World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

Apparently it’s a game where you take turns swinging a chestnut on a string and trying to hit the opponent’s chestnut and break it. Yes, I can see how a steel fake chestnut would be an advantage here, though I’m amazed it wouldn’t be instantly obvious to even a casual observer that the look and sound were wrong. So maybe I’m still missing something.

I’m from elsewhere in Europe and I know about it from high school and it’s also something that pops up in the world sports section on news websites every now and then.

It seems the suspicious was pretty quick.

In more recent years a bus driver complained to me conkers are not legal tender as I placed some down while in search of change. Around this time of year you will find most people have their pockets filled with conkers. </dev/random>

Sounds like a British version of pencil break - but with way more scandal, apparently

Yes. Picture some British parents and their child on a walk near a pond, river, canal or whatever. The child sees a swan. The parents will say something like "don't get too close dear, it could break your arm".

Swans are aggressive so it's probably not terrible advice, but not because they go around breaking people's arms specifically.

On the other hand, we also have competitions such as cheese rolling (trying not to get killed by a giant cheese wheel rolling down a hill), so I'm not that surprised.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-gloucestershire-6...

You make a hole through your 'conker' (horse chestnut, not the edible type) and thread a string or a bootlace through it.

Then you take turns.

One holds their string still and lets the conker hang down, the other gets a swing at it with their conker. Whoever's conker lasts the longest is the winner.

There were all sorts of rumours about baking them, or soaking in vinegar or what have you to harden them up, but effectively it's the sort of game that a bunch of kids can play under a horse chestnut tree with relatively few props.

Using a steel 'ringer' in that circumstance would be the worst sort of unsportsmanlike behaviour.

Or at least that's the way I heard it, come to think of it I have no idea at all if that's true. Stops people killing and eating swans though. Not that many would anyway these days.

They've got a pretty savage and scary charge to them, it's highly likely they've startled more than one person in a park who've turned to run, tripped and fallen across steps or rockery edges and come out badly injured.

I generally don’t like Hans and think given how many times he is confirmed to have cheated online he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. But still, claiming the butt plug meme as fact is going a bit too far.

though through the "draft" nature of which spork you would receive, we never had a controversy on the level of the article's:

> "There are also suggestions that King Conker had marked the strings of harder nuts"

But overall perhaps the false rumors might have been a good thing? Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players. The rumor/tabloids in combination with Magnus Carlsen’s very loud whining(?) got FIDE to greatly upgrade their security posture and now they walk through metal detectors and their shoes are put through metal detector/scanned manually.

So it’s very hard to hide controls for something like this at the moment. Worth noting that radio-controlled / WiFi buttplugs actually made for sex often fail to pick up their command signals because the flesh attenuates the signal too much. The most reliable ones have an antenna exiting the body (kind of like the Lovense Lush or Vulse series). I don't know if metal detectors will pick up an ESP32 and an antenna and a lithium battery large enough to power that for up to 6 hours or so…but I think they might?

Normally I’d expect the butt part to just be the RX, with TX done with the toes or something rather than by butt clenching some kind of morse code, which would require some moderately impressive signal processing and a lot of player-practice. Any non-butt-clench TX would be very very to get past the current FIDE anti-cheating-device screening.

But maybe someone could get away with something built on the same platform as the O.M.G. cable - but I still expect the power demands of WiFi to require a battery big enough to be detected. Or maybe someone could get away with a tiny-enough battery by dropping power-hungry wifi in exchange for LoRA (1x) / long range BLE (10-20x) / SigFox (1-2x) / IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee & Thread) (5x-10x) / NB-IoT (50x-100x)? Multipliers are for rough energy-per bit estimate. Anything else would have too short of a range; would need to be at least reliable at 50 feet. So probably LoRA because it has both lowest energy-per-bit as well as excellent long range.

With an optimized microcontroller strategy and wireless strategy, most of the battery energy would be used for the motor. A small cell phone vibration motor (weakest you could get away with and still reliably feel) uses 60mA at 3V. A lithium coin cell battery can only provide around 1% of that current, so you’d need a bigger battery - at least 100mAh lithium weighing approximately 3g (75% of this is metal). A cell phone vibration motor weighs about 1g (all metal). The world’s smallest Lora module with included microcontroller (FMLR-6x-x-MA62x) weighs about 16g (not sure what % of that would be metallic, lets say 10% as a low-boundary worst case).

