You've been solving sudoku for years. You have strategies, you have patterns, you have a morning ritual. You've never solved against other people in real time. The Grand Prix record at 6×6 is 3:41. Your first session will not be 3:41. But it will immediately reveal something about your technique you never noticed before.
verified_user Real opponents · Live timed sessions · Hall of Fame benchmarks
Grand Prix · 9×9 Classic
LIVENewspaper solver. Different game now.
Strategies built solo. Now tested against real players.
Rajan has done the daily sudoku every day for six years. The Times of India on weekdays, the full-size Saturday puzzle on weekends. He has strategies: the naked single, the hidden pair, the box-line intersection. He can finish a medium-difficulty 9×9 in around eighteen minutes without making errors.
He had never done it while someone else was doing it faster, in real time, visible on a shared leaderboard. The difference is larger than he expected.
His first Quick Match session: he finished. He was fourth. The fastest player finished in 5:12. He sat and thought about that for a moment. His strategies are correct. His execution, under timed conditions, with live comparison, is something he had never measured.
He switched to Grand Prix the following day. Multi-round format. The anxiety cost of watching the leaderboard move while he was still solving was, he discovered, real and significant. It slowed him down in rounds one and three. He placed 5th overall.
By the end of the first week he had identified specifically what he needed to improve: the time he spent pencil-marking versus committing. He was over-marking. In a newspaper you can take as long as you need. In a live session, the pencil-marking time is visible in your final time. He started trialling reduced annotation. His time dropped.
InkSolver88 placed second in a Grand Prix in his third week. He knows his actual capability now for the first time. It wasn't 18 minutes. It's something much faster when the competition is visible and the pressure to commit is real.
The grid is the same logic. The experience is categorically different. Live competition with a visible leaderboard changes how you solve, what you notice, and how fast you can get.
Finishing is no longer the measure. Your time against other players, in real time, at the same grid, on the same day, is the measure. For the first time, you know where your technique actually places you.
The visible leaderboard creates time pressure that newspaper solving doesn't. It exposes exactly where time is lost — over-annotation, hesitation, inefficient scanning order. The pressure is the data you never had before.
The 9×9 Grand Prix record is the ceiling. Not a fixed puzzle or an editor's par time — the best live player solving the same kind of grid in real time, ever. That's the target for an experienced solver who wants a genuine benchmark.
Naked singles, hidden pairs, box-line intersections — all identical. Your strategies are exactly right. The difference is speed, pressure, and the presence of other players. You're not learning a new game. You're discovering your real time.
Grand Prix multi-round format is where newspaper solvers find their real level. Four rounds. Cumulative time. Each round reveals something about your technique. Your rank across rounds is more honest than any single solve time.
If you've grown comfortable at 9×9, the 10×10 grid forces new strategies. The constraint patterns at 10×10 behave differently from 9×9 — the logic extends, but the solving order matters more. Experienced solvers discover new technique there.
InkSolver88 · First Week
First Quick Match
9×9 · First live session
4th / 9
"Slowest I've ever been"
3rd Grand Prix
9×9 · Reduced annotation
2nd / 10
"Found the problem"
Week 3 Grand Prix
9×9 · New approach
🏆 1st / 11
"Newspaper technique + live pressure"
The Hall of Fame records show what's genuinely possible. The Grand Prix format provides the pressure that reveals technique gaps. The 10×10 grid ensures you never run out of challenge.
No account required — play immediately. No onboarding, no tutorial forced on experienced players.
Progressive grid sizes — start at whatever size challenges you. 6×6 for warm-up, 9×9 for serious play, 10×10 for new technique discovery.
Hall of Fame is public — all-time records per grid size. The target for serious solvers looking for a genuine apex benchmark.
You've been solving alone. The live session is the first time the puzzle has pushed back.
Everything you need to know about Kidoku Live for this use case.
Kidoku Live offers daily live tournaments (Grand Prix at 4 PM), a global Hall of Fame for best-ever times, and Quick Match for immediate competitive play against real opponents. No account is required. It is consistently described by experienced solvers as the most competitive online sudoku experience available because all opponents are real humans, not bots.
The 9×9 Classic grid on Kidoku Live is standard difficulty comparable to a medium newspaper puzzle. The competitive difficulty comes from time pressure and real opponents solving simultaneously — even puzzles that are individually solvable in 12 minutes become challenging when you know others are working faster. The 10×10 provides additional difficulty for advanced solvers.
Top players use systematic techniques rather than trial and error: naked pairs, hidden singles, box-line reduction, pointing pairs. Speed comes from efficient scanning sequences, not fast clicking. The constraint-propagation approach that top solvers use is the same algorithmic logic used in computer science constraint satisfaction.
All Hall of Fame times are submitted directly from live sessions — they cannot be entered manually or transferred from other platforms. Complete puzzle times are recorded by the system at the moment of submission. There is no way to enter a fraudulent time. The leaderboard represents real session performance.
Yes. The systematic techniques reinforced through session-pressure practice improve solo solving speed directly. Many Kidoku Live regulars report halving their newspaper puzzle times within four to six weeks of daily play. The competitive pressure forces technique development that casual newspaper solving rarely demands.
Enter Grand Prix. Your strategies are right. Your time will surprise you. Then you'll know what to work on next.
Real opponents · Timed · Hall of Fame benchmarks · No account needed