The Friendly Memory Championship (a little late)

While I try to remember what song I was singing in a dream last night, let's have a belated recap of the Friendly (Cambridge) Memory Championship, back in June!

(See, the dream involved a concert by Tracy Chapman, though she didn't bear much resemblance to the singer from the eighties, and she was accompanied by a male guitarist also called Tracy Chapman, and since for the purposes of this dream my name was also Tracy Chapman I came up on stage and sang a song, along with a woman who once again happened to have the same name too on guitar and backing vocals. I performed a relatively recent hit song, I'll remember which one it was eventually. I was really quite awesome, anyway, though I couldn't remember half of the words)

This was the tenth Friendly Championship, which is quite a landmark. Back in 2006, as I pointed out quite excessively, it was one of the very few memory championships in the whole world - there was the World Championship once a year, the German Championships (and the North and South German little events), the different-format US Championship (only open to Americans), and that was basically your lot. Some exotic places like Australia and China had competitions too, even the top competitors would go to an absolute maximum of three memory competitions in a year. The world of memory has expanded quite a lot since then.

In 2015 we gathered together once more in the Attenborough Nature Reserve - not as lethally hot as last year, no particularly noisy interruptions from ducks and geese, good wifi connection so I could update the fans on Facebook with the latest scores, it was a pretty good venue as always. The lineup of competitors was just perfect - two of the absolute world's best in Simon Reinhard and Johannes Mallow, the two leading lights of British memory in Katie Kermode and Marlo Knight, two memory competition veterans in Javier Moreno and Dai Griffiths, and two complete newcomers in Eline Malleret and Rosalind Hoo. That is so exactly the mix of competitors I like at these competitions, it's almost like I'd hand-picked and invited them especially! We also had some kind of researcher, Zaïn Ceizar, keen to probe the brains of the competitors and find out how the whole memory thing works, just to make the whole event a bit more sciencey.

(Look here, Blogger - if I type "sciencey", I don't want you to autocorrect it to "science". "A bit more science" doesn't even work, grammatically speaking.)

We had a perfect line-up of arbiters too, in the form of me, Phil Chambers and Nick Papadopoulos - or if not exactly perfect, we did a pretty good job. The thing about the Friendly competition is that it's a friendly kind of arbiting - we're all sitting in the same room and marking the papers, and anybody's free to query their scores and check their papers to see where they (or the arbiters) went wrong. I'm pretty sure there was only one arbiting mistake (my mental addition going wrong), and that was caught straight away, so everyone was happy and nobody grumbling that their score was wrong. Also, we get things marked and the results announced as quickly as possible, so people can do those important calculations of how much they need to attempt in the next discipline to keep ahead of their rivals.

The competition, as best I can remember at this late date, was exciting, and absolutely packed with world records! Katie and Simon set the pace with scores over 100 in 5-minute words, which is pretty cool; Hannes followed that with 951 in 5-minute binary, which would have been a world record back in the days when I was the record holder, and then Katie totally blew everyone away with a score of 97 in 5-minute names and faces.

The thing about that is, you get 50 first and 50 last names, and the three she got wrong were just slightly mis-spelt. It's seriously freaky and beyond my understanding (although names aren't my strong point, as everyone knows - while writing this blog I've had to remind myself that Marlo's name isn't Marlowe Weisman, the American cartoon-writer, even though I've known him for years now). Simon deserves a mention too for getting a score of 88, which would have been a world record if not for Katie. Freaky, I tell you.

15-minute numbers then immediately provided us with another world record - 1014 for Johannes! To put that in context, memorising a thousand digits in an hour is still considered pretty exceptional; memorising a thousand in 30 minutes is something that very few people have done. It's getting quite scary.

Before lunch, we had 10-minute cards, and guess what? Another world record, sort of - with 7 packs and 8 cards, Simon set a new "non-digital" world record (he'd done a higher score on a computer screen in Los Angeles the previous month, but this is the best score with actual physical cards). "Wait, did I hold the old record for this one?" I asked, but everyone laughed that no, of course I didn't, my world record was broken ages ago.

Lunch was as awesome as always (they make great lunches at Attenborough), although I did my best to hurry it along - the conversation went something like "We want to have two trials of speed numbers instead of one" "Okay, but we'll have to have just a half-hour lunch break, otherwise we won't finish before they kick us out of the building at six o'clock" "No, we'll have an hour for lunch and still have two speed numbers trials, I think."

After a sort of compromise of 45 minutes for lunch, we did have our two speed numbers trials - no world records here, but Simon had built up a healthy lead in the competition by this point. Hannes fought back with yet another world record - 495 in abstract images! The scores in this one are just getting silly now; it's really about time someone did something about it, like making a 5-minute images discipline instead of 15 for these short competitions. In dates he scored 120, which isn't quite a world record but is still higher than anyone else apart from Hannes has ever scored, so it deserves a mention anyway.

