Microsoft is sponsoring an esports competitors with prizes totaling $10,000. The sport? Well, it’s not precisely a sport — it’s Microsoft Excel.

Every yr, the highest Microsoft Excel customers (gamers?) from all over the world face off within the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) (through PCWorld). The qualifying rounds already happened, leaving simply eight Excel masters to compete for the FMWC crown. The quarter-finals, semifinals, and closing spherical all happen in the present day at 12PM ET through a YouTube livestream and the ESPN app.

According to the FMWC rules, rivals are introduced with a one to five-page lengthy case research throughout every spherical. Case research comprise real-world issues, together with six to fifteen questions that modify in complexity — the extra complicated a query, the extra factors are awarded to the participant.

Participants will, after all, have to make use of their monetary modeling expertise to find out the reply to every query. The pattern circumstances on the FMWC site can provide you a glimpse of what sorts of issues these Excel professionals clear up have to unravel, a few of which they might encounter throughout a typical workday, and others, dubbed “freestyle,” might need a extra uncommon subject material.

And should you by no means thought you’d get amped up over an Excel event, assume once more. Surprisingly sufficient, watching a livestream of the FWMC feels simply as thrilling as watching your typical esports occasion, full with announcers, stay commentary, and a scoreboard. It even has a bracket system to trace the progress of the competitors, in addition to a ranking system — appropriately made with an Excel spreadsheet — with Diarmuid Early of New York on the high of the worldwide leaderboard, adopted by Anup Agarwal of India, and Andrew Ngai of England.

The FWMC isn’t the one competitors of its type, both — the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship covers all the Office suite, together with Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, and challenges college students to turn out to be the “Microsoft Champion.”