The race is on

To qualify for the XMT, that is. With week one, cards, out of the way, we've had 35 people record a result in the qualification competition (not counting me, Boris, Nelson and Simon - who blew everyone away with a time of 19.79 seconds, the big show-off). Exactly 16 of those did a full pack of cards in 60 seconds or less, and two (Johann Randall Abrina and Enkhmunkh Erdenebatkhaan, who I'm pretty sure is a teenage Mongolian who I met in China and will hopefully wear some kind of name badge until I've met him another time or two - this applies to everyone else who I've only met once and can't remember the face of, naturally) did better than 30 seconds. Everyone's doing it nowadays!

But now we're on to week two - Images! Thirty random photos from a pretty big databank of interesting snapshots, and the idea is to memorise them as quickly as possible and then put them into the right order in the recall, a la speed cards. I suspect I'm at a little bit of a disadvantage here - in speed cards I'm in the habit of memorising 26 images in 30 seconds or so, meaning that the Images discipline involves a little bit more than that. People who still use a primitive one-card-to-an-image system, on the other hand, see 52 images in, say, 45 seconds, and so this is like only three-fifths of a pack of cards for them.

We'll have to see how it turns out. It'll be fun to see who's topping the leaderboard at the end of the week!