So at minimum you’d be looking at 5-6 grams of metal for this cheating device (which has no input device at all!!). This is approximately the weight of one US quarter. It is right at the limit of what walk-through metal detectors are rated to detect on their highest sensitivity. NIJ level 3-certified metal detectors like the Garrett PD 6500i are designed to be able to detect a steel handcuff key which weighs about 4 grams. The manual for this scanner includes a technical drawing for a reference design of a test “handcuff key” so that customers can validate this performance themselves.

Is FIDE using an NIJ level 3 metal detector? I don’t know. But if they are, it would be impossible to get a radio-controlled buttplug through without detection.

The Guardian are certainly a left-leaning, frequently political paper, but that doesn’t mean every story is political, and IMO this one isn’t.

Fox hunting, horse riding, polo and skiing... yes. Conkers, No.

I'm sure there are parts of the country where they're less common, but there's huge numbers of conkers falling off trees in big British cities (even if the majority will be in parks) as well as in the countryside. We played with them at my pre-teen city centre school for sure, and the trees are a common sight on roads and in gardens as well as public parks.

edit: the Woodland trust actually says "Though rarely found in woodland, it is a common sight in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens."

It’s certainly a good thing that security is being taken more seriously now. And I have zero sympathy for Hans. He chose to destroy his credibility by cheating online and, regardless of whether he also cheated over the board or not, has only himself to blame for the fact that people don’t trust him now.

Given how easy it is to cheat in chess, reputation and trust are really all you have, and if you decide to squander them, well, that’s on you.

We've got a ton of horse chestnuts in my neighborhood but I've never heard of this game and I'm eager to introduce it to my kids.

Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?

The rest are political ads.

British coroners know the signs….

WHen you were a kid, accidentally hitting yourself or the other person was just part of it!

[1] Which kind of sucks for me personally because they cause me really terrible hayfever. I think I'm specifically alergic to their pollen maybe.

https://outdoorswimmer.com/coach/myth-busting-can-a-swan-bre...

The beak is probably more dangerous, or at least give you a nasty pinch or nibbing.

Byt then I’ve watched some British costume dramas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg

And one from the championship:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5t6ej8Jzew

And here I was thinking that curling was the most ridiculous-looking sport in the world. I stand corrected.

Same, but with peonzas/trompos[0]. It's interesting since it's also about breaking the other player's item thanks to the inertia provided by a string.

In short, they're hardcore spinning tops: large, generally with a metal tip, spun much faster due to the string winding, and as mentioned, the objective is to crack the other player's.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompo

I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.

And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.

As I said, and supported by your link, I can't see a swan directly breaking a human bone - but they sure as hell can knock one arse over by charging and causing a step back fall over. That'll do some damge in some cases, easy.

When at school we probably made do with a compass (the drawing kind), as we all had them. I'm sure that resulted in a pretty high rate of conkers being destroyed before they could be strung, and a lot of ruined compasses.

> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?

Generally not, though the game isn't without its minor hazards :)

There's a (very sweet) video here that seems to do a good job of showing the process and the game - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg

Through the exact rules are up to the players and I personally consider the "stamps" rule they mention to be foul play :)

Kids just love to play.

The local ‘conker trees’ were famous!

If we play conkers with each other's bones the swan will lose.

The main detail I remember was that soaking them in vinegar was supposed to make them stronger!

Money has nothing to do with it, most of my friends had computers, some had those mini cars to drive — it was a wealthy area.

Cheating is a bit of an art. Baking the chestnuts at the right temperature was one method; a friend of mine filled his conker with glue.

People have the misapprehension that you're supposed to catch the cheese. No idea why you'd think it's a good idea to catch a rock hard lump whilst running down a hill so fast that if you tense your legs once to slow down you do 3 cartwheels.

Also just remembered - they have local rugby players to catch those who can't stop running from hitting the fence of the house at the bottom. Saw at least one person they missed who smacked into the fence and got carted off by St John's Ambulance.

Ours were made from a very tough plastic, either nylon or HDPE.

I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers, and the participants must select their conker from the collection or given one at random. Prevents tampering I guess.

Contrast the BBC's take: First American wins World Conker Championships[0], which focuses on the winner's family's pride, the "lovely little village" where the tournament was held, the American visitor triumphing over churlish natives heckling her, and concludes with a cozy panegyric embracing both tradition and the New World Order (of conkers):

> "Our overall champion, Kelci Banschbach, is our first American Queen Conker and David Jakins, previous finalist and long-standing committee member, very much deserves his King Conker title."

In typical fashion, the Establishment's champion declines to even hint at the underlying corruption.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr75xyn1rd8o

Round here, in the olden days the kids would fashion a crude type of ball called "basse" by cutting up a broken bicycle inner tube into a bunch of small rings, threading all the rings on a piece of string and tying this mess up in a particular way to form a roughly spherical object.

