

“I am looking forward to setting the most fiendish puzzle yet for the championships,” Mr Gould said yesterday.

Although Su Doku puzzles have featured as part of the World Puzzle championships, the Cheltenham Festival of Literature event will be the first dedicated to the brainteaser.

Anyone thinking of entering should not be put off by Mr Gould’s advice which accompanied our first Su Doku.

Asked how long it would take to solve a really difficult puzzle, he said: “The very hardest? Put it this way. If you were on death row and were due to be executed in the morning, and your guard told you that if you could solve this puzzle you’d be free, then you’d die.”

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