Further Saturday thoughts

So, was the TV-style competition a good thing, and what does the future hold for US memorisers?

I liked the championship a lot. It was fun to watch, and hopefully would make very compelling TV (it's going to be broadcast in April, on a very obscure channel). I'd like to take part in a championship run along those lines. I emphatically don't want to change the world championship in any way to make it more TV friendly - as I told Giles the reporter and he repeated in his article, my ideal for a memory competition involves a lot of people in a room staring at a piece of paper for hours on end - but I would like to see these more flashy tournaments becoming a regular part of the schedule too. The two different styles can co-exist perfectly happily, I'm sure.

But there are problems. Firstly, the standard of information recalled was not high. A lot of people watching at home would be thinking that the achievements demonstrated was unexceptional. Whether that's such a bad thing, I'm not sure - the aim of this is surely to entertain and get people interested in the subject, not to make them think memorisers are a world apart from them. But shouldn't a memory championship be a real test of memory, rather than relying very much on luck and sitting in the right seat in the final?

Also, as Maurice and others pointed out, it could have been a lot less impressive than it was. The format could easily have left two people with no card-memorising ability at all in the final. How impressed would viewers have been with two people who could barely remember half a dozen cards contesting the grand final of a national memory championship?

As for the future, Josh is the new champion and I'm sure he'll be a worthy one. Asked if he thought he had a chance in Malaysia (he won two tickets courtesy of British Airways, longtime sponsors of the US Championships - I don't know why they're still involved now the WMC isn't in Britain, but I'm very grateful), he replied that he had none whatsoever, categorising the top competitors as 'extraterrestrials'. Thanks, Josh! But I was impressed with his performance, considering how short a time he's been training, and I think he might just be the person who takes American memory competitions to new heights. He's learned his techniques from Europeans, he's been to the competitions over here, and he's not restricted like the others by the low standards necessary to make it big in America. He's got a genuine passion for the 'sport', and I think he could go on to be not just a grandmaster, but maybe the first American to get into the top echelon of memory competitors. And when he does, no doubt his countrymen will up their game to keep up with him. It only takes one person to inspire others.

I've been looking back at how well I did when I'd been learning memory for as long as Josh, maybe a little longer, in the MSO competition 2001. I tried to memorise a pack of cards in just over a minute, but failed. I seem to recall that I rarely managed to do a complete pack at that time. I managed 750 in hour numbers, which isn't at all bad, and something poor in the binaries (which I hadn't really practiced at all), but did well enough at the poem and words to end up in third place in a five-discipline competition. I was still very much a beginner, and somewhere around the level Josh is now.

So I think the future looks bright for memory in America. If only we could say the same for Britain!