UKMC, episode one: In Praise Of Arbiters

Okay, FINALLY I can get round to writing about the UK Memory Championship weekend! As I said yesterday, this is going to be split into multiple episodes over the next... four or five or three days. I'm not sure exactly how many. It might also be postponed if something exciting happens to me in the next few days. But it would have to be really exciting, because I spent today, uncharacteristically, doing DIY and things with tools and paint, and I'm not going to write about that, even though it would make for a fun blog. Because I really want to write about this.

So, before I start recounting the events of the weekend, it occurred to me that my account of the memory competition is going to involve observations about arbiting mistakes, and that this is really, really rude of me, because nobody ever mentions the things that go right with the organisation and running of memory competitions. I think I mentioned before that it's like being a football referee - you get no credit for getting it right, and no end of grief for getting it wrong. So, rather than just not saying bad things about the arbiters, who work unbelievably hard for little or no financial reward and never get recognised for it, I thought I would do a prologue-post in which I list all the many, many things that went right last weekend!

First off, the venue was excellent! The rooms above Simpson's-in-the-Strand had been booked for all the previous week's afternoons for a very, very major chess tournament (the kind that attracts Adams, Short, Speelman, Timman and many other recognisable names even to someone like me who's not really interested in chess all that much) and thanks to Ray Keene (OBE, chess grandmaster, buddy of Tony Buzan) we memory people were able to borrow the room, for free, in the mornings. And the room was classy, spacious, entirely silent and perfect for a memory competition! Also, there was a constant supply of water and glasses from the restaurant, which somebody behind the scenes presumably organised without any thanks from the competitors.

Or at least not from me. It's possible that all the other competitors are more polite.

Furthermore, all the memorisation and recall papers were prepared perfectly, which is a major headache to do - the abstract images, which take Phil a huge amount of time, were printed clearly and with very good quality (and, importantly, were exactly the same quality in each copy - it's a major problem if bad photocopying or empty print cartridges make some pages different from others). The historic dates, which also take a huge amount of time to write, were done just right. And the dates and the words were translated into LOTS of languages, and I didn't hear a single complaint about the quality of the translations. That's impressive.

The scores for each discipline were announced promptly - marking papers is a tiresome and tedious process that, just to make the point again, was done by mostly unpaid volunteers just helping to make the event possible. These markers were also always accommodating to competitors questioning their scores and demanding that they be double-checked.

In a related note, and something that isn't done enough at memory competitions, the memorisation papers were available for competitors to look at after the recall period had ended and the recall papers had been collected in. This is important because memorisers know what they've written down and, once they've looked at the memorisation papers afterwards, they know what score they've got, more or less. So if there is a mistake in the marking, they can challenge it with confidence and not waste everybody's time. It makes the whole thing go more smoothly.

The cards were all shuffled, and shuffled well and repeatedly, whether the competitors had brought their own or were using the cards provided. It's another thing that takes a lot of time, isn't any fun at all, and never gets any thanks.

The spoken numbers worked perfectly, without a technical hitch, and they'd tested the sound system beforehand to make sure. This is the number one discipline for things going wrong or competitors being dissatisfied, and it all went well this time!

And, as a major tribute to the organisation, there were TWENTY-TWO competitors! This is huge! Much more huge than any competition in this country for ages, bigger than the German championship, many more than I expected, not too far off the number I was expecting for the World Championship in Bahrain in October! Excellent work with the publicity and the press releases.

So, here's a special Zoomy thank-you to Phil, Chris, Ray, Tony, Warren (whose name I am really, really going to try to remember in future), Françoise, Neil, Jamie, Dionne, and whoever else was involved with the organising and arbiting but whom I've forgotten or never even noticed in the first place because they were doing such a good job. I really, really do appreciate all the unbelievable amount of hard work and effort! Thank you!