Sydney man Andrew "The Annihilator" Ngai has won the Microsoft Excel World Championship for the third consecutive year. 

Key points:

· Sydney man Andrew Ngai has won the Microsoft Excel World Championship for the third straight year

· The esports event took place in the US city of Las Vegas, and was streamed and televised live

· Mr Ngai says his work as an actuary and time spent practising helped him achieve his three-peat

The actuary, who began competing in 2018, claimed this year's title during an esports event in Las Vegas, which was streamed online and broadcast live on TV.

The competition sees data crunchers given problems to solve using Excel spreadsheets, including maths, financial modelling and even board and card games.

Players with the fewest points are eliminated one-by-one, before the winner is crowned.

"It's pretty intense because it's just half an hour per case, so time ticks pretty quickly," Mr Ngai told the ABC's RN Drive.

"People get eliminated, you overtake people throughout the whole half hour, so it can be quite exciting to watch the scores go up and down."

Mr Ngai says his prize includes $US3,000 ($4,500) in prize money, a trophy and a wrestling-style champion's belt.

 

Andrew Ngai says "time ticks pretty quickly" in the high-pressure event.(YouTube: Financial Modeling World Cup)

"Obviously it feels good," he told ABC News.

"This time was a bit different, because it was in person … I guess it felt a bit more special and a bit more nervous, with everyone watching you live and screaming — the crowd screaming as things were happening."

Microsoft congratulated Mr Ngai on his win, posting on Instagram: "You didn't just succeed — you Exceled."

'We're good with numbers'

Mr Ngai said that as an actuary — someone who compiles and analyses statistics to calculate things such as insurance risks — he uses Excel in his work every day.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.

"We're good with numbers," he said. "Before I got into Excel competitions I had already been using Excel for more than a decade, so that quite naturally helped me in these competitions."

He said making sure he had the latest version of Excel had helped due to some useful new features, but he also put in quite a bit of practice.

"Most of my preparation was doing past cases, kind of like when you're sitting an exam you'll do past papers to get used to what the exam might be like," Mr Ngai told RN Drive.

He said his family and friends were proud of him, and had always been very supportive of him competing in Excel tournaments.

"This year was nice because they could watch it without having to wake up at 3am, and I got a lot of messages from them. That was great," he said.

YOUTUBEWhat is Excel Esports?

'Annihilator' says Excel skills are safe from AI 'for now'

Mr Ngai said Microsoft Excel tournaments had evolved to become "more fast paced, more exciting and more accessible to people who aren't financial modellers".

He also said Excel experts were not threatened by the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which can create its own spreadsheets in seconds.

"Originally, back in 2018, it was very financial modelling-focused — think accounting or finance and projecting balance sheets and companies' money and things like that," he said.

"Who knows what will happen in the long term, but I think generative AI — yes, it is very smart and I've used ChatGPT as well — but it still needs a human to guide it and so I think right now, generative AI is very good at supporting what we do, but to just let it loose, it's not quite there yet.

"Generative AI depends on the data that is used to train the model, so it could be that if you use incorrect data to train an AI model, then the AI model will give you wrong results, but it will also pretend as if it's really confident about those wrong results.

"So there is a whole thing but you have to be really careful with how you train those models. I think our skills are still safe for now."