A year after he lost his winning momentum with three consecutive titles to Venkatraghvan S of Mumbai in 2017, Ramki Krishnan of Chennai got his crown back on Sunday by lifting the National Crossword Champion trophy for 2018, beating a field of top 30 contestants from India and abroad. The result was declared at the end of the Grand Finale of the sixth edition of the global online-offline Indian Crossword League.

Shashwat Sinai Salgaokar of Mumbai was declared the runner-up, while Devraj of Bangalore finished third.

The day saw a written elimination round, at the end of which six top contestants qualified for the onstage final. Besides Ramki, Sashwat and Devraj, three others who remained in the reckoning after the elimination round were IXL 2017 winner Venkatraghvan S of Mumbai, Abhay Phadnis of Chennai and Narayan Mandyam of Mumbai. Ramki had won the 2014, ’15 and ’16 editions of IXL.

For IXL 2018, the 30 contestants had earlier qualified for the Grand Finale after nine online weekly rounds conducted between September and the first week of December on www.crypticsingh.com. Among the 30 were participants from as far as Bahrain and Singapore.

Ashwini Nachappa, famous athlete and actress, was the chief guest on the occasion and handed over the prizes.

IAS officer Rakesh Singh, IPS officer Amar Pandey and IFS officer Rajit Okhandiar were the guests of honour at the event held at Hotel Royal Orchid in Bangalore.

IXL 2018 was launched in Patna on September 22, 2018 by Bihar Governor Lalji Tandon.

The Indian Crossword League, popularly called IXL, is an annual online-offline global competitive platform to test the mettle of Crossword buffs. It was started by Extra-C in 2013, the Year of the Crossword, for it was the centenary year of the first published Crossword, then known as word-cross. Created by Arthur Wynne, the word-cross was published in the Christmas-eve edition of New York World on December 21, 1913. At some point of time, the word-cross became crossword, thanks to a typo.

The inaugural edition (2013) was won by Col Deepak Gopinath (retd) of Bangalore, who has been the chief arbiter of the contest since 2014.

The contest comprises 9-10 weekly online rounds on the website crypticsingh.com. A leaderboard is created every week and after the 10 rounds the top 30 on the final cumulative leaderboard are called for a final offline showdown at Bengaluru. The winner lifts the National Crossword Champion trophy.

Beginning 2015 edition, IXL has also conducted offline rounds in Toronto and New Jersey.

Extra-C promotes knowledge-based pursuits among the young and the adult, and is focused on promoting crosswords as a learning tool. It believes crossword is one game with multiple benefits. “It enhances your power of reasoning, helps you enlarge your functional vocabulary, forces you to make quick inferences and, above all, provides that Eureka feeling, of achieving something on your own, when you crack that tough clues,” Extra-C said in a statement.

Extra-C also organizes A-Clue-A-Day, popularly called ACAD, and CCCC, Cryptic Crossword word Contest. While ACAD is a year-long online daily challenge for schoolchildren of all ages, CCCC is an annual inter-school offline contest open to school students of class IX to XII. CCCC has been acknowledged by the Limca Book of Records as the biggest event of its kind in India.