Prague - A murmur fills the room as a contestant criss- crosses a chart full of numbers. Following the second World Sudoku Championship on a large screen, the audience is watching one of the finalists, Thomas Snyder, as he rushes to inspect his results.
Sitting in a circle around a flat-screen TV in the other corner, Himani Shah, a 22-year-old member of an Indian team, is riveted to the finalists' brisk moves on the screen.
"We are amazed by Snyder's speed. We feel very stupid," the young woman in the turquoise hoodie says later with a laugh.
Indeed Snyder, a 27-year-old Harvard doctorate student who grew up in Buffalo, New York, hands in the first of two puzzles in four minutes and seven seconds.
After the jigsaw puzzle, lots of camera clicking and shaking hands with a Czech president later, this fast-talking, self-confident preppie beams happily.
He beat 140 entrants from 32 countries in a three-day championship in Prague to be crowned the world's best sudoku puzzler of 2007.
"I was very nervous getting into that first puzzle," the new champ says, adding, "I really wanted to win."
In the first ever sudoku championship last year in Lucca, Italy, Snyder, a runner-up, was edged out by Jana Tylova, a 32-year-old Czech accountant from the northern, Bohemian town of Most.
But this time, he says he did not succumb to pressure and managed "to shut out" the cameras and audience to focus only on the problems before him.
This year, Japan's Yuhei Kusei and Slovakia's Peter Hudak won the silver and bronze medals respectively, as Tylova ranked 18th after what she described as a "miserable first day".
In order to solve a classic sudoku, a contestant completes a nine- by-nine grid with a few numbers so that each row, column and three- by-three internal square includes numbers one to nine. But puzzle authors also conceive variations in numerous shapes.
The puzzle was invented by a Swiss scientist Leonhard Euler in the 18th century and its popularity spread like wildfire after former Hong Kong judge and New Zealand puzzle enthusiast, Wayne Gould, hatched a computer programme generating its variations and persuaded the world's largest newspapers to publish them.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a sudoku fan who solves the puzzle "every day" and watched the finals from the front row, admits to reading fewer books since he discovered it in 2004. He says sudoku awaits him at a bedside table.
"I relax by (doing) it," he says, adding, "It cuts off my often dramatic, working day from (the moment) when one goes to bed and closes his eyes."
An intelligent boy from a family that values education, Snyder has been solving these logical puzzles since the time between "walking and crawling", and long before they earned their Japanese name.
"Whenever I go anywhere, either I have a puzzle I am solving or writing," he said, adding that he is just about to finish his own book of sudoku variations.
But he has no plans to turn this skill into a career. Instead, he is concentrating on earning his doctorate in chemistry in a few months.
"My goal is to be known for the science I do rather than for sudoku," he says.
