The Mental Calculations World Championship (online) 2025 (hosted by the Mind Sports Olympiad as part of their Grand Prix) has just finished, and we have the winners!
Out of nearly 100 entrants, 23 people from 8 countries qualified to this semi-final (Saturday 22nd February), and the top competitors were invited to the final (Sunday 13th April).
Daniel Timms (that’s me) wrote the questions for the final and semi-final, and I was in the Zoom calls with the participants. I was impressed as always with the high standard of competition, organization of everyone involved, and respect for the other participants. Congratulations to everyone who qualified, who did very well to qualify to these last two rounds!
Grand Final
The competitors were given 24 questions, simultaneously in a Zoom call. They had between 20–60 seconds to answer each question, with some bonus points for the fastest answers or most accurate answers. The maximum theoretical score was 340 points.
The time limits and synchronous format make it a very high-pressure competition! See the semi-final video below for a simulation.
Although the competition is designed for adults and open to all ages, the majority of the participants who qualified to the final were between 13–19 years old. This is similar to previous years, where sometimes no competitor was over 18 years of age!
🥇 Kaloyan Geshev 🇧🇬 (276 points) (aged 14) is the overall winner. Some of the questions he answered included:
- Calculating the square root of 775 to 11 significant figures (in 60 seconds)
- Expressing 256380 as a sum of square numbers (faster than anyone else)
🥈 Abhilakshya Arora 🇮🇳 (219 points) wins the silver medal, to complement his bronze medals in 2021 and 2024. He was the fastest to solve the following tasks:
- What is the remainder when 35^81 is divided by 37?
- Express 10209 as a product of its prime factors
🥉 Swanand Bhore 🇮🇳 (206 points) qualified to the final for the first time, and won the bronze medal. He was the fastest to solve several of the questions, including:
- 58 5/8 ÷ 5 4/9 (with the fraction simplified fully)
- 9251 × 352443
Radhika Maheshwari 🇮🇳 (150 points) came 4th, which is her top score in this online format. In this journey, she answered questions such as:
- 50 ÷ 43.732164 (to as many decimal places as possible in 60 seconds)
- What is the largest number that divides perfectly into both 3591 and 4161?
Andrej Zivanovic 🇷🇸 (121 points) was the youngest competitor, at 13 years old, and came 5th. In fact, he has qualified for the final every year since he was 11! Andrej was one of the fastest competitors to answer the following:
- Find the smallest number that is a multiple of both 1176 and 1452 (clue: the answer is a 6-digit number!)
- 7/18 + 3/8 + 1/28 (with the fraction simplified fully)
Domenico Mancuso 🇮🇹 (119 points) was competing in the MSO online competition for the first time, and came 6th. Because the other competitors have been remarkably young, Domenico is the only person born before 2000 ever to qualify to the final. He collected points from many questions, including:
- Exact square root of 70,073,641 (solved in under 20 seconds)
- Express 113724 as a product of its prime factors
Vandan Nyati 🇮🇳 (113 points) came 7th in his third time reaching the final of the MSO. answering 15/24 questions correctly, including:
- Cube root of 3700 (almost to 4 significant figures in 60 seconds)
- What day of the week was 29 February 1788?
Achyuttam 🇮🇳 (57 points) is fairly new to mental calculation, having competed at JMCWC 2024, and has already improved to the level of qualifying and scoring in the final of the MSO! We can look forward to see how he develops from a solid performance here. Achyuttam solved tasks such as:
- What integer is the cube root of 1,622,234,375?
- 1050470 ÷ 365
In addition, Asmita Pal 🇮🇳 and Aaryan Gupta 🇮🇳 qualified again to the final (placing 7th and 8th in the semi-final respectively) but they were unable to participate due to academic exams. Previous medal-winner Aaryan Shukla 🇮🇳 and others were unable to join the semi-final for similar reasons.
All competitors in the final have been successful in other major international competitions held in person, including:
- the Junior Mental Calculation World Championship in 2024, 2023 and before. Kaloyan, Abhilakshya, Swanand, Radhika and Andrej each won medals at JMCWC 2024, while Vandan and Achyuttam also scored high.
- the Mental Calculation World Cup in 2022 and in 2024, where Kaloyan, Swanand and Domenico attended and performed very well.
Additionally, most of them have competed online before in the MSO World Championship and/or the GMCA League (Season 2).
Semi Final
The semi-final involved 23 participants, who had 25 tasks on a full range of calculation categories, with 20 seconds permitted for each task. Here is the full ranking—do you recognize any other names?
After the 2021 event, I prepared a sample video so that you can go through the questions as if you were actually competing! Grab a pen and paper, and watch the video, which will explain the steps.
These questions are a sample of the 2021 questions—the 2025 event had more questions (25) but a similar level of difficulty. Good luck!
Further Reading
To find out more about competing in mental calculation, check out the following links:
- Information about all international competitions
- Various resources about learning mental calculation
- Article about preparing for the day of a competition
- Advanced calculations methods (including calendar, multiplication, roots and division)
This event was part of the Mind Sports Olympiad, which also hosts various mind games, such as Scrabble, memory sports, diving chess, and Settlers of Catan. They also have a page with the results of this event, complete with a video!
There are more opportunities to compete in mental calculation in 2024 at other major international events, as well as at the MSO next year! Keep in touch with the organizers of each event for further information. I’ll also publish announcements here, by email and on the Facebook page.
Reminder: the deadline for entering this year’s JMCWC (in Germany) is the end of April!