I admit it

I didn't get round to describing what happened at the Cambridge regional othello tournament the other week, and I really should say something, because otherwise people will look it up on the internet and realise that I lost all my games and came last, and assume I'm deeply ashamed of the fact and trying to conceal it.

Actually, it was still fun - the competition was very nearly cancelled because nobody was going to attend, but I'd been umming and ahhing about whether or not to go, and finally had my mind tilted in the right direction when it turned out that Singaporean memory man Wellon Chou was in Cambridge that day as well, so we could have a drink and a chat in the evening if I went along to the othello. So I did, despite not having played a game for so long I could barely remember the basic rules of the game.

In the end, there were four of us there - Imre, Iain, Roy and me. And I didn't really play terribly badly, just not well enough to win any of the six games in the double round-robin. Adelaide joined us for the traditional pub lunch too, and a good time was had by all! I resolved to go along to the next regional as well, down south in Salisbury, but then forgot about it.

Friendliness

This coming Saturday sees the twelfth (!!!) annual Friendly Memory Championship. I've been saying for years that I might stop doing them, because there are so many other memory championships around nowadays, but there's always a small minority of people out there who want the Friendly, and I hate to disappoint them. Even if only four or five people turn up, it's always a fun day for everyone, and always inspires at least someone to take up competitive memorising, so it can't be a waste of time and effort. I'll probably still be hosting the things fifty years from now...

Find your level

Here's the other memory thing I've been meaning to blog about for a while - Belts!

Or, to give it its official name, the New IAM Levels System. It looks like this:

What you can do is go to the site here and type in your best score in each memory discipline. For each one you get a number of points based on the highest level you've achieved, and your overall level is the average of the best ten of these - with at least one discipline having to come from each of the five groups (numbers/cards/names/words/miscellaneous).

The whole thing is just a proposal rather than an actual thing yet, but it's a very cool idea. It naturally leads (in my mind, at least) to coloured belts as in martial arts, with level 10 being the black belt and any levels above that being 'dan' rankings for the ultimate memorisers. There currently aren't any ultimate memorisers according to these tough standards - two black belts (Alex and Simon), and two brown (Johannes and Marwin), and a few people (like me, as above) on purple. It's genuinely very motivating to know that I could bump myself up to the next elite level by slightly improving my top scores in three disciplines!

The proposal also sticks with the "grandmaster" title, which I think is a mistake. It would be fine if not for the fact that there are HUNDREDS of people out there who have already qualified to call themselves a grand master of memory, by different rules, and so there's no way an "IAM Grandmaster" title could ever be meaningful to anybody. I think we should have actual physical coloured belts - imagine the photo opportunities! Local newspapers around the world would lap it up.

Admittedly, some people have said the Belt idea is "slightly corny", and admittedly the people who say this include the two black belts themselves, one of them being the current world champion and the other being the main person who decides things like this in the IAM, so it's just possible I won't get my actual purple belt... but come on, just imagine the coolness! They could be thin (inexpensive) coloured fabric belts with little metal clasps on each end, bearing the IAM logo. So desirable! I might have to make my own.

Cats cats cats

The German Memory League Championship is happening right now - you can watch the fun on the Memory League website! They've just had the surprise task of the quarter-finals - images, except all 30 images are cats! It's brilliant, you can see the memorisers struggled with remembering which cat came in which sequence (there are also a couple of people dressed as cats, one that's just the word "Katze", one picture of Cat Stevens, one of Katie Kermode...)

The whole Memory League thing is awesome, as I've mentioned before. We're also currently running frequent online competitions - there's a Swiss tournament going on at the moment between memory people of all levels and nationalities, and a "purge" competition where the aim is to get a certain score, increasing at each level, to avoid being eliminated. Coming up soon is a full-blown league structure, four divisions with all-play-all in a 'season', promotion and relegation, and a knockout competition in between each one. It's great!