The highlight of spoken numbers was me trying to get it to work, but we succeeded eventually, more or less. No world records, but an exciting finish in store with Simon a mere 150 championship points ahead of Hannes going into the speed cards. But Simon didn't manage to get a pack correct, and with a time of 30.33 seconds, Johannes Mallow became the 2015 Friendly Memory Champion! Is that an official title? It sounds a bit silly. It's something to be proud of, anyway! Hannes is now officially both Extreme and Friendly, in fact. And having been one of the competitors at the very first Cambridge Championship back in 2006, we can look back at the scores he got then and marvel at the improvement - back then he got 600 in 15-minute numbers, 720 in binary, 75 in dates, all of them considered really impressive scores. And 81 in abstract images, which was the first time anyone had ever tried the new discipline, but it just goes to show how much people can improve with nine years to think about how to remember things!

Simon was second, Katie third and Marlo fourth; Eline won the much-coveted Best Beginner title, and everyone had a good time!

Okay, I'm still alive!

Sorry for the three months of silence - the fact is, I've been pretty seriously depressed for quite a long time now, so it's been hard to summon the enthusiasm for mindless rambling bloggery on a regular basis. Really, quite a lot has happened over the months that it seems like people really want to read me going on about, so I shall endeavour to catch you all up with what's been going on, since you all asked so nicely...

I'm quite staggeringly out of touch

Why am I only finding out about something that supposedly "went viral all over the internet" last week today, when I decide to look up Charlie Watts on google? It's official, I'm an old man.

And my poor blog readers are drastically out of touch with my life right now, too, aren't you? I'll make an effort to fill you all in about my doings on a regular basis - I imagine there's a huge army of people out there who eagerly look forward to my blog posts and get terribly disappointed when I don't write one, although I don't have any tangible evidence of these people's existence.

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...

Two days of extreme!

When we left our extreme memory heroes, the first day had just come to an end. Here's the ranking calculation (my own made-up calculation, nothing officially-endorsed about it) that I meant to post in the previous blog but forgot: 

Well, the memory part of the first day was over, anyway - a bunch of us followed it up with dinner at Olive Garden (I sampled a few cool American food franchises while I was out there - In-N-Out Burger, however much it sounds like it's promising us an immediate case of food poisoning, is actually really great!) before retiring to our hotel for the night. The hotel was the Doubletree Golf Resort we stayed at last year, although the name turned out to be a lot less appropriate than it used to be, as the golf course is closed. Keen golfer Simon was particularly annoyed by this, met the manager and demanded half the price of his room back, plus green fees at another local course and a free lunch. He got everything he demanded, too, and suggested I do the same - since I didn't have any intention of playing golf and indeed hadn't noticed the course was fenced off until Simon pointed it out, I thought that might be a bit too unethical of me, so I passed.

I'm starting to consider being a bit less ethical about things like that in future, though; I can't help thinking it'd be nice to have more money and fewer made-up-the-rules-as-I-went-along scruples that nobody else cares about...

Anyway, day two dawned bright and sunny, if a little damp - San Diego was apparently suffering a three-year-long terrible drought when we arrived, but it sorted itself out with some overnight rain that didn't bother anyone and cleared up during the daytime to leave things lovely and sunny for everyone. I approve of this kind of weather. We all made our way back to Dart Neuroscience for the excitement of the Round of 16. Germans have a word for that, incidentally - Achtelfinale - which sounds so much cooler. With four matches going on at once, this meant that the eight of us who weren't in the first four hemidemisemifinals were sealed away in the auditorium to watch everything (except the surprise task, which had to stay a surprise) on xmtlive.com on the big screen. Which was awesome! It really was exciting to watch along and follow the developing excitement, and I've been told by numerous non-memory people that they enjoyed it too!

We watched Alex polish off Annalena 4-0 with some safe and steady scores; Katie brush aside Akjol in the same way including a 47 in words (on the second day, practically everyone copied my impressive score from day 1 - Boris, Christian and Hannes all did it!); Jonas also beat Ola 4-0 with some close contests including a names match that went to a replay; and the Battle Of The Johanneses end with a tighter 4-2, settled with an amazingly close names match - Mallow managed to stop his clock two hundredths of a second before the full minute was up, and thus beat Zhou's identical score of 17 names, taking him through to the quarter-finals!

The eight remaining extremers were set free from our isolation and took our seats to find out the surprise task. It turned out to be cards, just like normal, except with loud distracting music/conversation/noise blaring at us, and no earplugs/blinkers/distraction-minimisers allowed! Up against Enkhjin, I made the slightly dubious decision to go through the cards twice rather than once, only for him to do the same and stop his clock before me. I probably would have been fine with just looking at them once, with hindsight (Simon did just that, over at table 3), but there you go. As it was, we both recalled perfectly to give him a 1-0 lead.

