There was a moment in the semi-final of the Microsoft Excel world championship when Andrew “the Annihilator” Ngai thought he had been eliminated.
With the clock ticking and the Las Vegas audience on the edge of their seats, the two-time spreadsheet world champion started “furiously checking” his answers. Had he made a rounding error? Were his decimal places off?
Stressed and doubting himself, Ngai decided it wasn’t his night. Michael “the Jarman Army” Jarman from the UK or Peter Sharl – no nickname – from the US looked set to win. But Ngai had no reason to worry.
“For some unknown reason there was a mismatch between the scoresheet and the live stream,” he tells Guardian Australia from the US. “No one really knows why but it got out of sync.”
The glitch was fixed, the scoreboard corrected and the 36-year-old from Sydney stormed to victory on Saturday night, becoming the triple world champion in data processing.