Ultimate Typing Championship


The Ultimate Typing Championship is a typing competition designed to identify and award the fastest typists in the US.

History

The Ultimate Typing Championship was created in order to promote typing and find the fastest typists in the United States of America. Players compete against each other in typing races. Typing races are done in real time online via an online typing race application. Finalists compete in person at SXSW in Austin, Texas. The Ultimate Typing Championship was initially created by the keyboard manufacturer Das Keyboard.

2010

Sean Wrona of Ithaca, NY and Nate Bowen of New York, NY were the two finalists in the inaugural Ultimate Typing Championship, held on March 14 at the 2010 SXSW Interactive Festival. Wrona and Bowen competed in a best-of-three finals. The first round consisted of a standard 574-word text in which Wrona defeated Bowen 163-110 wpm, setting an unofficial world record. The second round consisted of a more difficult text involving the majority of the keys on the QWERTY keyboard, in which Wrona defeated Bowen 124-79 wpm to win the Ultimate Typing Championship and a $2,000 first prize. Since then, the finals have gathered over 10 million views on YouTube.

Effect on the Typing Community

The Ultimate Typing Championship has left a lasting impact on the typing community, inspiring many more typing tournaments.  The most notable since has been The Clicking Championships 1, which took place on February 2nd, 2019. This tournament consisted of over 100 players and was hosted online on Type Racer. It was live-streamed on Twitch, and had over 150 viewers for most of the 10 hour stream. The tournament had a double elimination format, and over $1,000 in prizes provided by many online keyboard vendors such as Das Keyboards. A typist by the name of Chak upset Sean Wrona to ultimately be named the new world’s fastest typist.