That gave me the choice of discipline for the second round, and I opted for normal, quiet cards, doing a pack without any problems in 26.73 to make it 1-1. I had wondered whether Enkhjin would choose names next, which is usually a guaranteed easy win against me, and so nodded approvingly when he opted for images, his specialist subject which is very easy to make a mistake in at top speed. No mistakes here, though, and he blew me away with a time of 15.66. I went for numbers after that, and stopped the clock at my usual kind of solid speed of 31.24, only to realise that I hadn't paid enough attention to the last-but-one image (I read the last six quickly and say the names repeatedly to myself rather than taking the extra seconds to visualise them, but this time I didn't have a word at all for that penultimate one. Careless.) I took a guess, got it wrong and thus had three wrong digits, whereas Enkhjin had stopped the clock unnecessarily at 38.23 and misremembered one digit, but got away with both of these sillinesses to go 3-1 up. After that, he did go for names, and did remember more of them than me, winning 19-15.

I really have to learn how to do names better - I mean, looking at it now, there's a guy called Jay with a dark blue jumper and white collar which now when I look at it immediately makes me think of Mordecai the blue jay from Regular Show. Why didn't that occur to me at the time?

In any case, that gave Enkhjin the fully-deserved win, 4-1. As it happened, the other three matches all finished at that point too, a trio of 4-1 wins for Boris, Christian and Simon over Yanjaa, Marwin and Mark Anthony.

That took us into the quarter-finals, leaving me to cheer on Meddlers Katie and Alex, who both hadn't remotely expected to get that far - or at least were humble enough to claim as much, which is just as good. The surprise task here involved memorising a protein sequence, or in other words a lot of letters, on a grid. This one wasn't very visual, since they did the memory and recall on paper and nobody could see what was going on, but Alex and Katie both won theirs against those big big names of memory Johannes and Jonas (the competition had two Johanneses, one Jonas and one Johann, with no consideration at all for people who can't remember names. Luckily, we all had name-badges.) Boris beat Christian, Simon beat Enkhjin and we went back to the visual excitement of the regular five disciplines.

This time, Enkhjin did make a mistake in his super-speedy images memorisation, and although he was unlucky to stop his numbers clock fractions of a second after Simon, he did get them all right this time around while Simon made a rare mistake. That was the only point Enkhjin won, though, and hot-favourite Simon went through to the semis 4-1. Alex pulled off a big shock by beating Jonas by the same score, after Jonas tried fast times in both images and numbers without success, and couldn't keep up with Alex's 35-second cards. Katie fought valiantly against Hannes, intending to record good images times twice only to find he did it faster, and going out 4-2. The match between Christian and Boris was the most exciting of the quarters - particularly for Boris, who was in a state of wild, manic hysteria for most of the day (nobody could accuse him of not being passionate about competition!) A 21-21 in names which Christian won by virtue of stopping the clock just before the 60 seconds were up was followed by a 43-43 words in which this time Boris did the same thing! That made it 3-2 to Boris, and when he won at numbers to take him through to the quarters he screamed "JAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!", leaping to his feet, sending his chair flying, and giving everyone either a laugh or a heart attack, depending on their constitution.

After a break for lunch (in which I sampled a Cali-style burrito, which was delicious, and chatted with the St Louis academics who probed my brain however many years ago it was) we moved into the auditorium to watch the remaining games on the stage. This allowed them to project the surprise tasks onto the big screen - the one for the semis involved memorising a map with fictional towns, temperatures and weather-symbols. I couldn't help thinking that the temperatures would have been easy enough to remember perfectly in the time allowed, giving a better score than anyone managed, but it was probably different up on the stage and under pressure. As it was, Alex got a better score than Hannes, and Boris beat Simon (yelling "YES!" and running wildly around the room to celebrate it). When in the next match Simon chose names only to lose 19-17, the celebration this time was a squeal of "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" and a mad-march-hare bouncing fit that nearly took Boris through the roof. That seemed to make him a bit more self-conscious, possibly because every camera and phone in the building was pointed at him from that point onwards to see what he'd do next - everyone was a bit disappointed with the more restrained happiness when he went 3-0 up and even when he sealed a hugely surprising 4-1 victory over the tournament favourite!

Alex, meanwhile, put up a fight against second-favourite Hannes, taking advantage of his opponent's mistakes to win at cards and numbers only to finally go down 4-3 on another cards - I doubt anyone in the world could do a fast time without mistakes under that kind of pressure.

Alex and Simon then contested the third-place play-off, which boasted the coolest and most original surprise task yet - blindfolded memorising of different textures, which then had to be rearranged into the right sequence! Extremely difficult, but a fantastic idea that I'd love to have a go at under tournament conditions myself some day! Simon won that, and took charge of things from that point on, winning 4-1 to ensure a German 1-2-3 in the XMT. Fantastic performances from both him and Alex!

