Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article? Or are you expected to have to google it?
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.
Yes, it was a big deal when I was in school in the 70s. Everyone played. They were never any conkers left unclaimed under any Horse Chestnut within a mile of the school. We all tried lots of tricks - soaking in vinegar, baking in the oven - practically anything was allowed, but I'm not sure any of it made a difference. It could be pretty painful as getting your hand hit by a high speed conker was common occurrence, but I don't recall anyone getting any lasting injuries.
It is a very, very British thing. A generation or two ago, almost everyone played it at school and it was Very Serious Business. I guess you needed something to occupy yourself before Pokemon Go was invented.
I used to play conkers at school in England, however my children didn't.
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.
It's much more likely to have died out because of smartphones. The boredom of the pre-smartphone era led to all kinds of ingenuity. Kids were bored so they found ways to not be bored. Nowadays everybody is addicted their phone, simple pleasures such as violently smashing two nuts together no longer have the same pull.
I was out for a walk yesterday, and kids were throwing sticks up trees trying to knock the chestnuts down, so I don't think it's dead completely.
I never really played it when I was a kid, but knew all about it from The Beano and Oor Wullie.
Drilling/punching the hole in a conker might be vaguely dangerous, and you're not supposed to carry a stabby tool at school anymore. But the game itself is not that dangerous, though that won't have stopped some schools from banning it.
Also played at school in England.... probably ~22 years ago now I'd guess! Sad to hear that era is over!
I'm one of that 'too young to be a millennial, too old to be a zoomer' cohort and we definitely played it in the '00s, I vaguely remember the rumours of it being banned encouraged its popularity quite a bit. They also banned British bulldog around that time so we renamed it 'hot dog' and carried on!
Side note, if you were playing conkers in the 00s are you still too young to be a millenial?
<The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.>
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.
I remember being a kid in the 80's, and being told by a primary school teacher we couldn't play conkers anymore :( We'd only just discovered it too!
The HSE posted on their mythbusting site that it was a myth at a national level, but I suppose individual schools might have done so?
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
Not a myth. I went to school during the twilight of the conker. It absolutely died because risk-averse teachers banned it, to howls of protest from us kids.
The myth is the game being a health hazard, not if it was banned (or not).
Just another brick in the wall.
What are the health and safety risks from this game? Do the chestnuts fragment violently when they break up?
Mostly it increases teacher stress levels having to referee.
accidentally hitting each other
I can't really visualize the amount of momentum involved, or how sharp the chestnut is. Is that specifically about eye injuries, or could it hurt someone some other way?
If you whip it above your head at a good 100-200 rpm, anything is possible.
Ah yes "accidentally"... ;-)
Yes. Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school. My dad seemed to find the concept of fake conkers amusing enough to take it upon himself to craft me a resin filled one, although it didn't fool any kids.
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>
> Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school.
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.
I did not know it was possible to break those things to be honest. We made a circle with a string or something, and then let the two spinning tops (as we called them) duke it out, and the loser is the one knocked out of the ring.
Ours were made from a very tough plastic, either nylon or HDPE.
As well as the old myth that putting a conker in the corner of a room will ward off spiders building a web there. The veracity of which, attest to I cannot.
Yes. Usually conkers were banned at school. So we had to play space invaders, for which you need a tennis ball not an Atari.
I feel there is enough in the article to build an image of the game in your head: I'm imagining a game game where two people trying to destroy the other person's chestnut by whirring and hitting the chestnuts on the end of strings. Now I'm going to go check my mental image against wikipedia.
I’m American and never heard of this sport in my life yet article painted a similar picture in my mind.
It's not a sport, it's something that kids used to do pre 1950s. People were poor, didn't have manufactured "stuff", so they made their own toys out of simple things like stones, sticks, old wheels etc Football was likely popular because a single ball could keep a while bunch of kids happy for an afternoon (if someone could actually afford a ball).
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.
> And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
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.
I played conkers in the 1990s. Everyone did.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'm an 80s kid and we passionately played conkers at my primary school. We used to hang them on shoe laces or string, by burning a hole through the middle with a heated awl or kebab rod.
