I beat Geowizard without even thinking about it

Geowizard – the pseudonym of Youtuber Tom Davies – was probably the guy who got me back into Geoguessr a few years back. At that time, he was one of the world leaders at playing the game, and his sense of humour really added to his entertaining offerings.

But I’ve always enjoyed his videos rather than trying to play along. And once you’ve watched the video, you know the answers, so you can’t play along. So when I realised that I had just a few minutes spare this afternoon, rather than starting his latest video, I decided to click through and play the same game, blind.

And I did OK, considering. This was a single point photosphere, so you couldn’t move. There was a Masjid in Timor L’Este, an airport in China, mountain viewpoints in Liechtenstein and Pakistan, and a mining settlement in Papua New Guinea. And I didn’t spent much time on it: only about 8 minutes in total, but came out with a very decent score of 23,499.

And with a bit more effort (and time), it could have been even better. I guessed a bit, instead of taking the time to plonk my marker down really accurately.

But it was only a couple of hours later than I actually clicked through to see how Tom had done.

16,758. Wow.
Sure, a big error on the last one in PNG, but even without that, I’d still have outscored him.

And this isn’t me being smug. Or me saying that he’s rubbish, because he’s really not.

But if you are going to try to be good at something like this game, and you start learning how to play it, then managing to achieve this sort of thing is a real milestone, and I was amazed to have done it.

I’m still some distance from learning bollards, or challenging the real stars of the game, but I am getting better.

So this was a pretty big moment, and I am well chuffed with it.

Helpful

Dumped on a narrow country lane in the Daily Challenge on Geoguessr today.

First thought was maybe Wales?

Then I turned the camera around, and… hang on…

Well, that looks very much like the Lady Isabella – the largest working waterwheel in the world – which would make it just over the other side of the valley from here:

Very helpful.

And 5,000 useful points in the bank before heading off towards Indonesia and Colombia.

The (nerdy) sporting weekend

It’s amazing what can pique your interest, hey?

This weekend, I’ve enjoyed watching some really great sport. The football on Friday was great, but it was Sheffield United, so of course I would be interested, and they won, so of course it would be great.
But it was other events this weekend that made me remember that it takes something extra special to get you invested when you’ve got no skin in the game. And those sort of things are fairly rare.

Sure, there are artificial ways of generating interest, like a small bet on the outcome (thank you, Aston Villa) or a fantasy football match-up (curse you, Aston Villa), but when you are just watching because you enjoy the sport, and you’re not rooting for one side or the other, well, it needs to be wow! to generate that same sort of interest.

That’s happened twice for me this weekend.

This morning’s game in the Australian NRL Finals was a superb watch, with both sides giving it absolutely everything for the whole 80 minutes, and Manly winning only after a – literally – last second field goal attempt missed by a couple of metres. 50,714 in the stands, 26 on the pitch, probably hundreds of thousands in front of their TVs across Australia and the world holding their breath as Matt Burton launched the ball into the Sydney night air. I was in the gym and I had to stop cycling to give my full attention to that last play of the match. Because concentrating and pedaling is hard.
And then the instant juxtaposition of relief, jubilation, heartbreak and despair as my legs realised that they had to start exercising again the rugby result was set in stone.

But even that had nothing on the Geoguessr World Cup final. And I know that I keep banging on about this, but just so you know, I could have been doing something much, much, nerdier this weekend…

…and maybe I did.

But that’s for another blog post.

Because that final. Best of 5 games – or first to 3 if that’s your preference – and wow, did it deliver.

As a very basic introduction, players each start on 6000 points (I know, right?), and lose points the closer their opponent is to the correct location, and the further they are away. Ten 1 minute rounds per game.
When you run out of points, you lose the game.

I’ve just enjoyed watching stuff. I don’t mind who wins. I’m not invested. Yet.

The favourite, a French guy called Blinky, is already up 2-0 and cruising to a crushing victory, and comes within a whisker of wiping his opponent, America’s MK, out and winning the World Cup. Based on the fact they could have been dropped anywhere in the world (but ended up in Latvia), if Blinky had been just 5km closer to the actual spot or MK just 5km further away, it was all over.

Here’s the twenty minutes of madness that followed.

The score is 4035-46. No typos here. No missed digits. One guy is basically two games up and four thousand points clear. The other is on forty-six points. It’s nothing. It’s impossible to turn this around with just two rounds of the third game to go.

But obviously, he does. It’s an amazing comeback. But it’s still only 2-1.

And in the eighth round of the fourth game, Blinky has MK down to 66 points again. The event is being staged at the City Hall in Stockholm and there’s a crowd of a few hundred watching it live. And as they hit the tenth round, it was like that field goal attempt (which hadn’t happened yet, but still). Held breath. Wide eyes. And then just sheer incredulity as MK drags in back to 2-2 with a guess just 12km off in the middle of rural Mexico. Literally a horse in a river.

