it's fair to say most of us don't like spreadsheets but the people who do like
them like them a lot and while many of
us use Microsoft Excel in our day-to-day work and Elite few have adapted the
world's most popular spreadsheet software into an Esports phenomenon in
2022 the Excel World Championship debuted as part of ESPN's theoo an
annual Showcase of lower profile sports like axe throwing Corgi racing and of
course the the slippery stair climb the vast majority of viewers had never even
conceived of competitive Exel before because there are some levels of nerdy
that are simply Beyond mere mortal Ken
but the sport was popular enough that it was renewed for the 2023 oo and will be
holding its finale in the Las Vegas hyper X Esports Arena this December with
a prize pool of $110,000 across the competition but Excel as an esport
didn't appear out of nowhere fully formed in 2022 it came out of an
existing culture of financial modeling competitions basically these are
tournaments where participants must create a financial forecast for a
fictional company based on a provided data set in what else Excel the
organizers of the financial modeling World Championship were looking for a
way to turn these competitions into a spectator sport because apparently the
cultural mainstream is unenthusiastic about debt service coverage ratios which
is a real shame they gradually adapted the format to make the contests more
exciting and accessible and in mid 2021
they went viral because you know pandemic finally ESPN expressed an
interest and the fmwc open was streamed
on ESPN 3 in December 2021 the next year
Microsoft sponsored the competition lending it their own name and making it
the Microsoft Excel World Championship
but what does a round of competitive Excel actually look like and how do you
Excel enough enough to win we'll tell you right after a message from our
sponsor enlisted if you're looking for a slightly more traditional type of game
with immersive World War II combat check out and listed it's available on PC the
series s and x and Playstation 4 and 5
with several iconic campaigns from history to play in every game will feel
fresh and you have complete customization over your soldiers when
you go head-to-head with other players so hit up the link below and start
playing enlisted for free today and score some additional bonuses just for
signing up each round of an Excel tournament has a unique challenge like
tabulating the results of a series of hypothetical elections or projecting the
outcome of a game of whack-a-mole participants have to answer a series of
100 increasingly difficult questions about the puzzle in only 30 minutes
that's roughly one answer every 18 seconds but that assumes that the
players are answering them one at a time which they aren't unless time is short
and they're desperate questions are typically organized into five batches of
20 questions and the dominant strategy by experienced players is to create a
single formula that will solve an entire batch this means that a player's score
can stagnate for long periods then jump rapidly it can even go down which means
it's time for a quick undo but that might not save novice players who get
stuck and wind up with a big fat zero out of a thousand the winner is whoever
answers all the questions correctly first or whoever has the most points
when the 30 minutes are up the puzzles can vary a lot in terms of difficulty so
the points players receive are typically adjusted to normalize scores across
games an Infamous 2021 case based on the game civilization was so difficult that
the winner managed to get just eight points total narrowly edging out his
opponent who managed to accumulate a poultry six both of them were guessing
which can be executed quickly and efficiently using the formula ran
between to cover large batches of unknown answers familiarity with
keyboard shortcuts is obviously a necessary skill to the point that player
BIOS will list their favorite shortcut and there's some hot controversy in The
Meta over whether competitive players should ever use a mouse to navigate
Advanced players with a fluency in Visual Basic might even code on the Fly
unsurprisingly the game tends to be dominated by accountants actuaries
mathematicians and Engineers you know
the alpha nerds the format of games can vary as well with tournaments sometimes
featuring 1 V one elimination matches and other times eight player battle
Royals it's brutal a panel of commentators narrate the game dissect
the outcome and introduce and interview the players before and after the fact
and at in-person events there's often an electric crowd excited to see their
favorite Excel battler perform the spreadsheet equivalent of a mounted
elbow drop off the top rope and it's not
a sport without merch they've got shirts like this invalid formula divide by by
zero design or this one with all your favorite formulas I'm partial to equal
count ifs open parin closed parin myself
the Microsoft Excel World Championship isn't the only Gaming Arena where you'll
find Excel it's had a long if eccentric history in gaming usually acting as an
external supplementary tool for complex RPGs that require Advanced data
management Eve online the game sometimes called spreadsheets in space actually
got an official Excel plugin earlier this year much to the excitement of its
player base not to mention that people have been programming games directly
into Excel for decades like snake mind sweeper and even Battleship if there's
anything we can learn from a sweaty crowd cheering on their favorite Excel
Champion as they formulate their way to Victory is that human beings can find
joy in literally anything and it brings
me great joy to see you here at the end of the video welcome thanks for watching
like the video if you like it dislike it if you disliked it check out our other
videos comment below with video suggestions and don't forget to
subscribe and follow and plug us into your spreadsheet of choice don't I know
you have it