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.
> if someone could actually afford a ball
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.
My kids play conkers. They also have games consoles and other luxury toys.
Kids just love to play.
I grew up in the 90s and we played conkers.
The main detail I remember was that soaking them in vinegar was supposed to make them stronger!
I’m 47 and played conkers in school on merseyside.
The local ‘conker trees’ were famous!
I think whether or not you grew up with a significant local population of 'conker trees' probably had a lot more to do with it than age. I'm younger than you (and didn't grow up 'poor') and we played too, 'pre-50s' is ridiculous.
Yeah, very much fron the 1950's 'Beano' era, but it did still go on in the mid 90s, at least in a wild throwing them about the place as entertainment. It was indeed a simpler time.
A lot more kids in the background smoking cigarettes around the bike sheds as well, but that's another story :)
> 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.
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
Another voice here of someone (in my 30s) who played conkers growing up. Was great fun!
That's more or less it.
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.
Ho do you drill the hole? I'm having trouble imagining kids with needles in their pockets, do you do it with a pencil or toothpick?
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?
We used to have a BBQ skewer that we used for various purposes, including adding holes to belts. We'd heat it up on the gas hob and then burn a hole through the conker. I actually still have the same one I've inherited in my kitchen drawer. If you have an awl, you could use that instead, but I'd recommend heating it to get a cleaner hole.
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.
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
It does until you learn, usually quite quickly, to do it properly.
Hurting your opponent's hand is a different matter :)
We randomly had something like this in our kitchen draw...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/SpitJack-Trussing-Butchers-Roasting...
Attach string, push through, detach string and remove.
sweet!
I'm not from Britain, but we used to craft with chestnuts. We always used a small hand drill (Wikipedia tells me it's called a gimlet). I assume it's the same in Britain
> your hand hitting it and hurting you?
WHen you were a kid, accidentally hitting yourself or the other person was just part of it!
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
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!
A gimlet? Hammer and a thick-ish nail? Honestly I can't remember how we used to do it. Might even have used a hand drill at some point. They're fairly soft when you've made a hole in the shell, so you might get away with a screwdriver?
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 :)
compass makes a ton of sense, and that is indeed a sweet video, thanks for sharing!
Horse chestnut shells are very hard, normally you would drill the hole.
Here's a video that explains 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.
If my memory serves me: you used to announce your conker as a “two-er”, or “three-er”, for example, to inform your opponent how many conkers your particular conker had previously claimed. If your opponent decided to challenge you and won then they would claim your “three-er” and add its win total to their own. So a “two-er” would become a “five-er”.
I also recall this, but suspect sometimes numbers may have been inflated...
I at nearly 50 years old still own my undefeated 48’er. It’s on a yellow bootlace in a box in the loft at my dad’s house.
This is really probing the dusty, cobwebbed corners of my memory but yes, I have a very vague recollection of a 'six-er' being somewhat special...
I'm having the utter best time as a 12 year old replacing conker with something less wholesome
I'm Norwegian, but have lived in the UK half my life, since I was 25, and I'm aware of it, though have never seen it played. I think most people who have lived her for a while will at least have heard references to it.
I only know about conkers due to photonicinduction's youtube video where they play conkers with two CRT televisions attached with ropes to the ceiling
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 :)
Innate knowledge to Brits, similar to knowing a swan might break your arm
Lol, I don’t understand what THAT means! A swan might break your arm?!?
I emigrated to Britain. These sorts of things mystified me for the longest time.
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.
Anecdotal reports, all of them true I'm sure:
https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-24...
Lovely read!
In the Netherlands we are also taught a swan could break your arm if you get too close. I don't know if it's true or not because I've been too scared to find out.
They're not going to hold you down and break it with a tire iron .. but I'll bet for certain that Swans are responsible for arms being broken.
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.
They are also able to swing their wings quite rapidly while charging you. In this way they can throw a surprisingly hard punch. But not break bones in healthy humans - kids included.