And then it was time for the grand final - best of nine, this one, with two surprise tasks! The first of these was the textures again, and Boris's fingers proved the more sensitive. Hannes chose cards next, and won it despite neither of them managing to put the deck back together in full. It's very, very difficult to produce good results on such a big occasion, the tension was almost unbearable! Boris then won at names, and Hannes at numbers. The second surprise task was to memorise car licence plates - the name of the state and the six-or-seven-digit/letter registration number. The recall was done in US Championship style, with them reciting one state/letter/number in turns, and Hannes had a lot of difficulty with it, losing out on all three to Boris. We went into images next, but Boris's fast time was too fast for him to be able to recall. Hannes then won at cards to go 4-3 up and when Boris chose names for the potentially final matchup, Johannes chose that moment to produce a personal best, 22, to top Boris's 19 and become the new Extreme Memory Champion!

Just to prove that my arbitrary 100-points-for-the-best-score-in-each-discipline really does show who is the truly worthy champion, those 22 names nudged Hannes into first place on the spreadsheet, too! 

What an amazing and extreme competition it was! Huge thanks are owed to Nelson, Simon Orton and all the huge number of people who worked to make it such a big success! Here's to next year... hoping that I qualify for it, at least...

Extreme '15!

I'm on my way home from San Diego, after a day exploring the city - lots of good comic shops around here! After two days of extreme memorising in the hot sun, it's a bit of a drag to be going back to rainy old England. Maybe I'll just stay here and assume someone'll give me a pile of money.

Anyway, we all gathered in the same venue as last year, Dart Neuroscience, only this time we had four tables on the go at once instead of two, to cope with the expanded number of competitors and disciplines. Being in Group F, I got to watch the first four groups in action before having to face my first match - groups A and B kicked off with cards and then images and most people were playing it safe as they warmed up. The ones who didn't (Simon with a 27-second pack of cards, Yanjaa and Enkhjin with super-fast images) all made mistakes. Group A included fellow Team Britain member Katie (still politely cursing being drawn in a group with Simon), while Group B had our other battling Brit, Marlo, as well as Memory Medley Member Lance.

To explain, there's a group of us called The Memory Medley who have got together on Facebook to swap daily training scores, tips, friendly banter and general motivation. It's a select group of ten people who happened to be around at the time we decided to create it, but it's been a huge help in keeping me fired up and regularly training. Five of us were in the XMT - Katie, Marlo, Lance, me and Alex. The other five Meddlers are Phill, Clay, Kevin, Sri and AB, and they were sending electronic good wishes and support to San Diego throughout.

Groups C and D then had names and numbers, the highlight being a nearly-perfectly-recalled 20-second numbers time from Johannes M, before the final two groups got to sit down in the hot seats and test our skills with words and then cards.

There were spectators on all sides, and quite close too - the screens they were watching had a ten-second delay to reduce the possibility of cheating, which worked very nicely without any problems; as with last year, only more so, the coverage in the venue and online was wonderful, keeping everyone fully up to date with what was happening at any given moment.

My first opponent was Alex, who I'd previously listed among my Group Of Life on the grounds that he's 'not quite up to my level in all the disciplines'. I was mistaken about that, it turns out - I'd now describe him as someone who's actually a little bit better than me at practically everything. He won the words match, 42 to 36 (I'm significantly better at words now than I was last year, after some good improvement in training, but 42 was the highest score I'd managed in my practice sessions, and scores in the thirties were more normal), but then I came back and won the cards with a time of 29.18 seconds. I've got to a point in the training where I can do cards at that speed and get all 52 correct nine times out of ten, which I'm very happy with. That time put me on top of the best-scores leaderboard - the highest score in each discipline on day 1 took home a big cash prize, but I was pretty sure 29 seconds wouldn't be enough to take it; the days when that was an amazingly exceptionally fast time are long gone, I'm afraid. The others in Group F, Johannes Z and Tsogbadrakh, had also won one apiece.

And so it went on - I was confidently expecting not to have an easy time of it in the morning; two of my three names matches came in the first five. When I went up against Tsogo in names I thought I might have a slight chance, since he's not so great at it either, but he did in fact win 14 to 12. On the other hand, I had thought he might well beat me at numbers, but he took it slowly and still made mistakes, letting me get the win there. In Group A, the group of names experts, Simon had recorded a 23 to beat Anne and Katie a 22 to beat Yanjaa. Over in Group B, Jonas did the first sub-30-seconds numbers time.

I lost my next names contest to Johannes Z, which was expected, and then lost to him at images too, when he stopped the clock at 22.22 before I'd got to the end of mine (and I was going fast, too!) and recalled perfectly. Boris had already set a time of 19.29 seconds to top the leaderboard there. My last match before lunch was another images round, against Alex this time, and here I managed to stop the clock at 23.55 and get them all right. On the other table, JZ did 21.24.

