World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

- C. S. Lewis

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.

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.