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.
Black Swans in Perth, herdsman Lake and elsewhere, in the 1980s during breeding season (and likely still today) fully charged people and had the mass to knock over more than one kid or small teenager .. and scare the bejeebus out of many adults.
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.
I've never been charged by a swan, but I have been knocked into a ditch by the slightly smaller but no less aggressive Canada Goose while biking. No broken bones, but I did have to straighten the alignment of the wheels on my bike.
The smell test here is that swans are flying birds and a human is large(-ish) land mammal. Nature just cannot make a flying bird's bones strong enough because they have to be much lighter.
If we play conkers with each other's bones the swan will lose.
Upvote for the subtle reference to the conkers story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844545).
It's this thread, did you suffer HNception? :)
Was bitten by a swan as a child. Painful by all accounts, but not enough for me to remember the pain, though I recall being more careful around swans afterward Probably more scary for my parents.
It’s the British version of an urban myth. It’s like an urban myth… but more British.
The idea that a swan can "break a man's arm with a blow of its wing" is (or was) ingrained enough into the British psyche that Peter Cook's comic creation, Arthur Streeb-Greebling, once said of his mother that she could "break a swan's wing with a blow of her nose."
Ye and the queen eats swans for breakfast or something like that.
Less often since September 2022.
All swans are owned by the crown and the monarch has the exclusive right to kill and eat them.
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.
St John's College serves swan on formal occasions sometimes, because they have some connection to the royal family that means they have special permission. (Or used to in the Queen Elizabeth days, I don't know if they still do under Charles)
it is a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance
Apart from the ones at Abbotsbury swannery. Those ones are privately owned. It is true to say all mute swans in Britain are owned by someone, though.
Don’t draw on your hand with a pen or you’ll get ink poisoning
Don't make that silly face. If the wind changes, it'll stay like that forever.
Don't lean on your chair, I had a student who died doing that
How holding a feather and you’ll get a “red ring of fungus” in your hair.
I thought that was stupid then as well.
Here's how it looks like apparently:
It is in Spain, any self-respected pre-smartphone-childhood person has at the very minimum least seen this in action at the playground.
Yes, it is. It’s a game most news-reading-age adults will have played when they were at school as children.
It's a game you play as a kid. This is the first I've heard of there being a professional league.
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...
I did that race twice, dislocated my left shoulder each time. Scariest thing i've ever done.
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.
I know the version where you try not to kill yourself chasing the cheese. Are you saying there's one where the cheese chases and tries to kill you?
I feel we've entered Terry Pratchett territory in this thread, and I'm very happy about it.
Shhhh! The first rule of cheese-chase is never talk about cheese-chase.
British coroners know the signs….
If it is a serious game, I’m surprised they don’t examine the chestnuts first
The alleged cheater was also the head judge of the tournament.
Geez, we just had tetherball. No one tried to destroy each other’s nuts.
If we had those in my schoolyard, that would literally happen within 5 minutes -"spinny-spinny-whack-to-the-sack"
You're starting to get why the game used to be so popular.
They did at my school.
roshambo. southpark style.
It's sufficiently well known that as a British 30 something I understood what was being alleged just from the headline
Yes, it's a quintessential childhood game here. You take turns to have a single swing at the opponent's conker, until one of the conkers is smashed off its string.
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.
> Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland
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.
Was confused too. My first thought was about conker crafting [1] and I was puzzled that there was a world championship for it and people were serious enough about it to cheat - but then again, weirder things exist...
[1] https://curiousandgeeks.com/conker-animals-autumn-crafts
Swede here. I know from just reading the headline what happened.
Byt then I’ve watched some British costume dramas.
I'm British. I only have a very vague memory of the game from my childhood. I didn't remember what the goal was, but I remembered you have to hit the opponent's one. I don't remember if I ever played it or not.
You hold the conker in one hand and the string in the other with some tension and then release so it pings and bashes the other players conker, hoping to smash it off the string.
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.