That left me stuck at the bottom of the league table at the half-way point:

But that was okay, as I kept telling everyone - it was very close, I'd had the difficult matches, there would be a nice run of images-cards-cards-numbers after the break and I would soon catch up. With the hectic pace, it was hard to keep up with what was happening in the other groups, but Simon to nobody's surprise was romping away with group A, winning all his matches, while Katie was keeping pace nicely with Yanjaa in the fight for second place. In Group B, Marlo was struggling while Jonas and Enkhjin were proving very difficult to beat. Group C was finely poised, but Boris was keeping the challenge of Mark Anthony and Akjol at bay. Johannes M was topping group D without too much difficulty, although fellow XMT veterans Ola and Marwin were pushing hard. The surprise package of the morning was Annalena, who had won all seven matches in Group E - with a lot of luck, she insisted, but it put her in a totally comfortable position heading into the afternoon.

The afternoon went as well as I could have hoped for me - I beat Tsogo at images when he tried a fast time but got the recall slightly wrong, then beat him and JZ at cards with super-solid 31-second times before rounding up that nice run of four "good matches" with a win in the numbers too when JZ mixed up his recall. It all sounds simple now I look back at it, but in each of my matches against Tsogo I made a last-second change in the recall when I remembered just in the nick of time the right sequence of things. It certainly gave the spectators a bit of excitement!

That left me much more relaxed going into the final four games (words-names-numbers-words), but even that doesn't explain the performance I managed to produce in the first words match against Tsogo. I somehow remembered nearly all of the 50 words much more smoothly than I ever have before, getting 47 of them right and not being too far off with the others (along the lines of remembering at least what letter they started with...). 47 is a staggeringly huge score of the kind that only the real words experts manage to produce - it didn't quite top the leaderboard, since Simon had done a 48, but it was sitting proudly up there in second place. I heard later that the Mongolian translations weren't very good, with misspellings and such, but my conscience is clear there - my freakish result would have won against pretty much anyone, even if they had the best translation the world has ever seen.

Still in a buoyant mood about that, I went into a double-header against Alex in high spirits, only for him to comfortably beat me in names and then in numbers with an excellent table-topping 25.70 seconds. Looking at our league table, I consciously registered for the first time that even though I'd achieved pretty much everything I'd been aiming for, Alex had been good enough to beat me into first place - all he had to do in the final match was beat Tsogo at words to confirm it, leaving me and JZ fighting mainly for pride (my tie-break was good enough that even if he beat me, I would end up second if I didn't get an amazingly disastrous score). Alex did win, and so did JZ (36 to 35), leaving the final group standings like this: 

Johannes M knocked Alex's score off the top for numbers with 21.01 in his final match. Simon, to nobody's great surprise, took three of the best-score prizes, just like last year - cards, names and words. In images, though, it was Enkhjin who blew everyone else away - having tried super-fast times twice and not quite got the recall right, he successfully did 14.40 seconds on his final attempt; nearly a full five seconds better than anyone else had managed! This was a little bit concerning, because my second place in Group F meant I would be facing him in the round of 16. My group-of-life pick, Alex, would go up against my other group-of-life pick who had exceeded expectations, Annalena.

All the results can be seen on the excellent website, which I hope you were following all the way through the day (or night, if you're in Europe). Katie had triumphantly gone through to the round of 16 in second place in her group; Marlo and Lance had sadly narrowly missed out in theirs, on tie-break score in Marlo's case. My Excel analysis of everyone's best scores showed my opponent Enkhjin as the fourth-best performer, although I couldn't feel too bad about finishing second, because the top three were the usual suspects Jonas, Johannes and Simon, who Alex could expect to meet in the quarters, semis and final if he could win through!

It's time for me to get back to England, though - all the thrills and spills of day two will be reduced to boring bloggery for your reading displeasure when I get back home!

Go Diego Go!

Here I am in sunny San Diego! Well, it's night-time, but tomorrow it will be sunny, I'm assured. The Extreme Memory Tournament happens this weekend, and I hope you're all ready to tune in to the XMT Live website! As I said last year, click on everything, it's a Simon Orton masterpiece of clickability - in fact, I think it's even clickier this year than it was in 2014! Follow all the action, live!

Unless you're in bed. I do appreciate that it's four o'clock tomorrow morning back home.

Beware the red moon!

It does exist!

Big thanks to Gilby1385 for pointing me to an eBay auction for the one Krypton Force Force Five video missing from my collection! I'm not sure that I particularly want the tape for any reason other than completism - as I've mentioned in my various Krypton Force blogs, I don't really like the Grandizer cartoon, and the artwork on the Orion Quest covers doesn't even seem to be by Marc, so is missing all the so-bad-it's-good qualities you get with his artwork. But hey, from the picture of the box alone I've now got the subtitle, the text on the back and some pretty solid confirmation that it contains the first two episodes of the series, so I'll update the master blog page with the new details!

