UKMC, episode two: London On £80 A Night

I stayed in the Strand Palace Hotel, which is posher than any hotel needs to be, and rather expensive, but is just over the road from Simpson's. My justification for this is that I've now got a job, and I've got a credit card, and if a fellow can't splash out on an expensive hotel once in a while (or even every single time he goes to London, despite asserting that he always stays in cheap places), what is the world coming to? And it was quiet and peaceful, and since I'd brought my abstract images crib sheets with me and spent the evenings practicing (as well as watching telly), that's a good thing. Besides, the eighty quid includes a full English breakfast, and a good breakfast is an absolutely essential part of good preparation for any memory competition.

And, as I mentioned yesterday, this was a very good memory competition! 22 people competing, old-timers including Mark Channon who competed in the world championship back in 1995 before even I had heard of these things, and new-timers including Leong Hoo Tan who turns out to be one of Graham Brightwell's students at the LSE (proving beyond scientific doubt that it really is a small world) plus a wide range of usual suspects, among them Boris, Gaby, Jürgen and Mia from Germany, a couple of Jameses, a Katie and a Dai from England and Wales, lots of other international visitors and lots of other British people too!

We started out with five-minute random words, in which I attempted 104 but blanked in the recall on most of the fourth column and on just one word of the fifth ('bluebell', and for some reason I was sure it was either 'lily' or 'lilac'). 74 is still a pretty good score, and I know I could do quite a bit better if it goes really well for me some time. It did go really well for Boris (as indeed it always seems to do), and he broke the world record with 106.

Eventually his score settled on 106, anyway - there were a lot of mistakes in the marking and misunderstandings of the scoring rules, and all the scores had to be re-checked and adjusted a couple of times before we'd settled on the final results.

But while the words were still being marked for the first time, we were doing five-minute binary. My record in this of 795 was just waiting to be broken - I set it last year knowing that I can do a lot better in practice on a good day, and Saturday turned out to be one of those good days. This despite the fact that it turned out to be four-and-a-quarter-minute binary - a mix-up in timings led to us being told to stop memorising fifteen seconds early (we had a lot of that kind of thing this weekend - Phil was running in and out of the room all weekend doing three or four things at once, and none of the arbiters in the room seemed to be keeping track of the time. In the 15-minute numbers we were told to stop a full minute early and then told to carry on again, and a couple of other times I told the competitors to stop myself when time was up, seeing as I was sitting right next to the microphone and nobody else wanted to say stop).

[At this point, can I refer you to yesterday's post when I make it clear that the arbiters do a really great job and don't deserve to be publicly criticised like this. I've got it out of my system now, more or less. Sorry.]

Anyway, my recall was unusually perfect. Literally. And I ended up with a really groovy 930 digits! New world record, and by a long way too!

So, with the competition running more or less to schedule still, we moved on to five-minute names and faces, which of course I'm rubbish at, but I produced a quite acceptable score of 41 (once I'd got my score double-checked and corrected from an even more acceptable but clearly impossible 51) to stay in a good position overall. This is Katie's specialist subject, and she duly got the highest score, but only with 65 this time. Which is a bit strange, really, seeing as I thought the names here were quite a bit easier than the ones I made up for Cambridge, when she scored a sensational 82.

Anyway, by this point it was clear that, as expected, Boris was my main rival - he dropped out of the world top ten after Hannes's performance in Tuttlingen, and was eager to get back in - with Katie, James and James fighting it out for second-best-Brit (trophies and cash for the top three British competitors) and Ameel Hoque as a dark horse newcomer doing extremely well.

After that, we just had to finish off the day with the two 'marathon' events, at least by the standards of these short-discipline championships - 15-minute numbers and 10-minute cards. I tried for four journeys' worth of digits in the first (936, plus an extra three for luck) and ended up with an excellent new-world-record 819 (ie three rows with mistakes). Which is great, because before this I didn't hold ANY of the decimal-numbers world records and it was really annoying me. As I've mentioned before, my system isn't particularly exceptional with numbers, and I wish I could think of a way to improve it.

And in the cards, I contemplated attempting a daring eight packs, but in the end they just didn't seem to be sinking into my brain as clearly as they could, so I played it safe with just seven. And I finished the recall with minutes to spare, so possibly I could have gone for eight and been just fine, but never mind. I got the seven all correct, for another world record, so I can't complain.

So, lunchtime arrived - or at least it did for the other competitors who weren't dragged away to talk extensively to Canadian television - and the end of the first day's play. I really wanted to keep memorising, I was really in the mood. Too bad I had to wait until Sunday morning to keep going.

So, at the half-way point, I had a very comfortable lead, as well as three world records to my name. Second was Boris, then tightly packed together behind him were James Paterson, Katie, James Ponder, Jürgen, Gaby, Ameel, Mark and Mia. Stay tuned for what happened next!