I only know of the game because the Conkerer web browser was named after it. http://conkeror.org/
Is the game skill-based? How can you influence which chestnut breaks? Is the challenge chestnut selection? Or a specific swing method?
I find it highly suspicious that the reigning champion gets to drill the holes in the conkers. You can intentionally make some of them weaker by drilling closer to the edge or something.
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.
I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers
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.
Indeed, but apparently this is the way it works. I suspect to prevent 'foul-play' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Conker_Championships#WCC...
I thought it might be like formula 1 where having the right equipment is part of the challenge.
in my schools, the closest analog was probably using the school-supplied sporks to engage in "Spork Wars" (not the best example but it will do https://youtu.be/vO7SclBfpZ8?t=145 )
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"
> 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.
Sounds like a British version of pencil break - but with way more scandal, apparently
gosh i remember those halcyon days back when I had a niner, sadly it was taken by a fiver.
More UK people will have played conkers then soccer.
More Brits will have played football than soccer too, I believe.
Can you cheat by purposefully missing the opponent’s conker? Thus reducing the total impact on conkers in this match vs conkers in other matches and getting an advantage?
I can't imagine so. A match is over when one persons conker is destroyed. If you were purposefully missing, you'd be throwing the game. Theirs would still take a battering from hitting yours as well.
But then how would you smash theirs? That sounds a bit like cheating by staying at home and not playing.
Yeah, like saying 'tetherball' or 'keep-away' to someone in the US; which I only know from a Monk episode I watched last night.
I didn't know and wouldn't have guessed there were world championships, though.
I think most people would know just from the headline.
> The 23-year-old said: “My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen … I’m suspicious of foul play and have expressed my surprise to organisers.”
It seems the suspicious was pretty quick.
It’s just crazy that someone would cheat at something so low-stakes with such a high probability of being caught, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
The games cheat industry was huge[1] back before the internet was a major thing. Entire books about cheat codes, walkthrough to get the best gear and to beat the game in the easiest way possible, then websites full of cheats, etc.
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.
I dunno. The article states that David Jakins has been competing since 1977 and has never won. He was also a Judge, so this game seems to be extremely important to him for some reason. I guess he wanted to win by any means necessary before he has to retire from the sport permanently due to age or physical limitation
People cheat on online cooperative computer games like Helldivers with almost no rewards for being performatively better other than a few imaginary in-game points. People can be weird about the smallest things
Fair enough. People cheat at chess too which makes absolutely no sense to me.
Not just cheat but cheat using Bluetooth butt plugs at an extremely high level of play (https://nypost.com/2022/10/06/chess-champ-gets-butt-inspecte...). Some people have all the fun.
You shouldn’t state it so confidently as fact — nobody has ever produced any evidence that Hans Niemann cheated over the board (let alone with a Bluetooth butt plug, despite all the memes to that effect).
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.
Thank you. This is the kind of speed-of-correction (~20 min or less) that is needed for social media discourse to work effectively. Indeed, no evidence has been found, this was just a silly meme from Reddit which predated the Hans drama by several years. When the Hans drama happened, of course Redditors started making silly flippant references to this joke. But some people didn’t understand that those were references, instead mistook them for actual “accusations”, bought into it, and started actually seriously perpetuating the accusation/rumor. It was repeated often enough in juuust serious enough tone that tabloid journalism eventually picked it up and ran stories with it.
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.
> Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players.
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.
Cheating at a PvE game like Helldivers is basically a victimless crime (I don’t do it, but I can see why people would).
It is a crime against oneself.
Cheating with only your friends - yeah, mostly. Cheating with randos sounds like it would lead to boring gameplay.
Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?
Hey, dopamine is dopamine. This ain’t stolen valor or a plagiarized thesis.
Veblen called sports Conspicuous Leisure. The goal is not fun but that everyone sees you win. So Stakes are Status. And Status gets people things in the same way Cash does.
