Games

The contestants in an event like the Excel World Championship are given what’s called a “case,” which could be almost anything. One case from last year’s competition required each player to figure out all the possible outcomes and associated rewards for a slot machine; another required modeling how a videogame character might navigate through an Excel-based level. A lot of cases involve chess, elections, or random-character generators of some kind. In every case, the contestants have 30 minutes to answer a series of questions worth up to 1,000 points. Most points wins.

This year, there’s a new wrinkle: it’s an elimination race. Every five minutes, the player with the fewest points will be eliminated until there’s only one Excel-er remaining. “We have already shot the game,” says Andrew Grigolyunovich, the founder and CEO of the Financial Modeling World Cup, the organization that oversees the event. It’s now being edited down for ESPN consumption, he says, and the whole match will come out on Friday as well. “It’s a really fun, exciting event.”

Last year’s competition featured some of the biggest names in Excel: Diarmuid Early, a financial and data consultant who several people I spoke to referred to as “the Michael Jordan of Excel;” Andrew Ngai, an actuary who is currently the top-ranked competitive Exceler in the world; David Brown, a University of Arizona professor who also leads a lot of the college-level Excel competitions; and more. (Spoiler alert: Ngai ended up winning.) All three feature in this year’s battle, too, along with five other spreadsheet whizzes. ... Competitive Excel has been around for years, but last year’s appearance on ESPN was something of an inflection point for the game. This year’s televised match is just one part of a longer season, leading up to the really big show: the Microsoft Excel World Championship Finals in Las Vegas this December. For Grigolyunovich and the FMWC team, the hope is to one day not just get on ESPN during the network’s day of silly sports but to be as popular and exciting as any other game you might watch. And they think spreadsheets have everything they need to get there. “What would you rather do,” Brown says, “spend 1,000 hours getting good at Call of Duty or 1,000 hours playing Excel logic games?” To him, at least, the answer’s pretty obvious.