Memory Medley

It's the Memoriad in Las Vegas this week, which I would have liked to go to, but since I'm so totally out of practice I can't really justify the expense, especially since I've agreed to run all these competitions back in blighty over the next month. Still, I'm sure everybody'll have a great time!

As for the competitions I'm running, here's a quick reminder. Everything this year is a bit on the last-minute side, so I can forgive you for not knowing what's going on. Next year, everything I run (which I think will be two competitions at most) will be announced far, far in advance. See the bottom of this very post, for instance!

Saturday November 12th - Numbers and Cards, Broneirion, Wales.
Sunday November 13th - The Friendly Championship, Broneirion again.
Saturday/Sunday November 19th/20th - Peak UK Memory League Championship, London.
Saturday/Sunday December 3rd/4th - Peak IAM European Open, London.

The latter two are sponsored by Peak, the app for genuinely really fun "mind-training" games. I'd recommend it even if they weren't generously hosting memory competitions! [You know what I'm like, if I didn't like the app I'd say so, and sponsorship be damned, and get told off by everybody in the memory world. Luckily, I do like this one!]

All but the Memory League Championship are open to everyone; that one is invitation only and limited to British memorisers (BUT, if you're British and would like to compete, I'm currently waiting to hear back about filling a couple of vacated spots, so please let me know if you're interested!)



So that's your lot for 2016. But THEN, I'm happy to give advance warning that there will be a big, cool memory championship at the Mind Sports Olympiad in 2017, at JW3 in London, probably on Monday/Tuesday 21st/22nd August. It will be an international standard event, with the overall winner calculated in the usual way by adding up the scores of all ten disciplines, but it will also be split into three 'modules', which MSO competitors can pick and choose from, and which will each have their own individual winner and medals. Oh, and this competition will also be called the European Open, or something along those lines. But in both cases that just means it's in Europe, not that you have to be European to compete.

Day 1 morning/afternoon - "Marathon Memory" - 30-minute numbers, 30-minute cards and 30-minute binary.
Day 2 morning - "Natural Memory" - 15-minute names, 15-minute words, 15-minute images (or whatever the IAM come up with as a new discipline)
Day 2 afternoon - "Speed Memory" - 5-minute dates, 5-minute numbers, spoken numbers, speed cards.

I would urge everybody to come along to the whole MSO in 2017! I'm going to, and I'll probably wax lyrical about how I went to the first one as a 20-year-old in 1997, and now I'm going to this one as a 40-year-old in 2017, and ah me, where did all the years go, half of my lifetime, and so on and so forth. Look forward to it!



PS After my post earlier today, I need to put in some kind of disclaimer saying "any and all spelling mistakes in this post are obviously deliberately made as some kind of ironic comment. No, really, they are."

If you're going to use words like "author" and "professional"...

I get junk emails quite regularly from a thing called "Authorcraft - the professional network for authors." I don't remember why, which probably means I signed up to it with vague ideas of promoting my book about memory, in the days when I was determined to make an effort to write a proper book about memory. But I've finally decided to unsubscribe today after receiving their latest mass mailing with the subject line "AuthorCraft Caoching Call this Tuesday 8st November". And the attached email doesn't seem to be making a point about the necessity of proof-reading what you write, either. This is probably why I've never become an author, obviously - I'd much rather read a bad book with good spelling than a good book with bad. I'm probably very out of tune with the way book-readers' minds work...