There will also, we can only hope, be a second UK Memory League Championship, live and in person, later this year. This does depend on finding a location for it - I've insisted repeatedly that finding and talking to sponsors isn't something that's within my capabilities, but nobody else has come up with anything, so I suppose I'll just have to book a room somewhere and then see if the competitors are prepared to pay for it. It's more complicated than a pen-and-paper memory championship, because the whole thing falls down if the room doesn't have a rock-solid internet connection...

But in the pen-and-paper line, we have the Friendly Memory Championship next Saturday! It's at the Priory Rooms in Birmingham city centre, a nice building full of little meeting rooms (and a really cool big lecture-theatre style room too, which would be great for a more swanky kind of event) where the company I work for in my day job has its board meetings. Not that I go to board meetings, I'm not the director type, but I've been there once and really liked the look of the place. I'm currently printing out lots of papers and things - one day, you never know, memory competitions might move into the 21st century and be entirely on computer, just like the Memory League. It'll save a lot of trouble and expense, albeit at the cost of replacing it with a different, more up-to-date kind of trouble and expense. Progress!

The state of British wrestling

You know, I really must write more on this blog. I'll try to keep up a daily ramble from now on - there's absolute tons of things happening in the memory world alone that I feel morally obliged to tell the world about.

But to start with, here's another subject in the "everybody who might plausibly be interested in what I say already knows all about it" category - TV wrestling, of the specifically British variety.

You may remember that at the new year, ITV put on a World of Sport wrestling special, of the family-friendly, Saturday-afternoon, mainstream type, immediately following which the WWE Network inaugurated a UK Championship title with a two-part special edition of the strictly-for-the-wrestling-fanatics type. Comparing the two was really quite fascinating. ITV, naturally, went for 'colourful and entertaining' to appeal to the mainstream audience of normal people, while the WWE emphasized 'technical skills' to excite the nerdy internet people who watch the WWE Network. [It's surprising how very, very nerdy wrestling fans on the internet are, incidentally - Star Trek forum contributors are ten times more macho and well-balanced]

Well, since then, both sides of the UK TV wrestling coin have been more or less in limbo. Tyler Bate has defended his newly-won title here and there - a couple of times on NXT, the WWE Network's 'development' show for wrestlers honing their craft before being introduced on the 'real' shows that appear on real TV; a couple more times at non-televised WWE events. Some more of the guys from the UK Championship special have shown up on NXT and the like once in a while, too. It's not been forgotten, but then it's not exactly been made a big deal of, either.

As for World of Sport, it's had problems. After announcing an alliance with Impact Wrestling, the distant-second-biggest US promotion, there was a special press conference on the internet, in which some of the wrestlers from the new year special stood on the stage and got rounds of applause, followed by a little bit of squabbling and chaos, which promised well for the future - a new 10-part series would be filmed in May, with a regular weekly show expected to follow.

There was a slight hint of not everything having been agreed - Dave Mastiff featured on the poster, but wasn't seen or mentioned in the YouTube video, with Sha Samuels being positioned as 'main baddie'. The awesome Grado, though, was still there as the main attraction, and he's really good. Give him a weekly series and he'll be Big Daddy levels of popularity, no problem. The others who showed up were Zack Gibson (placed with the goodies, though he was a bad guy on the new year special), Viper, Kenny Williams, El Ligero, Johnny Moss, Ashton Smith and Rampage Brown, plus new guy Magnus as the square-jawed-hero type I said at the time was strangely missing from the new year special. It looked like being a lot of fun!

And then it was abruptly cancelled, "as a result of contract negotiations". The internet seems to think that the problem is between ITV and Impact, rather than the wrestlers themselves, which makes you wonder why they need Impact in the first place - surely it's within ITV's budget to pay for a dozen or so wrestlers, a half-decent scriptwriter and a ring in a studio? Oh well.

But WWE, on the other hand, have just done another "UK Championship Special" on the network last night - smaller in scale than before, but as a build-up to a title match on tonight's big live "NXT Takeover" special. That's the most prominent the UK Championship title has been, maybe it'll lead to an ongoing series eventually...

