Actually, as I said, I was already qualified for the world championship, and didn't need to compete in the final qualifying round yesterday - but I wanted to anyway, just to see how I did. It was a 60-minute challenge rather than the 30-minute monthly ones in the "Road to Las Vegas", so a bit different. Five unrelated tasks of different difficulty and point value - I went for the four easier ones and left the highest-scoring (which looked like it would take a lot longer to do), and I think that was a sensible strategy. And I made it to the front page of the results sheet, in eighteenth place!
Last year in the equivalent competition I was 74th, and you had to scroll down quite a way to find me. Knowing how these competitions work is the trick - that's why I always say people should go to a memory competition as soon as they learn such a thing exists, rather than waiting and training until they think they're good enough!
I see from the points I made one mistake in section 1 (I did notice that only 'losing' attempts at the game were divided by 2, but missed that the one 'winning' one needed to be multiplied by 2! Careless skimming of the instructions, but at least it wasn't too costly - I suspect this was designed for the RtLV scoring system rather than the one used yesterday; it would have cost a bigger chunk of points that way), and got one of the bonus questions wrong (just a careless mistake, doing it quickly), but otherwise missed any other pitfalls.
So now it's the first two rounds on October 28th - I just have to hope not to get drawn against any of the REALLY good Excellers, and maybe I can make it a bit further this year than I did in 2022! A paid trip to Vegas is still at least a theoretical possibility...
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