Excel esports on ESPN show world the pain of format errors

corgi racing, precision paper airplane tossing, and slippery stair climbing are just a few of the weird, meme-friendly contests you may have seen if you watched "ESPN8" last weekend.

A tournament in which an unexpected full-column flash fill is announced like a 50-yardHail Mary has been broadcasted. It's the latest acknowledgement of the quirky esport, complete with down- to-the-wire tension and surprising comebacks.

The Financial Modeling World Cup is an international competition in which excel pros try to solve as many questions as possible. The tasks used in the battle can be downloaded for free.

The full two-hour-and-48-minute all-star battle between the previous champion and the previous runner-up was shown. One of the three rounds was devoted to calculating how many points different spins of a free, online slot machine-like game would generate for players. There were a lot of spins.

The grandmaster from Ireland who claimed 10,000 hours in excel was Diarmuid Early. If he were a function, he would be Lambda. The winner of the first championship, Joseph Lau, competed along with six other function warriors.

The types of challenges faced by others were not as combative. Strj said that leaving a formula linked to the wrong sheet likely cost her hundreds of points. David Brown from the US said that he had a problem with his formulas being treated as text when he pasted from his 32-bit Windows-based excel to the online excel answer sheets.

The top four of the eight competitors advanced to the second round. They made it through. The two competed on creating a score-tracking mechanic for an entirely excel-based retro-style 2D platforming game, "Modelario." Ngai eked out the win, although with only 411 of a total 1,000 possible points. The reward for a marathon of more than two hours was a trip to the finals.

If you feel like you've found your sport after watching that kind of sprinting, consider the FMWC Open, which doesn't require an invitation, ranking, or experience. The competition takes place in the late autumn.