The Microsoft Excel World Championships title belt is headed to Canada.
Sorry, let’s pause to answer a couple of questions this raises. Yes, there is a Microsft Excel World Championship for competitive Excel experts. And yes, they do give a wrestling-style title belt to the winner because honestly what would the point be otherwise?
Ok, now that we’re all up to speed, let’s introduce this year’s champion: Michael Jarman, a Canadian by way of the United Kingdom, who went to the HyperX Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada last week to compete in the annual Excel Esports event. He notably dethroned Andrew Ngai, an Australian finance director who earned the nickname “The Annihilator” after winning the event three years in a row.
Jarman, the new champion, is a Toronto-based financial modeling director who came in second to The Annihilator each of the last few year’s go-rounds. “It was an amazing feeling,” Jarman told the CBC of his breakthrough. “It’s definitely, you know, a really great memory for me, and will be for a long time.”
He took home $5,000 as his prize, along with the aforementioned title belt. They did not have him cut a promo, though, which feels like a real missed opportunity, but he did call his shot after the event. “The next vision is to … win three more to break Andrew’s record,” he told the CBC. “I think that’s virtually impossible to do, but you’ve got to give it a go.”
While this is the first time Jarman managed to bring home the Excel crown, he’s no stranger to the world of competitive spreadsheets. He also netted first place in the Financial Modelling World Championships back in 2018.
And while one could be forgiven for assuming those are very similar things—they’re hosted by the same organization, the Financial Modeling World Cup—the Excel competition does not include any finance. It’s “just Microsoft Excel and logical thinking skills.” Example cases of the tasks that macro masters are made to take on are available on the Financial Modelling World Cup website and include challenges like analyzing asteroid mining data from EVE Online.
For this year’s title match, Jarman and 11 other finalists were tasked with playing a simulated game of World of Warcraft via spreadsheet, in which competitors had to manage a team of Horde players, completing quests to level up before finally undertaking a raid on the Molten Core dungeon. Players had to track XP, gold, character stats like armor and intelligence, and any damage taken or heals performed throughout the quests.
Jarmen proved best equipped to take on this extremely specific task. Now he has bragging rights for a full year until it comes time to defend his title.
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