(6 of 7)
The most exciting moment came in the semifinals when Mebane faced off against Voigt. Both looked invincible. Mebane stood in front of his easel with one hip cocked and a dead-eyed gunslinger's stare. They traded off victories--holding serve, effectively--but in the third and last puzzle, a complex sudoku variant called Andy's Sudoku, there was drama. Voigt took an early lead, his marker flickering over the grid, filling it with numbers, but then he froze, stared and lunged for a red marker, with which he started making laborious corrections.
Mebane raised his arm first, but after a long, tense pause, the judges waved him over. Iz not korrekt! He had to spend a minute in the penalty box before he could go back and fix it. Meanwhile, Voigt finished his corrections and raised his hand. But the judges ruled his answer wrong too. The room exploded with chatter, and the stage flooded with vexed puzzlers. A rumor raced through the crowd: The puzzle itself was broken! It would be tossed out as invalid! That had happened before.
But no--the problem was just reading Voigt's tangled corrections, which eventually ran to three colors. The judges reversed their verdict, and the solution was upheld. For a second, Mebane appeared stunned, until you realized that that was just his customary blank facial expression. Then he grinned and shook Voigt's hand. The two titans, Snyder and Voigt, would meet in the finals.
Which were, maybe inevitably, an anti-climax. Both parties would later agree that the key factor was solving the meta-puzzle of who got the puzzle types they were best at. For the first three rounds, Voigt and Snyder traded wins, but the fourth puzzle, which Snyder had picked, was his downfall. He made an unlucky guess, and it was exacerbated by the large format, which made it hard to take in the whole puzzle at once. While he was getting back on track, Voigt churned through the puzzle ahead of him.
And that was the win. The Croatian master of ceremonies muttered something deep, Slavic and totally unintelligible into the microphone. Voigt had taken back the title. He was, for a record eighth time, the world puzzle champion. There was no cash prize, though later that day he would receive a medal and a hideous trophy. The whale had eluded Ahab again.
Snyder was gracious and upbeat in defeat. In fact, in three days of white-hot intellectual competition, I never saw a single unsportsmanlike word or gesture or even facial expression. Ultimately the U.S. would finish third in the team standings, behind Germany and Japan, its lowest team finish in a decade. But the A team took two of the top three individual spots; moreover, an MIT freshman named Anderson Wang, who barely made it to Kraljevica straight from his midterms, placed a respectable 42nd overall. There is hope for the future.