How?!?

This is now running almost an hour overtime, but nobody is going anywhere.

Final round. The decider. NMPZ. Just a single image of a place anywhere in the world.
No moving. No panning. No zooming. WYSIWYG. Where G is guess.

Round one. It’s rural. Literally nothing to go on. And yet they both immediately plump for Mexico: about 50km apart from one another.

But it’s Ghana. Everyone is confused. They players look at each other and both laugh. Even the best in the world get it horrifically wrong sometimes. And when that happens, they usually both get it horrifically wrong the same way.

The tension is broken for a moment.

Heads are shaken. They reset. We go again.

Round two. There’s a guy burning some leaves in a wooded area. That’s all you’ve got. Both players go for Thailand. It is Thailand. Of course it’s Thailand. You don’t get two Ghana anomalies in one game.

Round three. It’s a slightly overgrown path in the field. It’s Peru. Blinky is closer.

Round four. It’s a brown dirt road. Nothing more. They both go for Argentina within 4 seconds. They’re each about 50kms out.

I’ve completely given up on Bournemouth v Chelsea now.

Round five: It’s a road and a mountain in Turkey. Obviously, they both go Turkey. It takes them 7 seconds.
Mind blowing.

Round six: It’s a grey road and some trees. It’s in Russia, but Russia is big. They’re both a long way off.

Round seven and Blinky is holding a decent lead thanks to that Peru guess, but we’ve seen this all before in the last 20 minutes.
Another road. Some green grass. Both hit central Bulgaria inside 10 seconds. It is central Bulgaria.

Round eight, It’s north east USA. MK’s home turf. They’re both there in about 10 seconds again. Nothing to choose between their guesses. And we’ve got a maximum of two rounds left.

Nkunku scores and I hardly notice.

Round nine: As the crowd sees it, there are gasps. Because it’s a town, and there are French flags everywhere. Does Blinky recognise the place? He zones straight in on Colmar in Eastern France… MK goes further north, closer to Belgium. Aaaand…

It’s Germany (despite the flags) but it’s only just over the border. It’s enough. Blinky wins.

I am emotionally exhausted. God knows how they feel.

270,000 viewers online. That’s four times the figures for last year’s World Cup.

Maybe there will be a million in 2025*. Maybe I’ll be there in the finals**.

I almost feel sorry for Spurs and Arsenal today.
Because they are surely never going to get to that sort of drama.

Are they?


* very possible.
** not possible.

The Geoguessr World Cup is on…

…and while Geoguessr might not be your cup of tea, it really is like watching that niche sport at the Olympics, in that you really should give it a go, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

It’s all livestreamed on the Geoguessr Youtube Channel. Completely free of charge, with full expert commentary on the A-stream.

Some beautiful locations on show alongside some absolutely insane knowledge. Different matchups and game modes, including the dreaded NMPZ: No Moving, Panning or Zooming. This is basically just a static image from a random Google Maps location anywhere in the entire world and you can watch in amazement as they pinpoint it to within a few hundred metres.

Once you get invested… wow, it can get quite intense.

GO AND WATCH SOME OF IT!

But the best bit for me is that you can have a go yourself – not competing directly with the best of the best – but using your skill to see how close you would get to the eventual answer. And then playing the same sport and wishing that you knew which sort of telegraph pole that they use in the midlands of Sumatra*.

* I’m appalled to note that I do actually know this one.

The monks are the monks

More from Geoguessr, in which I found myself dropped in Thailand somewhere near the Myanmar border, and close to a UNESCO World Heritage Site (there was a sign with the logo on).
Not too great on the guess, sadly – 131km away – but my curiosity was piqued and I ended I revisiting the place after the game to have a look at another sign which was nearby:

Turns out that I couldn’t find out much about it, because blue signs with white writing on are very popular in Thailand. (Aside from being able to recognise the Thai language, it’s actually a good way of working out that you’re in Thailand.)

Still, maybe using Google Translate would assist me in trying to learn a bit more about the place:

Well, this suddenly made things a lot clearer.

I don’t think that I’m assuming too much when I say that we all know that the monks are the monks, but equally, we often have doubts as to whether that goes deep enough in ascertaining what the monks actually are. Therefore, logically, any clarification of their actual full status is always going to be helpful.
And what I – and many others, I would guess – would have never imagined, is that the monks are the monks – and the the monks are the monks.

It’s that sort of attention to detail that Thailand is known for, and I’m very glad that I took that time to go back and have another look at this. Otherwise, I would only have got as far as thinking that the monks are the monks, whereas quite obviously (now, at least, lol!) the monks are the monks and the monks are the monks.

I think we’ve all learned something here today.