The Pentamind World Championship was one of the Mind Sports Olympiad’s original events. It is a unique meta-event, which celebrates the best all-round games player in the world. Any event at Mind Sports Olympiad can count towards that year’s Pentamind, and the player with the highest Pentamind score built up from five independent tournaments is crowned the Pentamind World Champion. Winning the Pentamind World Championship is considered by many to be the most prestigious achievement that a player can accomplish at the Mind Sports Olympiad.
The Pentamind Formula
The Pentamind formula rewards players with points based on their performance at the end of each tournament, as follows:
For events with 100 or less players:
- Event Score = 100 x ((N + 5)/(N + 6)) x ((N – P)/(N – 1)) x AF
For events with over 100 players:
- For P <= 10, Event Score = 100 x ((105) / (99 x 106)) x (100 – P) x AF
- For P > 10, Event Score = 100 x ((105 x 90) / (99 x 106)) x (N – P) / (N – 10) x AF
where N is the number of players, P is the player’s finishing position in the event and AF is the adjustment factor (explained below). If a player finishes tied for position with another player or players then P is the average of the finishing positions they tied for (eg 6 players finishing tied for positions 10 to 15, P = 12.5)
Adjustment factors are place an increased significance upon our premier events and a reduced significance upon events which either are deemed too dependant upon luck or not a level playing field for all participants (eg heavy advantage to English language speakers). A list of all events with adjustment factors applied is given further down this page.
- Premier Events have a factor of 1.08 applied (ie scores increased by 8%).
- Diluted Events have a factor of 0.95 applied (this was previously called a dilution factor).
In the (unlikely) event of a tie for the best Pentamind score, then the Pentamind World Championship title will be shared.
Additional Restrictions
Although all tournaments are eligible to be counted towards a Pentamind score there are some restrictions which must be taken into account. These restrictions apply to the Pentamind only and not to individual category meta-events:
- Scores must be taken from 5 different games. If a player plays in multiple variations of the same game then only one can be counted towards their Pentamind score. A full list of such cases is provided further below.
- A maximum of 3 tournaments from any one category can be used within a Pentamind score.
- Meta event scores such as the Amateur Poker World Championship or the Multiplayer Games Championship cannot be used as part of a Pentamind score (but you can use an event score and count it towards both your Pentamind score and the associated meta-event category).
- If a player withdraws from an event without completing at least 50% of the rounds then their Pentamind score in that tournament is automatically included as one of the 5 in their final score. This may be overturned by the Tournament Arbiter or Head Arbiter with their consent.
- A minimum of 2 long events must be used within a players Pentamind score. Long events are tournaments which are longer than one session on the schedule.
- Players may only participate in one event at a time, no simultaneous play will be permitted.
Other Meta-events
Along with the Pentamind World Championship, we will also be awarding Junior, Senior and Women’s Pentamind Championships. These follow the same rules as the Pentamind World Championship however only players that are eligible can qualify for these awards. Junior is defined as any player that is aged Under 18 on the opening day of the Olympiad. Senior is any player that is aged 60 or older on the first day of the Olympiad.
We will award Junior medals for each individual tournament however in order to win this prize the player must finish in the top half of the overall tournament results, as well as being amongst the top 3 Junior finishers.
Category Meta-events
In 2022 we have assigned all tournaments to one of seven categories and there will be a meta-event championship for each of these seven categories. Are you the best at one particular type of game? This is your way to prove it!
The categories in 2022 are:
- Multiplayer Games
- Imperfect Information Games
- Abstract Games
- Mental Competitions
- Chess
- Backgammon
- Poker
What category does each event fall into? You can check at this link
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oO_B8BqbPKFIT0UJkMQ6zbKPQ3RfXK3wFjVT6h3dqRc/edit?usp=sharing
Prize Money
Thanks to our sponsors at ASICS we have an extensive prize pool to be won at the Mind Sports Olympiad 2022. For details please visit our Prize Money page.