It was pretty good, though some of the technical details didn't seem to be quite right - there was one cameraman just outside the ring who was really terrible, and for the first match the crowd was almost inaudible, so it didn't feel like a big event. Still, good fun all round - we started out with Wolfgang beating Joseph Conners in a doesn't-count-for-anything match; Wolfgang is still really, really good and deserves to be the main event, probably at some point when someone else is the reigning champion. Then, strangely, Dan Moloney joins up with three Americans from the WWE's cruiserweight division for a tag team match, Moloney and Rich Swann against TJP and The Brian Kendrick. He seemed out of place.

The main events were rather predictable, but well done - Pete Dunne beat Trent Seven in a match to determine who would be the challenger in the NXT Takeover title match, and the more I see Pete Dunne the more impressed I am with him. He's a great villain! Then there was a title match to finish it off, between Tyler Bate (rather unwisely having changed his cool and distinctive previous appearance to a beard and floppy fringe) and Mark Andrews (who already has a beard and floppy fringe). Not so much high-flying and agility from Mark Andrews this time round, it was a bit disappointing. There was never any doubt that Tyler would win, but that doesn't excuse putting on a match that looks like they know they're going through the motions...

Still, it's all entertaining, and now I'm cheering for Pete Dunne to win the title and go on to headline a new series. And fingers crossed, maybe we'll still get a World of Sport series too!

Cambridge beckons

I haven't played othello for longer than I can remember (my memory isn't very good), but I'm going to Cambridge to play it this weekend. I really should get back in practice, at that and all kinds of other games, in preparation for the MSO...

Mens sana in Men's Health

I'm just the perfect example of a healthy man, obviously - the American version of Men's Health magazine are writing an article about memory techniques, and I've just had a quick chat with the writer. Following fast on the heels of the bit about me in the British version of the franchise eight years ago, it's obvious that I'm the number one go-to guy for all men's health issues now.

Families are an expensive business

The excellent website findmypast.co.uk has made 1939 register details available, and even though you have to pay them a staggeringly huge amount of money to see them, it's very tempting to check up on the family. The Pridmores of Sheffield are somewhat reduced from the way they were in 1911 - within ten years of that census my great-grandmother and six of her ten children had died, and great-grandfather William had also passed away by 1939. But on the other hand, they'd all had hordes of children themselves, so there are plenty of relatives to check up on...

The family home of 34 Hunt Street was quite full in 1939, it seems:

Oswald, who'd never moved out of his parents' house, was now joined by his widowed sister Lilian, Lilian's daughter Florence, and James Palmer, the son of Oswald and Lilian's late sister Florence. And one other person who must have been born less than 100 years ago and hasn't yet been identified as deceased - living people aren't shown on the records. Since the 'officially closed' record comes in between the Mays and the oldest Palmer child, I'm guessing it must have been one of Lilian's two younger daughters.

Oswald and James are builders' labourers, Florence has that classic Sheffield occupation of spoon and fork glazer, Lilian has "unpaid domestic duties", which was the strangely fancy phrase for "housewife" used throughout the register. Just down the road at number 28 are a John and Florence Askham - Oswald married Annie Askham in 1944, I assume she was a relative.

See all the fascinating details you can find? I'm doing my best to resist the impulse to pay them £120 for full access to the records...

Cold turkey

Actually, I haven't got any cold turkey. I've got some cold pork if you want, it's really nice. I've got in the habit of cooking a Sunday roast and putting the leftovers in sandwiches for a packed lunch the next week - I'm very domesticated now, it must be because I'm getting old.

But the point is, I haven't drunk anything but water for the last two weeks - or maybe three weeks, I've lost count. Cherry-coke-withdrawal does strange things to my brain, but I think I've just about got over it now. I'm sure I'll get hooked again eventually, but it's nice to be able to look down on smoking or other vices without having to admit I'm drinking roughly three litres of the stuff every day.

And hey, have you seen that they're making a new full series of World Of Sport Wrestling? I'm looking forward to it.

