The 30th Mind Sports Olympiad took place in London over 9 days between 22nd-30th August 2026. Several of the games featured on PlayStrategy had their annual in-person tournaments with many of the worlds best players in attendance, including many PlayStrategy users!

James Heppell (@jheps) won the coveted Pentamind World Championship for the third time, his first title since 2017. The Pentamind rewards versatility rather than mastery of a single discipline, with competitors counting their five best performances from five different games.

James won the 40 player Amazons tournament, as well as the prestigious Entropy World Championship. He completed his set of 5 Pentamind scores with a Silver medal in the Lines of Action World Championship, another Silver in Mensa Connections, and a strong result in the Texas Hold'em Poker tournament.

Read more about the full event on Mind Sports Olympiad website, and to get a flavour for the action see the recap video below: Recap

The 30th anniversary of the Mind Sports Olympiad was the largest for many years, and also hosted World Teams Championship and World Individuals Championship for Backgammon with over 400 players, and several Elite Chess Event tournaments which had over 100 players.

Three Chess tournaments were broadcast onto PlayStrategy, which you can look back on here: 2-day Rapid, Saturday Blitz and Sunday Blitz.

We've also got a collection of studies of the top table matches for many of the games on PlayStrategy. This includes Abalone, Amazons, Breakthrough, International Draughts, Lines of Action and Oware. Many thanks to @vincent for putting these together!

Live Streams for the Chess and many of the abstract games can be found on the Mind Sports Olympiad youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mindsportsolympiad/streams.