And let's hope I win the auction and nobody tries to extort money out of me by bidding thousands of pounds...

Let's go skating!

I'm sure you all remember the blog post I wrote eight years ago in which I compared memory competitions to figure skating. Or at least the picture that followed it. It's interesting how things have changed since then. Back in 2007, "national standard" competitions with their shorter disciplines were still a bit of a novelty, the US championship was the only really different kind of memory tournament, and the XMT didn't exist even in people's wildest imagination.

The XMT, of course, is exactly the kind of free-skating thing I was burbling about eight years ago, and I'm pretty sure it now gets the general memory-athlete community more excited than the world memory championships do. But things like that and the Memoriad and the multiple other competitions going on (I haven't even mentioned the cool things happening in Los Angeles, been so wrapped up in Extremeness...) have all sort of combined into a really quite cool whole. The WMSC isn't as big a deal as it used to be when those were the only memory championships in the world, but while the world championship with its hour-long disciplines is still something people aspire to, it's not going to be swept aside. I like the balance we have right now!

Glossary

An additional note to tonight's blog - Yanjaa has given me a good telling-off for referring to names and words as 'nurds' instead of 'nards', so I do apologise for any confusion caused. The official ruling is now that 'nards' means 'names and words' or the people who are good at memorising them, and 'nurds' means 'numbers and cards'. So now there can't possibly be any mix-ups!

The draw is done!

And hmmmmm, not the group of death I was most worried about, but it's going to be tough. Check out the group draw here!

Let's have a look at the groupings, starting with Group A: Simon, Yanjaa, Anne, Katie. Poor Katie, she was hoping to avoid Simon, and I'm sure she would have preferred not to go up against Yanjaa either. But I don't think that's a problem - Katie really is better than those two at the crucial names and words (nurds), and I think she could spring a surprise or two. In fact, Simon could be in a little bit of trouble here! This is the nurdiest group of all, with four experts fighting it out. If he slips up on numbers or cards (which, I'll grant you, he seldom does), it might not be plain sailing for the reigning champ.

Group B: Jonas, Enhkjin, Lance and Marlo. I'd certainly give Marlo a chance here of reaching the knockout stages. (I'd really love to see Team Britain do well in the XMT). It does look like Jonas will be favourite to top the group, but I can see a fierce battle developing between the other three.

Group C: Mark Anthony, Boris, Tuuruul and Akjol. That's a good draw for Boris, I think he'll do well here. And I can see Akjol being his closest rival; he's got a sort of all-round consistency on the big occasions, I think based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the guy. By the way, is it me or does that photo look nothing like Boris? Are we sure it's him?

Group D: Johannes M, Ola, Enkhmunkh, Marwin. This is going to be a real ding-dong; all four of them are likely to be evenly matched and producing some impressive results. It'll be down to who can do it with the most consistency, and I think that's probably going to be Hannes. Marwin is my dark horse to do well at the XMT this year; he's improved a lot since 2014.

Group E: Christian, Johann, Annalena, Johnny. Interesting in that Christian and Annalena are a couple, and will be head-to-head against each other for the first time; that's something to talk about in the press. But I can see Christian coming out on top of this group quite easily, maybe with Johann in second place.

Group F: And finally, it goes Ben, Johannes Z, Tsogbadrakh, Alex. The good thing about this is that at least three of the group will probably be blogging extensively about it - Tsogo might too, although if he does it'll most likely be in Mongolian. I'm going to face some tough challenges from all three of the others here, and it really depends on how fast and reliable everyone can be with cards, images and numbers. In my training lately I've been pretty good at getting 100% correct in a reasonably good time, but we'll just have to see how it goes in the competition...


And if I win my group and my round-of-16, I'm liable to face Jonas in the quarter-final. Finish second, and it'll be Simon. But I'll cross those bridges if and when I come to them.

A different kind of death

Okay, I need to rethink exactly what the worst XMT group draw for me could be, because they've rejigged the seedings so I'm in the first pot and introduced rules limiting how many people from each country can be in a group. See the post here for details!