The Memory World

Competitions continue to happen around the globe - since I last mentioned them, we've had the North German championship beziehungsweise* championships (a regional-format, seven-discipline thing with the other optional three disciplines the day before to make it into a national-standard open championship; there were also junior and kids' competitions, so really it was a whole lot of championships all merged into one). The winner of the one that counts was Simon, in another of those pitched battles between him and Hannes.

There was a fiercely-contested Mongolian championship, won by Lkhagvadulam Enkhtuya ahead of the two Narmandakhs - Germany and Mongolia have entirely dominated the year of memory competitions so far (Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh, now living in America, won a typically American non-standard competition as well), with the American, Swedish and British contingent presumably biding their time to burst onto the scene...

Next month, though after the excitement of the Tokyo Friendly Championship, we move away from the national-standard format and into the exciting realms of Memory League! There will (hopefully) be Scandinavian and German ML competitions, along the lines of the UK pilot episode last November, taking place in May, and I can't wait to see what happens!

Then at the end of May, I invite everyone to come and enjoy the twelfth (!) annual Friendly Memory Championship in its new home in Birmingham! It'll be great, I assure you!

We will also (very hopefully) have our own UK Memory League Championship again in November; with any luck, I'll be able to share details of it shortly, but this does rather depend on somebody (anybody) else arranging a venue and talking to people about it. We'll see what happens...


*It's a German word that means something along the lines of 'or as the case may be...'. There isn't really an English equivalent, but Germans say it all the time in sentences like that.

The Mind Sports Olympiad 2017!

You can now register for the MSO - the timetable is here!

I really recommend going along to this, it's always a lot of fun. Take your pick from a week's worth of mind games, try something new or something you haven't played for years! Here's what I'm probably doing...

The first two days, Sunday and Monday, August 21-22, we have the European Memory Championship (open to everybody around the whole world, we already have confirmed competitors from Asia, North and South America and I bet we can complete the set by luring some Africans and Australians into the mix as well; the MSO traditionally likes everything to be a world championship, but it'd be a bit silly to keep the title "Memory World Cup" going when there's going to be two other world memory championships elsewhere in the world this year..).

This is an international-standard event, split into three "modules" that MSO all-rounders can pick and choose from as they please, but with the total scores added up in the usual way. So Sunday gives us our three half-hour marathons - numbers, cards and binary, 30 minutes to memorise, 60 minutes to recall. This starts at 10am and finishes safely before 6pm, so you can do one of the evening sessions in another sport if you like.

Day two, Monday, is split into two sections - the morning session (10:00am to 1:45pm) is "natural memory", with 15-minute names, 15-minute words, and 5-minute images. This is the kind of thing a newcomer could walk in off the street without knowing the first thing about memory techniques and still do well in.

The afternoon section is the miscellany of speed disciplines - 5-minute numbers, 5-minute dates, spoken numbers and speed cards. A little mini-championship in its own right of the fastest disciplines you can find in a big international competition like this!

Entry fee is £15 for the marathon memory, £10 for each of the others, making £35 in total for the "European Championship". Or you can pay £120 for a whole-week ticket and play in as many MSO events as you like. You should!


Okay, what shall I do for the rest of the week? In the evening session on Sunday there's the always-entertaining daily poker tournament, and this one is everybody's favourite, Texas hold'em. It's a great way to end the day! But we also have the othello championship that night - 15-minute games, an MSO tradition - so I think I'll do that.

Monday evening gives us London lowball, which I think I somehow won a medal in the last time I played, but there's also the mental calculation blitz, which might be a lot of fun. It's way too long since I did mental calculations!

Tuesday, with the memory out of the way, I can start playing games for the rest of the week. Let's see.. there's acquire, a very fun game, in the morning/afternoon double session, or else I could play the morning session at quoridor (I wasn't very good at that one the one time I've tried it before) or the big mental calculation championship, then in the afternoon session play continuo (always a good way to spend an afternoon). In the evening it's Omaha in the poker, or the really great new game blokus, or the really great old game backgammon (the no-doubling-die version,so outrageously lucky rolls of the dice can make all the difference), which is a tricky choice.