It does not roll well at all, but the kids stand around in a circle and kick the basse around to each other, trying to keep it in the air. If you cause it to fall to the ground, you lose.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/SpitJack-Trussing-Butchers-Roasting...

Attach string, push through, detach string and remove.

I thought that was stupid then as well.

Going around the conker trees in your area and finding the perfect conker is a huge part of the game. There is also a certain amount of pre-game 'modification' that are generally allowed, like soaking them in various solutions, or baking them in an oven.

Having to use a provided conker would be like showing up to the Tour de France and being assigned a bike by the organisers.

Extremely common for kids to play this at least into the mid 2000s where i'm from, i moved away so i don't know if they still do

Did you grow up in a city? I'm mid 30s and we used to regularly play conkers in the village where I grew up.

The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.

I asked my 17 year old this morning and he had never even heard of the game of conkers.

So I think the age of conkers is passing, alas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game

A lot more kids in the background smoking cigarettes around the bike sheds as well, but that's another story :)

Not usually in my experience, the string isn't that short and you're holding it at one end. Injury is still possible though, but that's part of the fun!

https://youtu.be/dDjV9iKmT9k?t=118

[1] https://curiousandgeeks.com/conker-animals-autumn-crafts

Repeat until one conker is smashed into oblivion.

If your conker wins against multiples it becomes named mythically: a twoer, a threer, and so on.

I once had a niner. a fiver took it down.

Cheating was always rife with people using all manner of techniques to try to preserve and strengthen their conkers: soaking in vinegar, baking them, coating in nail varnish, &c.

Pretty sad to hear it's fallen out of fashion, as it was good, cheap fun and, with long enough string, not very dangerous.

https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-24...

Lovely read!

I understood that was a myth created from a few isolated instances and the medias general desire to wind people up. I don't know why it has died out mind.

You need to use a long enough string. Old cotton shoe laces are actually perfect as the aglets make threading that much easier.

The force of one conker against another is enough to sometimes make it spin round, but not enough to do any real damage. You just need a long enough string that your fingers are not in the firing range. Obviously there is a vanishingly small risk of a piece of conker ending up in the eye but I never witnessed that or any other injury happening. The biggest problem was usually upset kids when their prized conker got destroyed.

People, on average, like to do the easiest thing possible and on top of that, they frequently like to brag about what they've achieved and how good they are. Social animals and all that.

[1] By the standards of the time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211018040605/https://www.hse.g...

Quote: "Realistically the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about. If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that's a discipline issue, not health and safety."

Certainly there was at least one school that got goggles for pupils to wear while playing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/3712764.stm

I never really played it when I was a kid, but knew all about it from The Beano and Oor Wullie.

I didn't know and wouldn't have guessed there were world championships, though.

However even without knowing that I think reading the article makes it clear enough what it's about and that a steel chestnut shattering the other one seems like an unfair advantage :)

https://youtu.be/hXUbTKd6pmo?t=29

It does until you learn, usually quite quickly, to do it properly.

Hurting your opponent's hand is a different matter :)

It would be nice if we stopped stigmatising play. Growing up doesn't mean we stop playing. Acting grown-up might mean stop playing, but it's just that — an act, and a likely childish one. Real adults don't give up on what brings them joy.

That's brilliant. Why did this never occur to me? That's going on the list of things to tell my younger self when time travel becomes possible.

Absolutely. Very well known.

My Youtube-fu is not with me, so I can't seem to locate this video on Youtube, but see this BBC Archive footage from 1971 that was posted on Instagram[1] from a BBC News Report entitled "Conkers is no longer a kids' game."

[1] https://www.instagram.com/bbc_archive/reel/DA7zkmkAShz/

Please resist the urge to mod me down in flames for the above, but, in former times, buying LEGO at the ripe old age of fourteen would be a bit shameful in the school playground. Adults did not play LEGO then, it was the role of the father to read the newspaper and the role of the mother to be 'chained to the sink' in those days, with LEGO just for small children.

Conkers was very much for younger children, once an interest in the opposite sex, playing cards for match sticks or general juvenile delinquency was established, conkers was 'grown out of'.

Much like how fathers could teach their sons to beat up bullies, so it was that fathers could help with the technical aspects of conkers, such as getting the hand drill out (remember those contraptions, before battery power tools).

