After the speed cards, there was only time for a very quick speech from Phil and Tony thanking everyone for coming and asking them to get out of the room and let the chess players in. I missed it because I was talking to the Sun on Phil's mobile phone, but I'm sure it was a fitting end to an excellent weekend's memorising. I gave Phil his mobile back, burbled something quickly into the microphone about how great it was to see everyone and how the organisers are all great, while trying to keep hold of my non-closing rucksack full of speed stacks timers and packs of cards that were falling all over the floor. You can see it on the Sun website if it's still there and if you really want to. I don't think it shows that I was in a hurry, knowing I was going to be late for the othello if I didn't dash quickly. All that remained were a few closing conversations:
-Phil: Your cards from yesterday are through here, follow me.
-Me (following him): Okay. Thanks again, great competition, etc...
-Lots of other people: Congratulations!
-Me (repeatedly): Thanks! You too! Well done on the [insert anything I could remember about whatever whoever I was talking to had done well]!
-Boris: Hey, Ben, where does a score of 6350 put me on the ranking list?
-Me: I have no idea. I never remember the ranking scores. [I had to keep asking what score I needed to get to number one over the course of the weekend. I seem to have a real blind spot with ranking points memory] James Paterson's the one to ask. James, where's Boris on the rankings now?
-Sun journalist with camera (not the one I was talking to on the phone, another one): Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me (seeing Phil had by now disappeared out of sight): Sure, why not? Talk and walk?
-Sun guy: Let me just quickly put this radio mike on you...
-Me (after extensive attempts to clip the thing on my shirt, only for it to fall apart): Can I just hold it in my hand?
-Sun guy: Sure. So, happy with the result?
-Me (holding radio mike): [burbled something about the competition. You can also see that on the Sun website, same video clip, same provisos as before]
-Sun guy: Great, thanks.
-BBC camera crew: Ben, got time for that quick chat?
-Me: Um, yes, sure, just a minute, let me get my cards back first, I'm really in a hurry.
-BBC presenter: Sure, I just have to go and [do something I wasn't paying attention to] first. Talk to you in a minute.
-Me (seeing Phil being hassled by even more people than were hassling me, but noticing a box full of packs of cards sitting near some chess people): Ah, my cards!
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ah, Ben, this is Jan Something and Someone Else, he's the Something of the chess tournament.
-Me (finding my cards, dropping the contents of my rucksack again and trying to pick them up): Oh, great, look, I've really got to dash, I'm playing in a...
-Raymond Keene OBE: Ben's just won the memory competition.
-Jan Something: Ah. You are a competitor in the memory?
-Me: Yes, that's right.
-Jan Something: Ah. And you are the winner?
-Me: Yes.*
*[conversation edited for comic effect. I'm sure Jan Something (possibly not his real name) is a great conversationalist, it's just that I was really in a hurry to get away and not arrive at the othello more than 15 minutes late]
-Jan Something: Ah.
-Me (thinking if I'm going to be talking to chess people, I might as well do what I'd been meaning to do all weekend, and say hi to Nigel Short): Is Nigel Short anywhere around here?
-Someone Else (gesturing to a man sitting right next to him): He's right here.
-Me: Oh. You don't wear glasses any more. [thought to myself: Why, considering that I'm in a tearing hurry, did I just take the time to tell Nigel Short he isn't wearing glasses? He probably knows that already.] Um, I just wanted to say hi. Back when you were in the world championship match with Kasparov, I was a nerdy teenager and I was following the games with rapt attention.
-Glasses-less Nigel Short: Um, thanks.
-Me: Big fan. Got to go, nice to meet you.
-BBC presenter: Ben, have you got five minutes to talk?
-Me (leaving): No. Not even five seconds. Really in a hurry.
[for the record, Michael Adams won the chess, as usual. Nigel Short lost his Sunday game to Jan Smeets, possibly alarmed by the conversation with me, and ended up joint seventh with Jan Werle and Jon Speelman. And yes, everybody at the chess tournament was called Jan - three of the competitors and also the sponsor Jan Mol, who I suspect was probably the Jan Someone I was speaking to.]
I dumped my stuff in my hotel over the road without losing anything, cleverly fitted in an in-depth interview with the BBC while walking to the tube station (they offered to get a taxi, but I refused on working-class-hero grounds), said my goodbyes and hot-footed it to the Royal Horticultural Halls.
I was only ten minutes or so late, and the othello hadn't started yet. There were six of us there - me, Imre, David B and Geoff plus MSO regulars Bharat and David P. The MSO, like the othello world, is overrun by Davids, and another one of them, David Kotin, was running the othello tournament. We played a double-round-robin of ten-minute games, and Imre was on the kind of everybody-squishing form that he seems to reserve for tournaments that don't affect the British rating list. He won all his games, and I managed to win six out of ten, beating Othello David once and Geoff once to end up in bronze medal position.
They don't do actual medals at the MSO any more, but they do do stylish little mini-trophy/plaque things, which look really nice. Of course, they hadn't made the othello ones yet, so I didn't get it before dashing off again, but I'm hoping to collect it some time.
The highlight of the othello was the game against Geoff that I didn't win - I was already well and truly dead, but also running out of time, and so I was playing my moves at a frantic rate. I played my penultimate move, Geoff played his and Imre quipped "Ah, so now Ben can't lose on time."
Not paying attention to this, I played what I thought was my only available move and started flipping discs, only to notice from the giggles of the spectators that this actually wasn't a legal move, and in fact I didn't have any legal moves and should have tapped the clock to signify that I had to pass. This made sense of Imre's comment, but it sank into my brain just a second too late, and I didn't manage to unflip the discs I'd wrongly flipped before my time ran out. So I lost on time in a position where it's not possible to lose on time, which is quite an achievement.
And so that was the weekend. Hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed living it. I doubt you did, since I'm not THAT great a writer, but never mind. I got criticised for not blogging enough about the world memory championships last year (even though I spent it in a hotel without internet access), so I wanted to make up for it here. Normal bloggery resumes tomorrow with a precis of what's been happening to me over the last five days.
It's taken me months to get around to reading it, but I've really enjoyed your extended report, at last. It's a clear description that makes it pretty easy to imagine what it must have been like for you, and I do like all the discussion of rushing to get to the MSO and balancing it with your other commitments. If you get chance, and (more importantly) if it's the sort of thing that you'd enjoy writing, I hope you get the time to write up the Bahrain adventure in as much detail.
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