Wednesday there's that MSO favourite the decamentathlon in the morning, I think I'll have to do that. If you're new to the MSO experience, it consists of written puzzles in ten different mind sports events - brilliant stuff. The afternoon gives us mastermind, I've always liked that game. The evening gives us five-card draw poker, or else another MSO favourite, oware.

Thursday is all double-sessions in the daytime - I think I might do monopoly, I've always said I'd like to do that at the MSO but never actually played it there before! Pineapple hold'em in the evening is a must.

Friday I think the pick of the bunch is the double-session lines of action, a really cool game that stretches your brain in unusual ways. I'm no good at it, but I like to play anyway. Alternatively, there's cribbage singles in the morning and doubles in the afternoon if I can find a partner. No evening session on Fridays, or anything at all on Saturdays - the venue is a Jewish community centre and they're big on observing the shabbat.

So we resume on Sunday 28th, with maybe a day of rapidplay chess, or more likely (since I'm still hopeless at chess and need to maintain everyone's vague impression that it's something I'd obviously be good at) a morning session of kenken and sudoku puzzles! Followed by either Chinese chess (I do like that game, though I haven't played for a good few years now) or else the traditional brilliance of the creative thinking world championship. In the evening we have seven-card stud, or maybe twixt (it's a good game) or I could get all nostalgic about my schooldays and play exchange chess...

And the last day, bank holiday Monday, there's a new-to-the-MSO Countdown event that I think I'll have to enter. I always wanted to be on Countdown...


So that's the week-and-a-bit of the MSO! See you there!

Memory world news

I need to post a whole lot of important information on this blog. I'll do it over the Easter weekend. But I said I'd say this tonight - if you want to play a Memory League competition in a scenic location against the world's best, please consider joining the Scandinavian Memory League Open on May 13-14 in Gothenburg! In the same format as the wonderful event here in London last November, but they're struggling to fill the places with 12 Scandinavians, so have thrown it open to the world!

I'd really like to go, and I'm trying to resist the temptation, because I'm really trying not to spend all my money right now...

Oh for crying out loud

I just spent absolutely ages, maybe as much as 20 minutes, searching around the internet trying to remember which student hall of residence I stayed in the last time I spent a week at the MSO in London - I didn't see fit to mention the name on my blog and searching the usual websites didn't come up with anything just down the road from JW3 as I knew this place was. I finally identified that I'd booked it in 2014, searched through my emails and found that it was Hampstead Residence, belonging to King's College - but it turns out they've sold it now and it's not available to rent a room in the summer any more. Now I'll have to book somewhere else.

Assuming I get round to it, I'll detail where I'm staying in another blog entry, along with the extensive preview of the MSO I'm going to write any day now. Promise.

French memories

That was a fun competition! The scores are online here and more-or-less accurate - it was an exciting battle all the way through between Simon and Johannes, with me a fairly distant third but still producing the kind of decent results I was entirely happy with, considering how very long it is since I even sat down with a real pack of cards or a piece of paper to memorise. And our gallant band of French memorisers all put in great performances, particularly Sylvain Estadieu - he's going to be a force to be reckoned with before long, I'm sure.

I'll see if I can get into some kind of regular training and start competing again - this one has achieved its aim of getting me in the memory mood, I think (old-fashioned memory, that is; I've been in the Memory League mood for months). The only problem is that the only memory championships in this country are run by me nowadays, and travelling to other places costs all that money I'm trying not to spend right now...

Other important things about the competition

The lift up to the competition room (on the first floor of the Espace Moncassin) doesn't go 'ding' like normal lifts, it plays a tone of exactly the same pitch and length of the first note of Sloop John B by the Beach Boys. So that's my mental soundtrack to the championship.

Also, I can confirm that there is such a thing as the Eiffel Tower - I saw it with my own eyes last night. It lights up after dark, too!