Conkers was a rite of passage, something that you would be expected to grow out of. It also came with a season, i.e. autumn, and the etiquette was to pick on someone of your own size. Hence, someone playing conkers at the age of 23 has not really got it right.

As for the guy with the steel conker, again we have a problem of age.

Now, as for playing with LEGO as an adult, or playing conkers as an adult, or, for that matter, the retro 8-bit computer scene, this is about regressing from the adult world of today, with all of its problems, and hiding in a recreated childhood. This is sort of understandable for people that were sent off to war, to see things they did not need to see. Those people kind of need the therapy that a return to the child world provides.

But nowadays, I see it as a response to the atomisation of community. If you are not spending your weekends with friends at pubs or at dinner parties, if you don't have an adult hobby such as with a lathe in a shed, if you can't afford big toys such as a boat, then childhood hobbies are a safe space to return to. Apart from anything else, you can buy all the LEGO that you could not buy then. Or, with conkers, you can find a social scene of like minded individuals and get a bit more scientific about winning.

(When I was a kid, conkers were so prized we chucked sticks at them to try to get them to drop. So it was a bit of a shock to me when they started just being left where they fell. Kids today, off my lawn, uphill both ways, etc etc).

This was usually because it became a tool for bullying: deliberate hand hits in games, deliberate hand hits in other contexts with complaints of an attack fobbed off as “we were playing conckers and there was an accident”, and so on.

Also like any playground sport there were gambling issues (I'm not sure if they were serious issues, or just if some schools took them too seriously, but I remember there being a glut of warnings about it when I was in secondary level education, around the same time as some bullying concern related bans).

Luckily, I grew out of that and I do not feel self conscious when playing as an adult or being goofy.

Inner-city kid, same age as you, and it was everywhere. Not universal, I guess.

Was it that once you reached six, you stopped counting? Or do you retire it, undefeated?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup-and-ball

   In 2004, several schools banned conkers due to fear of causing anaphylactic shock in pupils with nut allergies. Health advisers said that there were no known dangers from conkers for nut-allergy sufferers, although some may experience a mild rash through handling them.[20]

I see parents and children collecting horse chestnuts in the local market square and arboretum still today though, and it brings back fond memories of rapped knuckles and entanglement "clingy-niner's" or "clinchies" in some games, depending who you were playing with.

I know kids have a lot more money these days but I refuse to believe they are swinging two smartphones together instead of conkers.

- C. S. Lewis

e.g. a Peanut is a seed, as are almonds, cashews, walnuts.

Not all, just mute swans; so not Bewick’s or whoopers (if I remember correctly)

Edit:

“His Majesty specifically owns any unclaimed mute swan in open water in both England and Wales in a ceremonial fashion. This has been a law since medieval times. His ownership is shared with the Worshipful Company of Dyers, granted to them by the Crown in the 1400s.”

https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/king/does-the-king-really-own-...

Very few people using the word "berry" are discussing scientific classifications. It would be worse, not better, to make terms more scientifically precise. Berry refers to small juicy fruits, often in bright colors.

Kids will be kids and bullies will always find an excuse to pick on someone if they want to. Just deal with it one-off when a game gets out of hand and let kids play games and learn social skills along the way.

Yes they are

> tomatoes and bananas are

No they’re not.

The word “berry” is much older and more fundamental to language than the technical botanical definition that a tiny minority of people know or care about.

I got the gist just from reading the headline, yes. And I'm not even a limey, I just lived there for a few years.

You take a chestnut, and you hook the ice pick. You wait until nobody is in the kitchen, and then one kid presses down on the pilot-light button so that a long delicate blue finger of flame comes out, and the other kid puts the ice pick in the flame until it is red-hot. When it is, he bores a hole in the chestnut. You do as many as you can until somebody comes and asks you what you are doing, and then, according to your standing in the family, that day, you either plead, argue, or say, “Oh, jeez,” and slink away.

And while I know my son can safely play with conkers, we most certainly have not tried to eat one!

Strawberries aren't berries and tomatoes are. You can say that's wrong all you like, but in the context of how they are botanically classified rather than what we named them you're incorrect.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/dec/09/conker...

Also, I think this follows how most sports come to be. They are started as child play, when we have the time/leisure/energy, then they eventually become something some of us want to continue with as adults and the rest of us will pay to watch because we enjoy the sport so much (often fostered during youth play).