He is approaching the end of his life and been competing for decades but never won. Risk vs reward.
cf. wordle
Yes, conkers is sufficiently well-known enough as a children's schoolyard game that I would expect pretty much every newspaper-reading adult to have heard of it. The fact that there is supposedly an "adult" championship event would be a surprise to most. If you're looking for the "story behind the story", other than the fact that it's a seasonally-specific, light human-interest story: there is probably a slight cultural bias amongst those who most fondly remember the game towards the private-school-educated, upper-class types who combine nostalgia for imagined "glory days" with political conservatism, so this is a good opportunity for the left-leaning Guardian to hand-pick someone who appears to belong to that class and expose them as a ridiculously-dressed scoundrel with childish interests and suspect morals. The subtext is: these are the sort of idiots we want you to associate with Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and co, and thus the Overton Window gets a tiny nudge in the opposite direction.
I think you’re reading way, way too much into this. Read the piece and it seems like just a goofy little oddball story, makes for a light and enjoyable read, I’m really not picking up any political angle in this piece.
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.
This is silly. Conkers aren't a rich person's sport, and this article in the guardian isn't pushing any political subversive subtext.
News is what you don't get to read.
The rest are political ads.
I heard the conkers cheater was an illegal immigrant, the establishment covered it up and now they wont even report on conkers anywhere in the main stream media (/s?)
Right on.
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.
It never occurred to me that conkers could be a class thing and you could be right. But let it be known that conkers was extremely popular at my state school; me and all of my friends grew up to be pretty left wing too by the way. Also they banned it at my school, along with pogs, yoyos, etc.
It's not a class thing.
Fox hunting, horse riding, polo and skiing... yes. Conkers, No.
Wherever there is a chestnut tree you'll get conkers. I would imagine it's more of a town/village vs city thing rather than class thing.
Which of those are you imagining doesn't have horse chestnut trees? (Conkers come from those, not plain chestnut trees)
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."
Live in London in Zone 2 and there are absolutely tons of conker trees around me including in areas which are not posh. They are very common in an urban setting.[1]
[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.
Depends where you are - I went to a very modest comprehensive in Scotland and yet we still went skiing at weekend to Cairngorm because it was close.
What if you ski in jeans?
Skiing is a much more expensive activity in most of Britain, mainly since it requires taking a week off work, international flights and hotels to be able to participate. And to become good at skiing you'll have to do that once or twice a year for many years. In places where the local ski slope is a bus ride away it is much less of a class/wealth thing.
The height of ski chic in Scotland used to, at least when I skied regularly, consist of offshore foul weather gear emblazoned with the name of the oil company (or oil service company) the wearer had borrowed it from.
Exactly! I used to ski double black diamonds in the Sierra Nevada range wearing jeans, with gaiters to keep the snow out of my boots.
Eton wall game is a class thing. Conkers is not.
Considerably more pleasant than the St. Tadger's Day wall game played at Graybridge public school.
In Britain, maybe. In the USA, I don’t think so.
They did play conkers with cranes and caravans in Top Gear, so I feel that at least a large portion of non Brits will know the game from there.
I'm puzzled as well, what the heck the article is talking about and why it's posted here?
Yeah it’s a game you play as kids.
Conkers are just cool things. Like unwrapping a present to get a perfect little gift.
I learned about conkers when I was very young and read the Hitchhikers Guide for the first time...
"We bust our way into a megafreighter I still don't know how, marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what? Conkers.
The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts of the Galaxy - lots of conkers, of course, and we had just the most incredible time."
Of course in this well pre-internet age I had to wait literal YEARS to find out what conkers actually WERE. Luckily my aunt was an anglophile and went there six or seven years later. Before she left I asked her to find out what conkers were for me. When she returned she told me what they were and... to be honest I was kinda bummed out it wasn't something more elaborate.
Would the word not be in a dictionary?
For me, the whole notion of there being a professional conkers league, and its longtime judge, real old chap, using a steel replica to cheat, reads like something Douglas Adams could invent.
I was about to post the same thing! I've thought about this literally for decades.
