I hope you are starting to feel more like an accomplished sudoku solver if you have been following along with this series on how to solve an easy sudoku puzzle. We are close to the end of this puzzle now, so this post will the be the end of this mini-series. I hope to bring you something related but a little bit different in the next post. If you missed the start of this mini-series, you can find it here.
I left you with the challenge of working on row 5 of our puzzle. If you don’t remember that, hop back to the last post and refresh your memory and we will pick up from there.
If you looked at row 5 closely, you should have seen that we only needed 3,5 and 6 to finish it off. Checking all the intersections with columns as well, it becomes clear that column 3 already has a 3 and a 6 in it, so we can only have a 5 in cell 5,3. There is already a 3 in column 2, so we have to put our 3 for row 5 into cell 5,4 and that just leaves the 6 to fill the row.
From there (in very much the same way), we only need 1,3 and 8 to fill box 4. There is already an 8 in column 1 so our 8 must go in cell 6,3 and the 1 and 3 work in a similar way.
This leaves our puzzle almost complete. Column 3 only has one value left, this will in turn make row 3 easy and you should be able to walk round the grid filling in values as you go. I won’t draw out the solution to the bitter end…try to complete it now.
I hope you finished that with ease after all the techniques you have now learned. Here is the final solution.
If you have followed along with this series, we have covered every technique up to and including “naked pairs”, so you should feel confident to add your vote to the poll on the right hand side.
Remember if you struggled with any of the terms I used or some of the ideas, check the link below for more help and if you found this or any other post interesting or useful, don’t forget to bookmark it for others to find too and sign up to the RSS feed for continuing updates on sudoku techniques.