World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

The World Conker Championships is an annual event held in England, where competitors from around the world play the traditional game of conkers using chestnuts. Each player threads a chestnut, known as a conker, onto a string and takes turns striking their opponent’s conker, aiming to break it. The tournament follows a knockout format, with players advancing until a world champion is declared. The event has been running since 1965 and has grown in popularity, drawing international participants and spectators.

Considering that it's called a world championship, someone should study the sport in-depth! Are the players allowed to swing the chestnut in a circle like a sling? Can they use carbon fiber strings, or maybe some sort of elastic string to build up more energy? Or can the player use a heavy string so it can crack like a whip? Fancy arm/wrist/fingers movements to accelerate the chestnut in the last moment? What's the optimum strike angle to crack a chestnut along its natural cleavages? This could be so exciting!

This all kind of takes the fun out of it don't you think?

Not every game needs to have the fun sucked out of it by endless optimization and instrumental play.

Just conk some chestnuts. Simple as.

Well, the winner this year was an American so I bet we’ll be back next year with high tech nano-engineered strings and carefully bred chestnuts.

What you find fun or unfun need not match other people's preferences. You can tell us what's fun or unfun for you, but you can't tell other people they're having fun wrong.

I personally find a lot of optimization problems very fun and can keep at them for a long time.

Stop optimising my fun! :-p

I’m do not think you always want to hit them hard. If our understanding of physics is right, it doesn’t matter whether you hit them or they hit you.

the two conkers hitting each other harder likely will lead to an earlier result, but it will also favor the conker that can withstand few hard blows over one that can withstand many softer ones.

So, assuming you can somehow judge how well your and your opponent’s conker do in this regard, you may want to go either for brute impact or for many rounds.

> What's the optimum strike angle to crack a chestnut along its natural cleavages?

I think that’s more important. Even idealized conkers are fairly asymmetrical, so possibly, the ‘bottom’ of one hitting the side of another is a winning or losing strategy. If so, it’s more a matter of timing than of being brutal, at least for hypothetical perfect players. Whether humans can do much here, I wouldn’t know.

The strings and the conkers are supplied by the organisers. Contestents can't use different types of string.

> If our understanding of physics is right, it doesn’t matter whether you hit them or they hit you.

That was my first thought too, but I don't know if it's true because of the strings they are attached to. The striking conker is at the end of a taut string the entire time, but the receiving conker is hanging loosely and bounces around after being struck. My guess is that the taut string helps with energy dissipation after a collision, but I could be wrong. And either way, it might be a negligible difference.