I also had to wait for years to learn what conkers are - and I'm still confused. I'd love to know the context/history/culture that DNA was referring to because it doesn't make any sense to me as written
So conkers are chestnuts on a string used for childhood smashing competitions. Ooookay.
But why would Yooden Vranx have "lots of" chestnuts on his spaceship? And why "of course"? Was that something that should be expected from an adult, or maybe specifically a captain of a ship? And why would a child think chestnuts were as special as the weird galactic stuff?
To this day, I think he was referring to something else which got lost or changed in the editing process. Maybe there was a side bar about "cosmic conkers" that got omitted, but the later reference was kept. Something.
This article on hackernews reads the same as "Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data" would on conkernews.
I'm also pretty disturbed by it being here. Even worse on place #1.
I'd recommend finding more important things to be disturbed by.
I'd rather read and learn about conkers than another snake oil AI / crypto blogspam.
#1 does feel a bit much but I don't mind getting a kick out of titles/situations which could be interpreted immaturely.
Hijacking page on place#1 to post this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rP3AAjsiqY
"Show HN: Two purple Conkers.. and one yellow honker. In Python using PyBangSwackThump With Fleshy Bits"
The British are living proof of the fact that amazing things[1] can be achieved when the place you live in is extremely boring.
[1] For varied definitions of "amazing", such as "conquer countries 10x your size", "invent 20 sports the entire world plays", etc.
I would argue that "Counquer countries 10x your size" is a misrepresentation as generally the British (and other European powers) conquered lands in which there were multiple small kingdoms or relatively sparse populations of tribes or similar. That is certainly the case in North America and Oceania and I would argue also the case in India and Africa too.
India for sure wasn't conquered that way. Yes, there was a lot of "divide et impera" going on, but just one simple example, the population of Bengal was about 40 million in 1800 while that of the UK was only around 10 million.
Britain didn't actually "overpower" India as much as gain traction by presenting themselves as a less bad alternative than some of the existing ones, for several major regions they conquered. They were even financed by major Bengali bankers for their conquest.
India was possibly the big outlier in this regard, ergo the whole "crown jewel of the empire" angle.
Read this: https://a.co/d/7r25CnA - The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.
> conquer countries 10x your size
> invent 20 sports the entire world plays
I mean, the two are kind of related, causally...
Football for sure wasn't spread (just) through conquest.
The UK never conquered Argentina or Brazil yet if you'd look at football fans in both countries you'd think Argentina or Brazil not only invented football itself, but they also built an entire cult around it :-p
When I was a kid (many years ago) me and a friend once went "conkering" down quite a posh road with several horse chestnut trees on it. We had collected a few good ones when a guy came out of his house and called us over. We thought "Oh dear, get off my lawn time", but no! He had big bin full of conkers that he had picked up from his garden, and invited us to choose from them.
He probably played it himself back in the day.
Its interesting how games and other things like songs, stories etc. persist and/or disappear over time.
What a wonderful story, thank you for sharing.
I'm surprised they pick their conkers out of a bag. The whole fun when I was a kid was competing for who could find the toughest conker. Common cheating methods included putting it through the tumble dryer to dry it out (Mum didn't love that) or soaking in vinegar. If you're pulling conkers out of a bag I think each match is basically a coin flip, unless there's much more technique I'm missing?
As someone that played it over 60 years ago, there is quite a bit of technique involved - for example, aiming to hit the opponent's conker accurately and hard.
Vinegar makes it stronger? I would naively expect the opposite.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the "techniques" softened it but made it more resistant to shattering.
An extremely hard but brittle conker would probably make for poor results.
Interesting. I can certainly see how brittleness is probably fatal. But a soft one won't be any help at breaking your opponent's conker, either, right? Unless speed of your conker can overcome the increased inefficiency of transmitting energy into the opponent's...
Everything can be a sport if you try hard enough.
Everything can be a sport if you can bet on it.
I varnished mine
Some stuff really makes you lose faith in humanity.
Some people pay for conkers
But I get mine for free
I go round my grandmas house
She's got a horse chestnut tree
Bass drop
I love the glimpses that give away the British people on here. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one but this thread has brought them all out
...
conkers
It seems like a bad move to have a participant responsible for drilling the holes and attaching the strings.
