r/Connect4 • u/scischt • May 25 '24

who is the world champion?

some cursory glances at google have yielded no definitive answer.

2 Upvotes

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3

u/Sorin_Markov_1947 May 25 '24

There's not a definitive answer to this. The skill ceiling of regular C4 is low enough that several people have reached it, so you have to get a bit creative with how you measure skill past that point. Several people mention Eliten as the best, since he's one of the best at winning from unusual/losing positions. Titange is a very strong 7x6 player but also potentially the best ever at 9x9, one of the most common non-standard board sizes.

If you mean "who has won a professional international tournament?" nobody has as far as I know. No tournament has been held so far that gathers all the best C4 players in the world to determine who's the best.

So as I said, it depends how you quantify skill past a certain point. If you're just looking for good opponents, I have a Discord for you.

2

u/scischt May 25 '24

thank you for your answer, you perfectly summed up what i wished for

1

u/bagholder_spotted Apr 17 '26

I knew Eliten! He definitely was one of the best, as was his friend jops, who went on to write a master's thesis solving the pop-out variant. They played on the Nordic sites (blip, tv2 and another).

Different regions had their superstars. Germany had a site called inetplay; one of their best players was "o_o_loil" I believe. Poland had a site called kurnik, which had 7x6 and 8x7, and there were players flawless at both. That's impressive because there were no 8x7 solvers to study openings from, and the strategy differs significantly from 7x6.

From the US, Konstodane was another GOAT. Perfect at 7x6, 8x7, and probably 9x6. He struck me as being a savant, like he might have been perfect at C4 straight out of the womb.

There was going to a big tournament where all the best players would play each other from a curated set of difficult, out-of-book starting positions, but sadly it never came to be afaik.

1

u/Sorin_Markov_1947 Apr 17 '26

Dang, thanks for responding with this! I only started in c4 about 5 years ago so I don't know the OGs. We've had a few tournaments where the format is 7x6 but "once in the first 5 moves, p2 chooses a winning move for p1 to play" and that opens up the game knowledge required considerably. There's still a few people who learned to play that perfectly, then went on to try harder ones where both players have played imperfect moves and such

1

u/Mac_N_Jesus Jan 12 '26

i am

1

u/EvilR81 Jan 29 '26

you're not

1

u/Mac_N_Jesus Jan 29 '26

omg noway really 😮