The Pentamind World Championship is the ultimate challenge for athletes of the mind. Modelled on the pentathlon of physical sports, this event tests which mind-sportsmen and women are most adept at playing a multitude of games and mental skills.

Unlike its physical cousin, the Pentamind rules do not specify which five games the contestants must play. This choice is left open to each participant, the only restrictions being that at least one of the tournaments included in the final calculations must extend over three playing sessions or more, to ensure that some heavyweight games are included in the tally, and at least 10 sessions must be played in total.

The participants score Pentamind points according to where they finish in each tournament. For example, first place earns 100 points, finishing exactly halfway down a tournament 50 and last place zero. The participants with the highest total scores from their five best tournaments for different games or mental skills win the medals.

Last year's gold medal winner was the software genius Demis Hassabis of London. At the ripe old age of 22, Mr Hassabis owns a multi-million-pound software company, Elixir Studios, programming video games. At last year's Olympiad he played in so many different tournaments (21) that he made some of the contestants giddy, even running back and forth between simultanously played games in Mastermind and Entropy. (This year, simultaneous play is banned.)

Mr Hassabis won gold medals last year in Continuo, Shogi and the card game Settlers of Catan; he took silver in MiniBridge and won bronze in both the Decamentathlon and Draughts for Beginners. With these results he captured the Pentamind title with 479 points out of a maximum of 500.

Mr Hassabis's life ambition is to be recognised as the world's best all-round mind sports player ever. He plans to take a sabbatical from his business so that he can spend a year in Japan studying Go and Shogi with the champions, hoping to stay ahead of his brother George who, last year, at the age of 14, won the junior gold medal for Pentamind.

Mr Hassabis says: "What I enjoy so much about competing in the Pentamind is the fact that it gives you the chance to prove yourself over so many different disciplines.

"One of the most fascinating things I find about the human mind is that not only can it compete against the most powerful computers in the world at, say, chess, but also, that same mind can play a hundred other games too.

"It's testing this adaptability and versatility to the limit that embodies what the Pentamind is all about."