“People cheer, they go crazy. It’s amazing, it’s energising,” says Irishman Diarmuid Early of his recent Excel world championship win in the Hyper X Arena in Las Vegas.
The sport involves a lot of crunching, not of bones or abs, but of numbers on an Excel spreadsheet.
It is described by the BBC as the fastest growing e-sport, and the Galway man took home the Microsoft Excel World Championship belt and $5,000 prize in December.
More than 150,000 people watched, many online, but it was the in-person audience that added to the intensity. “It’s a very full-on experience,” he says.
Challenges include maze navigation through coloured cells and columns, desert-island survival optimisation and this year’s final, origami, where cells were used to fold a sheet.
The contest involves hundreds of competitors taking part in regional qualifications across five continents, leading to play-offs and a final of the 24 remaining players.
“There’s a group of people who are very invested in this and completely lose their minds every time the scoreboard moves up,” Early says.
Audience members can also see competitors’ workings-out on a big screen as they try to problem-solve the case.
Diarmuid Early competes in the Microsoft Excel World Championship
Early, who runs his own data science consultancy firm in New York, does this for the enjoyment rather than the prize money.
“If I spent the time I spend on this on client work instead, I would make much more money.
“This is for fun. Many of my best friends come from this group.”
The social element of the competitive Excel scene came as a surprise to the UCC graduate.
“My expectation the first time I met this group of people was basically that it would be an extremely nerdy, extremely odd group.
“I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were actually very normal, well-adjusted, balanced people who also have lots of other interests and hobbies, and were warm and engaging.
“You read about the communities around online gaming or other e-sports and they are these weird, toxic, aggressive, anti-woman places. Ours could not be more different”.
Among his friends in the US and the competitive Excel community, Diarmuid is known as “Dim”.
“One of my college roommates in UCC was English and he took to calling me Dim, partly because he couldn’t say Diarmuid and I think partly just because it was funny. It stuck ever since. Even my wife calls me Dim.”
Since graduating with a maths and physics degree in 2008 as the Celtic Tiger economy collapsed, Early has spent his adult working life outside of Ireland.
“Pretty much my whole generation, at least among my friend group, left Ireland after the crash. A lot of people went to London to get work.”
He had wanted to move to London to be closer to his Scottish girlfriend, who is now his wife. After four years in London, the couple moved to the United States.
“We arrived just at the start of the summer, and New York was so full of life. We were looking around the Greenwich Village area for an apartment and we’d go and sit in Washington Square Park in between viewings. You would pass three different people playing live music. It’s very lively.”
Fourteen years and two Trump presidencies later the atmosphere in the Big Apple has changed somewhat.
“I mean, I have not seen Ice on the street, but I’m certainly very aware of their looming presence,” Early says.
“The school that my children go to has a number of asylum-seeker families who are afraid to leave the house because they could be randomly arrested. It is not a good time.
“It definitely is a strange situation to grow up in. It is not a welcoming time for immigrants in this country.”
Diarmuid Early is from Co Galway and studied at UCC. He lives in New York where he founded Early Days Consulting.