Tom Collyer’s left hand reached for his numbered card and, after a quick sweep over the grid with the pen in his right, he thrust his number in the air.

And with that, the 21-year-old student became the The Times national Su Doku champion. It was a victory that will be remembered as the year that men finally won bragging rights by breaking the female stranglehold on the crown. The top three positions were taken by men.

Despite being outnumbered, women had won the previous two championships. This year, however, only one woman made the final eight.

Mr Collyer, a Warwick University student, yesterday emerged as the last man standing in a field of more than 160 competitors at the Institute of Education in London.

“That was difficult,” he said, taking a deep breath after being named winner. The preliminaries were all difficult, the quarters and the semis weren’t so bad, but that . . .”, he tailed off, shaking his head.

The fourth-year maths student completed the puzzle in 12 minutes 45 seconds – a pleasing time, but by no means a personal best, he says.

So how does Britain’s best Su Doku player do it? “It’s a visual thing. I do it by eye and one thing leads to another,” he said, his hands a flurry of activity as if eager for the next puzzle.

For others, he said, the puzzle is a logical problem, but he goes about it intuitively. “That’s all very well when you keep going, but if you stop, then it’s just scribble, scribble, scan, scan.”

Mr Collyer has already become something of a veteran – he finished fourth in last year’s championship and was selected to represent Britain at the World Championship in Prague.

His hobby raises eyebrows among friends. “They see it as being quirky. It’s not exactly ordinary, is it?”

Indeed, his talent for Su Doku is bound up with his time at university. “I was being driven up at the start of term and there was a copy of The Times lying around. I thought: ‘I’m studying maths, how hard can one of these be?’ ” Since then his friends have grown used to him “zoning out” if there is a newspaper within reach.

Yesterday Mr Collyer, from Eastleigh, near Southampton, had a fight on his hands. After blazing his way through the preliminaries, he won the quarter and semi-finals, before meeting Mark Goodliffe, a 42-year-old finance director, in a head-to-head. Mr Goodliffe finished less than a minute behind Mr Collyer. “He had won the semi-finals and the quarter-finals, so he was clearly the cream of the field,” he said.

Last year’s competition was won by Rachel Roth, who took up Su Doku when she found her job lacking in mental stimulation.

Mr Collyer received £1,000 and a trophy. Some 35 children battled it out in the 12-and-under and 16-and-under competitions, won by Oliver Garner, 12, and Joseph Briggs, 16, respectively.

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