Also I don’t understand the one paragraph aside about the American who is never mentioned before or after(?)
>It seems like a bad move to have a participant responsible for drilling the holes and attaching the strings.
It is probably the kind of event where the only people who would be willing to do the timely prep work are the contestants.
The guy the article is about won the men's. At the end, the men's champ plays the women's champ for overall champion.
This American mentioned was the women's champ, who apparently went on to beat him. Which either means he wasn't cheating, or was and then played fairly on the last match?
I assume he wouldn't cheat everytime and instead would only do it to reduce the overall wear on the chestnut over many matches?
Apparently they pick a new one each round.
>It seems like a bad move to have a participant responsible for drilling the holes and attaching the strings.
Part of the "point" of conkers is that conker-prep is just as much as a skill as the technique during the hitting phase.
I think this was just poor scrutineering (or corruption) on the organizers side.
That would make sense to me, but it seems like maybe it isn’t how they did it?
> Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.
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!
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.
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 had a hard time figuring out where the cheating comes in. Especially with the metal chestnut. Marking the strings so they break more easily?
Gotta admit, it takes some nuts of steel to pull this through.
What is conker, you ask? Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LcaUTAuQfc
The alleged cheater is in this video @3:29
I was very confused by that link calling it a horse chestnut. That is not what I grew up calling a horse chestnut, ie the keratin thing that your farrier trims (or you do with a rasp.)
Separately, what an absolutely nutty thing to cheat at.
Thanks for sharing the video!
I developed a strange fascination with Horse Chestnut trees.
I remember in the nineties when I noticed Horse Chestnuts laying on the pavement, and felt a tinge of sadness kids would normally by scouting areas to pick up all the chestnuts like competitive squirrels.
Seriously, who gives a cheat?
This brought back so many fun childhood memories of fall time in Leeds, going for walks with friends in search of the best conker. I hadn't thought about it in years.
Am I the only one here who instantly redirected mentally to "Conker's Bad Fur Day" ?
If, like me, you were wondering WTF this is all about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
I just found this on the conker championships, quite funny. https://youtu.be/q8CYrM9xkUc
I'm just amazed to see that this was not The Onion
> Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.
So the "judge" who prepped the conkers for everyone and stringed them also competed in the competition and won
Surely every kids (in the UK) knows the secret to a winning conker is to keep it in a dark place for several weeks so it naturally hardens up. I'm not sure if this is considered cheating though.
I would not want to be conked on the head with that one.
The conkeror this year is from Indianapolis! She only learned about conkers a few months ago.
I needed this cute video to tell me what the heck conker is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGuZZraIqg
You and your opponent each attach a chestnut to a shoestring. You try to destroy your opponent's stringed chestnut by swinging your own stringed chestnut at it. The video explains different ways to cheat, such as coating the chestnut with nail varnish.
I’m pondering why and how this made to the top of HN.
Just found this on the Conker championships - https://youtu.be/q8CYrM9xkUc
It's Not Cricket
But was it a cheeser?
What a bunch of nutters.
Thanks to HN, now I know there's such a sport with hitting nuts attached to strings. I've read a lot of English-speaking material, but was only aware of rugby (it was aired on our TV in the 00's) and cricket. I'm amazed there's even a world championship, and that the Guardian has thumbnails to attract readers to important news on this sport.
This is bonkers!
We didn't have conkers so we played mumblety-peg.
Man, this is conkers!
He was said to have nuts of steel, but the claim wasn't taken seriously, or literally.
lmao this is always so funny to me. This is all that matters to these dudes.
lmao this is so funny to me, these cheaters and swindlers. This is all that matters to these guys at the end of the day? So lame.
They said he had balls of steel to try that one
For the yanks and elsewhere, yes conkers is well known in Britain. You basically put a chestnut (but its a conker) on a string by making a hole in the middle. Take turns swinging them on the string, whoever's breaks is the loser.
