I seem to be getting a lot of news updates about mind sports lately, so I felt that I should pass them on. The World Memory Championship has moved - but don't worry, it's only in space rather than time, and to a hotel rather than a university, which tends to be a good thing, more often than not. Hotel conference rooms are more luxurious-looking than exam halls, even if the latter are better suited to memory championships. New location is the Jingyi Hotel, in the Haidian district of Beijing.
I'm really quite looking forward to Beijing now. Just as long as I've got enough money for the trip from somewhere by then, it'll be a great place to visit! And since the press releases are still claiming (in defiance of all common sense) that six billion people watched last year's WMC on telly, no doubt I'll be mobbed by millions of devoted memory-championship fans!
Elsewhere, back home in London, I'm told that the fifteenth Mind Sports Olympiad kicks off on Saturday. It can't really be the fifteenth, can it? ... (A small amount of counting on fingers and toes later) ... It is. Wow, I must be old. I was there at the start, with all the wild dreams of international success and piles of money for competitors and organisers alike. Still, it's nice that it's still sputtering along, though I won't be bothering with it this year.
And I haven't said congratulations to Richard Ratcliffe on the Stratego World Championship last week! Shame I couldn't go to that, but it's got to be a good omen that there was a British winner for a change. And it's also the British Othello Championship in Cambridge on September 17th and 18th - once again, I can't go because of a memory championship clash, but if you feel like a bit of othello in its ancestral home, I recommend it heartily!
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