Saturday, January 14, 2023

Contributing to the development of memory sports

 The Memory League World Championship is happening right now, and I haven't even been paying any attention to it for the last three days, because I've been in London, working on promoting a sensational, spectacular, tangentially-memory-related thing that will burst onto the world on Thursday 19th January! I even dragged Simon Orton (who, as always, has been working twenty-four hours a day behind the scenes to make the world championship run so seemingly effortlessly smoothly) away from his endeavours to help me out - but I think the end result is worth it, as when I demonstrated Memory League to a couple of dozen international media-related people, they all loved it and couldn't stop playing! The excitement of advancing to a new level really gripped the whole room!

It says something about my status in the modern memory-sports community that I spend my time doing this and not playing in the world championship itself, doesn't it? Hey, remember when they expanded the football World Cup to 24 teams instead of 16, and everyone thought that was a great improvement? Do you think Memory League might also benefit from doing that and, for example, having someone ranked 23 in the world joining the fun?

In fact, maybe Memory League could follow football's future plans, and expand to 32, because let's face it, my world ranking is likely to go down a few more notches...

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