There are dozens of sports that I have no interest in simply because I wasn’t exposed to them as a kid. As an older American, we did not play Soccer(football) when I was a kid. It’s pretty popular now and my kid has had me go to professional games and such but I still just don’t really understand the game/rules/strategy or fully appreciate the difficulty of things that occur. I could learn I suppose but I still just have little effort in doing so as a middle aged person. I could say the same about Cricket and a handful of other sports that I never played as a kid but know are popular elsewhere. Likewise, when people move to the US, it usually takes them a while and likely never fully get into American Football and Baseball. Basketball has become more global and so I do expats that follow that sport. More likely than not, they follow the sports that interested them as a kid and just live with the time zone issue.

Mind you, it's much more likely the two phones involved would be mine and my wife's.

I mean if it's a school where they also have to carry laptops and use digital schedules I don't think it makes a difference, but it's a good first step.

One issue was that each phone also has a camera, so people would seek out / make trouble on purpose, spy on people and post it online, etc.

I played it properly, but I think is somebody decided to fast-forward through some bits they wouldn’t be denying themselves too much.

If I made up a new, niche meaning of already-existing words, and tried to claim everyone else was using them wrong, you would think I was crazy.

People do this all the time, though it makes me feel old rather than crazy.

They have never heard of object-oriented programming and yet, they're not wrong. You're the one who is wrong by assuming the terms made up by a niche field override common language used by everyone.

It was more banning the tool without which the game can not be played, but yes as someone who was subjected to bullies at various times in my education history I can say you are right about them just finding something else.

I didn't say it was right, just that it happened.

The problem that causes these ineffectual bans is simply that the school's head (and other authorities) feel the need to be seen to be proactively doing something, anything, about the bullying problem they otherwise officially deny having¹, especially when local press have got onto the issue and are stirring up angst amongst the parents, and when they can't think of anything better a target is picked and a simple ban gets announced.

----

[1] It always amazed me how soon after a claim that we don't have a bullying problem in the school, there would be a call to celebrate an action that was supposed to reduce the bullying problem we didn't have…

There's also some things with nut in their name. c.f. Nutmeg, coconut.

As others have mentioned, same kind of deal with 'berry'.

And to follow up, if you're travelling abroad it's worth noting that some countries have different naming structures/separate out the families of 'nuts'. So be careful if you're asking if something has 'nuts' in, there can be a language barrier. e.g. tree nuts vs. Lupins (peanut family).

While there is somewhat of a crisis of adulthood, I find it feasible to salvage the concept without carrying forward the sort of smothering social conformity you seem to advocate as a necessary condition.

I get the point that we call them berries even if they aren't, but your comparison to OOP is apples and oranges.

Do you remember being a child and just playing with action figures? It was harmless and fun. I wonder where we lose that ability to just chill and have fun without a challenge.

Actually, a lot of people seem to just spend a lot of time watching TV, which is also fun without challenge.

That wasn’t the point. The point is that they are berries, by the real definition of berries, which is not the different definition used by a tiny minority of mostly irrelevant people in a specific context.

What reason is there to prefer the botanical definition to the common one (that says a berry is a small colorful fruit)? I can see none. On the other hand, I can see many reasons to prefer the common definition: it is older, it is used by far more people, and it more closely corresponds to what we care about in real life (because almost everyone spends more time preparing and eating meals than they do classifying plant parts, so the culinary meaning is more important).

Scientists are not in charge of the whole human experience. They do not get to decide on behalf of everyone else that the salient defining characteristic of berries is not how they taste or what dishes you would use them to prepare, but rather what part of the plant they come from.

I take issue with this, and in fact we can see how the pedantic scientific meaning caused confusion about the actual underlying facts: people with allergies to what are commonly called "nuts" can in fact be allergic to things that according to the pedantic scientific definition are "seeds". So the OP is actually wrong to say it shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy!

An apple is a pome but an orange is a hesperidium. Different things entirely.

Though it would make my day if someone tells me they can't have peanuts because of a legume allergy.

- maybe "winning" is a special case of "completing"

- "playing a game" in a competitive sense is totally different than "playing" in an undirected sense; e.g. playing with Legos or playing with a cat. Or playing with matches for that matter.

- for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."

Niemann seems like a jerk, but he's also just a kid. He was 19 at the time of the controversy. I've sure grown a lot since I was 19.

We were talking about people cheating at multiplayer co-op in this thread. I don't think people use rule-breaking cheats in multiplayer games (competitive or otherwise) purely for the story in the game, or they could go watch a TV show/movie or read a book instead and get a better story. (Or watch someone else play it!)

> for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."

These aren't the only two options. You can also just challenge yourself for the satisfaction of overcoming challenges and not wear a t-shirt. I think when people cheat at something where the outcome is broadcast there is almost always an element of status seeking.

> Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Ge...