It used to be great fun till it was banned/requires eye protection now. There's an opportunity there, someone could make a perfectly safe conker app. I'm sure that would adequately replace it. /s
How is it banned? Banned in schools you mean?
Because I can’t see how authorities could ban anyone from picking up a conker from the ground and tying a string to it.
On a different note, if you’re just pulling a random one out of a bag, what is the competitive aspect? Is there a technique involved? Or just RNG?
It is banned in schools. As I said in another comment, that outlaws it for the vast majority of players at the place they used to play it.
Believe it or not adults playing conkers or people playing conkers outside of schools isn't a common pass time.
It is pretty much RNG, though you can massively nerf a conkers structural integrity by making the hole through the middle poorly, so there are some techniques. People also used to use thicker shoelaces like in vans, which I think made the centre more solid. I've never run an experiment to verify the difference that might make.
It's not banned, but the Daily Mail would like you to think the EU banned another British tradition.
I don't read the daily mail. Try again. Maybe be less partisan.
Page 3: "Carly 32D, 21 from Ipswich, thinks EU regulations on conkers is against British traditions"
I'm not sure if that betrays more about your opinion of women than you may have been aware.
It probably betrays more about my contempt for how peoples biggotry is exploited to make them believe things that are not true. When that is not enough then show them some tits with the message and they will tell you all about how pigs fly.
It just looks as though you have your own set of biases, just against people instead of against overly coddling rules. No one's mentioned the Daily Mail or the EU other than you and the other poster with similar biases.
IIRC at some point schools decided to put a stop to it (it was a popular playground game in Autumn) because of the possibility of injury.
Or that might have just been a tabloid outrage-bait headline.
It's such a persistent myth that a health and safety organisation decided to sponsor the championships to try and debunk the idea. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7637605.stm
So the game is to test who has the stronger conker by hitting them into each-other?
Yes, that's it.
The reason I think this game is so popular is horse chestnut trees are very popular in the UK. For about a month each year, where I grew up the ground would be littered with conkers, both on my route to school and on school grounds. It's natural when walking around to try to find particularly large / impressive looking ones.
Used to be bloody great fun and made me look forward to the time of year too.
I hope there are little rebels out there, still playing conkers as a massive "fuck you" to draconian safety laws, and not just watching tiktoks.
EDIT: I got downvoted, presumably by someone that lost an eye to a conker
A quick google will get you websites of primary schools up and down this great nation with photos of their Conkers champions holding up their trophies.
As for "the law" - from a 2019 petition to make conkers legal again:
There's no law or government policy banning children from playing conkers, so we're not sure exactly what you'd like the Government or Parliament to do.
I have no idea why you think safety laws prevent people from playing conkers in spite of the very thread you are commenting on being evidence that people play conkers and it is perfectly legal.
Well it is banned in schools. I'm not sure how many adults you believe actually play conkers, beyond a few nutters (sic), but its mainly been banned for the people that used to actually enjoy it, kids.
I do wonder if by banning it in schools it will get less and less common till it disappears. I suppose you predictably think that's nonsense.
But pedantry aside, its banned for the people who used to play it most and enjoy it, at the place they did just that.
You're downvoted because you're repeating unfounded tabloid rage-bait, hours after someone else posted a reliable source showing the opposite.
Ah yes your experience of a 2008 BBC news article from Copenhagen outweighs my lived, witnessed reality.
How could I be so clueless?
It is legal, but it also did get banned at my primary school. It continued to be played.
Conkers, bulldog, smoking behind the bike sheds (ok vaping these days), and porn (nowadays on screens rather than naughty magazines) ... a lot about British schools can be summed up in this quote:
“What exactly are you so happy about?' Harry asked her.'Oh Harry, don't you see?' Hermione breathed. 'If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!”
I would assume you got downvoted because you feel for a particularly implausible myth.
Indeed, a myth. One "disproven" by BBC news articles from 2008 when I have seen contrary evidence with my own eyes.
Believe it or not the world has come on a long way in 16 years.