The 2022 Premier Events are:
- Abalone
- Acquire
- Agricola
- Azul
- Backgammon 6x7pt
- Catan
- Carcassonne (2-players)
- Chess 960
- Dominion Expansions
- Entropy
- Go 19×19
- Lines of Action
- Mental Calculations
- Quoridor
- Scrabble
- Texas Holdem Poker
Events with a Dilution Factor applied in 2022 are:
- Countdown
- Creative Thinking
- Quiz
- Speed Reading
As outlined within the Pentamind rules, a score must come from 5 different games and variations upon the same game cannot be used. The “same game” clashes for 2022 are:
- Go 19×19 & 13×13
- Backgammon (all tournaments including Plakoto)
- Chess (all tournaments including Colour Chess & Diving Chess)
- Carcassonne 2-players and multi-player.
- Cribbage Singles & Pairs
- Stratego Duel & Classic
- Memory (Marathon, Natural and Speed)
- Catan and Cities & Knights
- Dominion Base Game & Expansions
- Poker (all tournaments)
There is a limit of 3 events from a category which case be used in a Pentamind score, however the “same game” restrictions mean that for some categories it is more limited and you may only be able to use 1 event from that category (as any other events would breach the same game rule).
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]Pentamind World Champions
Demis Hassabis
The Pentamind has been won five times by Demis Hassabis.
Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a computer game designer, AI programmer, neuroscientist and world-class games player. A child prodigy in chess, he reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 (at the time the second-highest rated player in the world Under-14 after Judit Polgar who had a rating of 2335).
Following his graduation, Hassabis worked briefly as a Lead AI programmer on the Lionhead Studios title Black & White before founding Elixir Studios in 1998, a London-based independent games developer. He grew the company to 60 people, signing publishing deals with Vivendi Universal and Microsoft, and was the executive designer of the BAFTA-nominated Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius games. Hassabis then left the games industry, switching to cognitive neuroscience, in order to get back to his lifelong passion of developing artificial intelligence technology. Working in the field of autobiographical memory and amnesia he has authored several highly-cited and influential papers, including his most prominent work to date, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early 2007. Hassabis received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL in 2009 and is continuing his computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence research as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Gatsby Unit, UCL and in collaboration with groups at MIT and Harvard. Demis co-founded DeepMind, which was acquired in 2014 by Google where he is now Vice President of Engineering leading their general AI projects. DeepMind’s AI Go playing program, AlphaGo, defeated the Lee Sedol, one of the strongest Go players in the world, in March 2016 with a score of 4 out of 5.
Andres Kuusk
Andres Kuusk won the Pentamind World Championship in 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2016. He is an Estonian data scientist, economist and board games player. Other notable mind sports achievements include national championship in bridge, draughts, five-in-a-row games, mind sports pentathlon (chess, draughts, bridge, gomoku and sudoku) and table games quadrathlon (chess, draughts, table tennis, and ovuss). Born in 1981 on the small island of Saaremaa, he moved to the mainland of Estonia for university and started a career as an economics scientist and mind sports player. He taught econometrics and game theory at the University of Tartu, and received his PhD in economics there in 2012. In 2015 he quit the academia and became a data scientist in Bondora AS, the P2P lending company. He is currently working mainly on the field of credit modeling. During his years in Tartu, he was actively involved in a wide variety of mind sports, studying games and competing semi-professionally.
Ankush Khandelwal
Ankush Khandelwal has won the Pentamind World Championships four times: in 2013, 2018, 2019 and 2020. His first experience of strategy games came when he learnt to play Chess at school at 8 years old and he instantly fell in love with the game. He went on to win many national titles and represented the England junior team internationally on several occasions, and placed 2nd in the U12 European Chess Championships. He also represented the England junior Bridge team at U20 and U25 level. After obtaining his Masters degree in MMORSE (Mathematics, Operational Research, Statistics, Economics) from the University of Warwick, Ankush strongly considered continuing academia to do a PhD in Game Theory, but ultimately decided that a career in trading would be too alluring to not experience. He briefly worked as a derivatives trader for a market maker in Amsterdam, but realised that he could better utilise his expertise in game theory by placing bets on cards than on financial markets and quit to pursue his dream of becoming a professional poker player. Ankush is now a high stakes online cash game professional specialising in his favourite format of Heads Up Pot-Limit Omaha. He aspires to be a top-class Bridge player and to represent his country at the Open team level, as of 2019 he won his first England cap winning the Camrose trophy. Ankush has developed his gaming repertoire in his bid to contest for the Pentamind adding many games including Agricola, Acquire and 7 Wonders to his arsenal. He also enjoys playing Badminton and Football recreationally and is an avid Fussball player.
