Angry Birds? There's a Championship with 2,600 contestants for that

Think you're a dab hand at Angry Birds? Nailed three-star ratings for all its levels? And those for Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio? Good work. Bet you still can't beat 19-year-old Jonas Koivula though. He's the newly crowned Finnish champion at Rovio's game, having seen off 2,600 rivals in the inaugural country-wide competition.

Yes, that's right: an Angry Birds Championship, in Finland. Which, if we're going by the example of baseball's World Series, may be the World Championship, at least until other countries get involved.

Nokia's official Conversations Blog has the story, and the finals of the contest were played using Nokia N8 smart phones, as the company had a hand in organising the tournament, which started with regional heats before culminating in a 32-person final in Helsinki at the weekend.

Apparently the youngest finalist was 6. Kids nowadays, eh? Finnish celebrities such as snowboarder Eero Ettala and Miss Finland Pia Pakarinen also took part, with contestants having to play four levels on Angry Birds, with the highest points total in the head-to-head matches prevailing.

Koivula won, with the support of a girlfriend whose quotes bafflingly have her saying she is "happy for him" rather than "disgusted with him for spending every night for two months playing Angry Birds rather than talking to her". But then she is getting a trip to Hollywood as part of his prize.

At the end of its blog post, Nokia suggests there may be Angry Birds championships elsewhere in the world in the future. It's interesting to see the company looking to link itself with the game, which many people might more readily associate with the iPhone.

Nokia hosted a session with Rovio at the recent SXSW conference in Texas, while the Mighty Eagle in-app power-up was first announced at last year's Nokia World event in London. Anyway, here's a video of how the Finnish contest went down: