Let's play with dynamic arrays

 This month's Excel Esports battle wasn't my best performance, but after work (this one was an early-morning competition, starting at 7:30, so I fitted it in before my nine-to-five job) I spent a leisurely hour or so doing the tasks properly, and looking up the most efficient ways to do them. I'm still not one hundred percent certain what a "dynamic array" is, but a lot of people seem to be talking about how great it is that modern Excel can do things with them - and I do now know how to do sumif kind of things on row and column headers, as well as the wonders of 'textbefore' and 'textafter'. These things will come in handy in future competitions - and who knows, maybe in real life too?

But enough of my new competitive obsession. Let's talk about the old one! See, I'm not running an MSO memory competition this year, but I'm already formulating plans for next year's. Let's face it, the MSO format doesn't really fit with the IAM format - the MSO wants short competitions, 4 hours in length at most, and that gives me the opportunity to experiment a bit. Do something different - or dare I say something truly 'memorable'? Stay tuned, and I'll tell you all about it in good time!

Or if you're the person or people who have been reading my old blog entries about the Cambridge/Friendly Memory Championships of years gone by, well, maybe there'll be another one of those next year too! Memory is making a comeback!

It's official: Push-ups DO improve performance at mind sports!

 I finished the British Othello Championship 2024 in sixth place out of fourteen competitors, winning five out of nine games, and thus achieving what genuinely is my usual goal in othello competitions of "better than fifty percent success", the exact meaning of which phrase can be twisted to suit the results I actually achieve. You can certainly make out that I achieved my aims this time around, and give Stephen Fry an appropriately celebratory script to read out in the next documentary about me!

And I was in fact pleasantly surprised and impressed by how well I played - I beat Iain Barrass, which takes some doing, and newcomer Elijah Everett, who's actually quite good, and even when losing to the likes of Guy, Ian and Marius I felt like they were the kinds of games where it could have gone my way if they'd let their concentration slip and made the slightest of blunders. I also lost 33-31 to Digby when I probably was well on top at one point, but that's a minor blip, and he played well too!

Guy became the new British Champion, beating Imre in the final to win his first title since 2014, that time when I came second. I haven't boasted about that for a long time, have I? I came second in the Nationals once. Without exercise or anything, but with a lot of good players not being there or losing games they probably deserved to win against me.

So in summary, I'm extremely happy with my othello performance, and grateful to everyone who came to the competition and made it happen!