James Heppell
James Heppell is a software engineer from the UK who has won the Pentamind world championship twice (2015 and 2017), obtaining his 100th overall medal in 2017. Born in 1988 he started playing chess at 4 years old and quickly advanced to become the UK U12 Chess Captain, taking him around the world competing internationally. Deciding to focus on his education he went onto obtaining a first-class Mathematics degree and a PhD in Complex Systems Simulation at the University of Southampton. Moving on from his academic life in 2016, he has now begun a career as a software engineer for a pharmaceutical company. James is also a competitive badminton player and has set up a bi-weekly games club, attracting a variety of players to try out new board games.
Dario De Toffoli
Dario De Toffoli won the Pentamind World Championship in both 2002 and 2012.
Dario De Toffoli is an Italian board game designer, gamebook author and elite games player who founded the games company Studiogiochi and established many games events. Born in 1953 Venice, after an early career as a Chemist he entered the world of games. Winner of over 60 medals at the Mind Sports Olympiad.
He won the 2002 and 2012 Pentamind Competition. In 2006, he won a special award for his contribution to games which includes contribution to all aspects of games.Dario was one of the top players in scrabble in Italian. The world championship in Italian scrabble was not founded until 2008 before that there were Majors. Dario had multiple top 3 finishes in these competitions and won the Masters in 1997.Dario De Toffoli is the foremost expert in backgammon in Italy. He wrote two of the key books on backgammon in Italian: “the rules of the game” and “the big book of backgammon” In the latter, he is credited with bringing to light that the origins of backgammon went back 500 years further than had previously been reported. As well as owning the company Studiogiochi, Dario has personally designed and co-designed several board games. The most notable of which are Lex Arcana and Vampiri in salsa rossa role-playing based games. More recent games have had a more mainstream focus such as Sudoku and Kakuro board games and themed board games such as for the Totally Spies! cartoon series.
David Pearce
David Pearce is one of the most successful games all-rounders of all time having spent more than a decade at the top of medal league table. He has won over 30 world championships in Mind sports from more than a dozen different games. Upon winning the Pentamind twice back-to-back in 2007 and 2008 he became only the second person to successfully defend the Pentamind title after Demis Hassabis. In 2010 David became the first ever player to win a 100 medals at the Mind Sports Olympiad and in 2019 became the first person to win 50 gold medals. While other players have shown greater success in individual events, David has the largest number of different events in which he has won medals. In 2009, he set a new record for the most medals in a single MSO with 22 medals (6 Gold, 6 Silver, 10 Bronze). When he obtained his 10th MSO International Grandmaster title, he arguably even fulfilled (the very short-lived idea) posited by one of the MSO’s founders Raymond Keene in the Times in 1997 of the “ultimate accolade in games” of “Grandmaster Decamentathlete”. David is currently working as a senior data scientist for an AI enterprise company (Chatterbox Labs) where he is a key influence for their Natural Langauge Understanding and Generation. He has a keen interest in a variety of science areas both academically and professionally. He was not prevented by his dyslexia from achieving a degree in Engineering Science from Worcester College, Oxford before later in life returning to academia to an MSc and a PhD in AI.
The Pentamind World Championship was one of the Mind Sports Olympiad’s original events. It is a unique meta-event, which celebrates the best all round games player in the world. Any event at Mind Sports Olympiad can count towards that year’s Pentamind, and the player with the highest top five scores is crowned the Pentamind World Champion.