We have 6 groups (A-F), that will have 4 competitors each. The top 6 rankings will own a top spot in the first 6 groups (so, Simon (A), Johannes (B), Jonas (C), Mark Anthony (D), Christian (E), and Ben (F)). Then we will split the rest of the competitors into 3 pools:

Pool 1 (rankings 7-12)

7. Ola Kåre Risa
8. Boris Konrad
9. Johannes Zhou
10. Yanjaa Altansuh
11. Enhkjin Tumur
12. Johann Randall Abrina

Pool 2 (rankings 13-18)

13. Enkhumnkh Erdenebatkhaan
14. Annalena Fischer
15. Tsogobadrakh Saikhanbayar
16. Anne Reulke
17. Lance Tschirhart
18. Tuuruul Myagmarsuren

Pool 3 (rankings 19-24)

19. Alexander Mullen
20. Marwin Wallonius
21. Marlo Knight
22. Akjol Syeryekkhaan
23. Katie Kermode
24. Johnny Briones


GER: 7 competitors - no more than 2 in each group
MNG: 5 competitors - no more than 2 in each group
SWE: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
UK: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
USA: 3 competitors - no more than 1 in each group
PHL: 2 competitors - no more than 1 in each group


So, I'm now in group F, and who'll join me? Well, from pool 1 I think the name that instils the most terror in me is Boris - he'll beat me in names and words most likely, and everything else quite possibly too. The 'easy' option would probably be Enhkjin, who's in the top group thanks to some super-fast times in images and numbers in the qualifying tournament that he might not be able to replicate in a one-off situation.

I've thought about pool 2 since I did my previous Group of Death predictions and decided that Enkhmunkh is slightly more deathy than Lance is, so he moves to the top of my most-feared list today.

And now that I can't be paired with Katie or Marlo from pool 4, that I think leaves Marwin as the one to most make me tremble.


Revised Group of Death: Me, Boris, Enkhmunkh, Marwin. Revised Group of Life: Me, Enhkjin, Anne, Alex. Fingers crossed!



And then, of course, we have to think about who I'll play in the knockout rounds if I manage to get through the inevitable group of death I'll be drawn in. They're using the knockout phase structure from Euro 2016, apparently, but that doesn't strictly tell me who I'd be up against if I win my group, because that seems to be arranged so that groups A and D are the top two seeds (they're the ones who play runners-up rather than group winners in the quarter-finals), so there'll probably be a bit of re-jigging of the alphabet. But E and F do seem to be fifth and sixth seeds in that structure too, so I guess I'd be playing the runner-up of group E (Christian's group) in the round of 16. After that I play a group winner - it's logical to have 3rd seed against 6th in the quarter-finals, so that would mean... Jonas again. Should I say "yikes" or "aha, my chance for revenge!"?

Tell you what, I won't say anything until I've got through the group stage. It's seriously dangerous to start planning things as if I'm going to win my group, isn't it?

Let's get extreme!

The most exciting part of the Extreme Memory Tournament that happens in advance (except for the qualifying competition) happens on Wednesday 15th, at 12 noon EST, which means 5pm here in Britain! It's the draw for the groups, and I would really prefer not to end up in the most horrifyingly difficult group again, if it can possibly be avoided...

So here's how it works. The names are in four pots, and I'm in pot 2:

1. Simon Reinhard
2. Johannes Mallow
3. Jonas Von Essen
4. Mark Anthony Castaneda
5. Christian Schaffer
6. Ola Kare Risa


7. Ben Pridmore
8. Boris Konrad
9. Johannes Zhou
10. Yanjaa Altansuh
11. Enhkjin Tumur
12. Johann Randall Abrina


13. Enkhumnkh Erdenebatkhaan
14. Annalena Fischer
15. Tsogobadrakh Saikhanbayar
16. Anne Reulke
17. Lance Tschirhart
18. Tuuruul Myagmarsuren


19. Alexander Mullen
20. Marwin Wallonius
21. Marlo Knight
22. Akjol Syeryekkhaan
23. Katie Kermode
24. Johnny Briones

Now, being in the second pot isn't so bad, because it means I don't get put in the same group as Boris, Johannes Z or Yanjaa, who are all experts at what Alex Mullen called 'nards', meaning 'names and words'. As an aside, that's not a good thing to call names and words. Not when 'numbers and cards' is another combination that people talk about. Let's call them 'nurds' instead; that should remove any possible confusion.

Pot one contains reigning champion and hot favourite Simon, who I would really prefer to avoid at all costs. It does include last year's 4th-placer Mark Anthony, who looks the most tempting prospect, for all that he did so well last time round. I'm fairly sure I can beat him if things go well, and finishing first in the group would give a big advantage when it comes to the knockout rounds.

Pot three contains a selection of scary Mongolians, who are more of an unknown quantity to me than the Europeans and so make me nervous with their occasional extremely good scores in numbers and cards. Tsogbadrakh, though, I know to be someone who concentrates on numbers more than anything else, and Tuuruul hasn't competed very much lately. Enkhmunkh is the one who's most worrying of the three, with his cards expertise; but Lance is concerning too, just because he's the kind of person who could pull an amazing performance out of nowhere. Hard to say which of them is the group-of-deathiest. The undeathiest in the pot would probably be Anne, though nothing's ever easy here.