D*ff

The most important thing I learned today - on the French dubbed version of the Simpsons, the Duff beer logo is blurred out, because it's an actual real beer now, and so contravenes product placement laws, even in episodes made when it was just a fictional thing. That's weird.

Anyway, there has also been the first day of the French Open Memory Championship! The one in 2008 attracted only two French competitors, a French-only competition in 2015 drew in eight, but this year's event breaks all the records - nineteen entrants in total, 13 of them French! That's enough for a national Memory League event!

It's the first old-fashioned memory championship I've competed in since the UK Championship in August 2015, and my complete and total lack of training shows, but it's still been fun! All the new French competitors have identical dark hair, glasses and beards, so I'm not at all to blame for not remembering who's who, but it's a two-day competition so I'm sure by the end of the day tomorrow I'll be familiar with them all.

I'll write a full report just as soon as I can get round to it - meanwhile, I've got a French dub of the Simpsons to distract me - most characters' voices are imitations of the American originals, but for some reason Krusty is totally different; he's got a sort of deep, booming voice. Foreign countries are strange and different.

And the whole world loves it when you're in the news

News websites the world over are running memory-related stories today! It's fair to say that 99% of them have latched onto a soundbite that "scientists have said something about memory" and used it as an excuse to fill a column with the usual blurb about the subject (here's the BBC's typical example), but there is some genuine Science behind this one - Boris and his gang's investigation into the brains of memory competitors, including me. Here's the actual science-stuff. I don't understand a word of it, but it scores points for not being illustrated by a picture of Basil Rathbone. Or some other thicko.

And speaking of memory

When I booked my flights and hotel tonight, I booked them all for next weekend instead of the weekend after, had to cancel everything and start again, and thought "I'll write something witty about that on my blog when I write about going to this competition..." And then I forgot to mention it. They shouldn't let people with terrible memories go to memory championships, it's a disgrace.

I love Paris in the springtime!

I haven't really mentioned it before, but 2017 for me is dedicated to living economically and paying off the vast debt I accumulated over the course of my last "career break", as I call those times when I spend a year and a half not bothering to work for a living. Because it took me longer than I expected to get back into a proper job that pays me decent money, I've ended up with a lot to work off before I can get back to financial liberty and not need to work any more. But now I'm working for an undeservedly high salary and living in a perfectly nice cheap bedsit down the road from the office, I'm in a position of earning much more than I spend, allowing me to devote huge sums of money every month to paying off my credit cards and loans and things.

And because I really have been good about not spending money to excess just lately, I've decided to reward myself by spending money to excess, and going to Paris in a fortnight's time for the French Memory Open 2017! Blog-readers with good memories (I'm sure there must be some of you who fall into that category) may recall that the first ever memory competition in France happened in 2008, and I was there. Now, nine years later, there's another open championship in that much-neglected-memorywise country, and I'll be there again, along with the cream of European (and American) memory talent!

I've done no training, of course, except for a whole lot of Memory League rapid-fire stuff, but this is deliberate, in a way. Going to a competition, as I've said before, is the best way to get me in the mood to practice for the next competition!

I really must try to see the Eiffel Tower this time. I've been to Paris something like four times before, and never actually seen the thing. For all I know, it doesn't really exist, but since everybody asks me if I've seen it every time I come back home, I ought to make the effort this time round.

Memory sports 2017 is go!

Yes, this year's memory competition season is in full Korea (career), with the weekend's competition in Seoul now completed, and Johannes Mallow the champion - it was a thrilling event, he fought off not just his usual arch-rival Simon Reinhard, but the latest threat to emerge from Ulaanbataar, the sisters Munkhshur and Enkhshur Narmandakh. Six people did a pack of cards under 30 seconds!

I wrote a full account of it, or as full as can be done by reading the scores and everyone's Facebook and Twitter posts, which might appear on memory-sports.com at some point in the future. Check it out, I promise it won't contain any terrible puns like the one I started this blog entry with.