Excel’s esports revolution is coming back to ESPN this week

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By David Pierce, editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

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It’s the Sheeter Bowl! The VLookup Cup! Merge Madness! Whatever you want to call it, the Excel World Championship is coming back to ESPN this week. On Friday morning at 7AM ET, as part of ESPN’s annual “The Ocho” event, a few of the world’s foremost Excel experts will battle to solve puzzles on the biggest stage in sports.

The Ocho is an ESPN event designed to show off otherwise un-televised sports — Excel is on the docket alongside “2023 Slippery Stairs,” the “Pillow Fight Championship,” and competitions in everything from belt-sanding to sign spinning — but it’s still a big deal. When competitive Excel showed up on the network last year, the sport found a whole new audience. More than 800,000 people have since watched the full 2.5-hour competition on YouTube (ESPN showed a 30-minute edit of the battle), and the folks who started the World Championship say it changed the event’s trajectory forever.

But we’ll get to that. First things first: how in the world do you make Excel a competitive sport? The answer is by turning Excel into the world’s most powerful puzzle-solving system. 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