Brackets

 Or 'pairings' as we call them in the kind of competitions I usually enter. But people are throwing brackets at me today! Two different sets of them!

Firstly, it turns out a sufficient number of entrants to the Microsoft Excel World Championship WERE equally or more stupid than me, and I scraped through to the first round proper! So tune in (metaphorically speaking - my match probably won't be streamed live) on October 29th, at 5pm British time!

Here's my quarter of the draw:

I'm playing one Ben Rotblatt, of the USA - there are a good number of Bens among the 128 qualifiers, actually. It must be an Excellent kind of name. He skipped the 'very hard' one of the five tasks, and had a mistake in the fifth. I think it could be a close contest, and I'm going to have to do some serious training!

And then if I win this one, I'm up against Justin Merson of Canada, probably. He did all five tasks perfectly, so he's obviously good at Excel. I might struggle to make it to the last 32. But I can see this is going to become my new "thing"! Competitive Excel! What a brilliant idea!

Meanwhile, my old "thing" is still doing its thing. The next Slam in Memory League is the African-European Open (that's the one in the most convenient time zone for Africa and Europe), and I'm only 17th on the list of seeds, so it'll take two rounds of qualifying to get to the finals...

Hopefully I can get through a match against the winner of round one (they're both beginners, but you have to watch beginners; they might get very good very quickly), and then I'll have to beat Ewelina (very difficult!) if I'm to get to face Andrea (entirely impossible!) in the first round proper on November 5th.

It's all good fun, if you like that kind of thing!