The extreme future

It's great to come back to work to find a hand-made poster taped to the wall of the office, cheering me on. (No, I don't work in a nursery school, though I can see how you might think that). But the XMT is always a huge success with "normal" non-memory people when they learn about it - they can and do follow the results with excitement, and understand what's going on! You can't really say that about the world memory championships.

So, if they do the automatic qualification and seedings for the 2016 XMT in the same way, the top eight will be Johannes, Boris, Simon, Alex, Christian, Katie, Jonas and Enkhjin. I'd have to match my just-for-fun training performance this year with the same kind of really-trying-to-qualify scores if I want to get into the second pot for the group stage draw. But it's a bit early to be thinking about that, who knows what new innovations might come along in the next twelve months?

Instead, I want to try to keep hold of the training enthusiasm the XMT has filled me with to practice for the more traditional competitions - hopefully, if I have any money, I'd like to go to the German championship in July, followed by the UK championship in August, and maybe get some half-decent results for a change. That will mean a lot of marathon-discipline practice between now and then, so let's see how it goes...