Pot four, on the other hand, has the name of Katie jumping out at me. Just like with James Paterson last year, she's the big nurds expert in the bottom six, and I really want to avoid her. Marwin is improving a lot too, and he's got the advantage of having been there last year. I would say my preferred opponent out of those six is Alex - excellent memoriser and all-round-nice-guy though he is, I see him as someone who's not quite up to my level yet in all the disciplines (except names, of course).


So, the Group of Death that I really don't want to end up facing: Simon, me, Lance, Katie. Group of Life: Mark, me, Anne, Alex. Let's just see how it goes...

Othelloadby

Saturday was the traditional clashing-with-the-US-Memory-Championship othello regional in Oadby, and since a trip to New York is too expensive (it's still open to Americans only), I took the train to Leicester and the bike out to the traditional Baptist church venue. The pub down the road where we always used to go to lunch has closed since I was last there (apparently it was also closed last year, when I must have been doing something else that weekend), but otherwise very little changes. Eight competitors, including organiser Steve Rowe - Imre Leader, Phil Marson, Iain Barrass, Roy Arnold, Ken Stevenson and Ken's son Neil, who was the British Champion in 1985 and hadn't played for around 25 years. I played pretty terribly throughout, which is what happens when you don't play a single game since the nationals last year (the two othello tournaments in between happened on the two weekends I was in China), though I somehow beat Phil in a way that I'll have to analyse on Zebra to see what happened.

The thing about that list of competitors is that they've all been coming to othello tournaments for a fair bit longer than I have (Steve I think predates me by a year or so; the others by at least a decade), and I've been around for quite a long time now. Like 16 years or so, in fact. I can't help wondering if our attempts to encourage new players to take up the game need a bit of work. While we've got Imre with his unfailing excitement over every game, pointing out great moves and playing through possible alternate lines for hours thereafter, I don't think the game's ever going to die out from lack of interest, but we really could do with attracting a few more newbies...

Imre won, 7 out of 7, Phil beat Iain in the last game to put them both on 5, Neil obviously wasn't too out of practice on 4, me and Steve on 3, Roy on 1 and Ken on 0. I need to get back in the habit of playing online, that'll get my brain working again.

Brain of Britain meets Brain of China

Check out today's edition of China Super Brain! Featuring Robert Fountain versus Roy Lam; Katie Kermode versus Li Wei; James Paterson versus Liu Jian and Ben Pridmore in a cool cravat versus Li Lu!

Here's the complete video:


What a completely awesome show. I hope we get to do it again!

Get back to where you once belonged

Nine years ago, almost to the day, I posted about 30-minute binary training, and said "I've recorded my score every time I've practised since I started properly training again, and it's gone 2545, 2715, 3005, 3195, 3355, 3650, 3865, 3980"

I've done two training sessions in the last week or so, and they were 2140 and 2475. So if I keep training a bit more I might get back to the level I was when I started training in 2006. It's depressing how far I've sunk away from the levels I used to be at - I've resolved not to go to the world championship this year if I'm going to get the kind of abysmal scores I managed in 2014, so I really need to get memorising regularly...

Don't miss it!

Friday 20th, 9:10pm Chinese time!

My brain is better than EVERYBODY'S!

Among the playful banter on the Superbrain TV show, the panel of Chinese celebrities compared me to Sheldon Cooper, which I think is a great compliment. Sheldon genuinely is the only TV character I can truly identify with, he's a wonderful creation and I can't help thinking he's partly based on my own life - I assume Hollywood spies have been watching me for years. Maybe I'll make a point of coming across even more Sheldon-like on TV in future, it'll give everyone a good laugh...

What a week!

Well, where to start? I've just come back from a week in China, filming an episode of the popular and awesome show 'Superbrain' in which contestants are pitted against each other in exciting brain-related competition. They're doing a series of international shows, Team China against Team Another Country, and this was Britain's turn. It says something about the organisation of mental sports in this country that the whole Team Britain was organised by the German TV company that did Die Deutschen Meister last year, since apparently there's nobody in Britain who could arrange this kind of thing, but never mind.

I was the captain of the British team (I didn't volunteer or get elected or anything, it was just decided that I was the captain, and the duties of the role only extended to announcing that I was the captain, without actually doing anything) which also included a strong lineup of James Paterson, Katie Kermode and Robert Fountain. We'd had cool video introductions filmed in London previously, to give us a taste of how the whole thing was going to be presented. Mine included magically summoning an umbrella into my hand, and jumping off a building to land on the pavement below. Also, buying comics.

Those wonderful TV people arranged for me to fly out a day early and visit my brother in Harbin, which was amazing. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years, since he's so settled out there now, so we had a lot of catching up to do (this involved staying up all night drinking beer and talking about Thundercats), as well as meeting the people he works with at the university who were all very keen to arrange for me to come back there in term time (Chinese new year holidays when I visited) and give a speech or maybe get a permanent job as a teacher there too.

Having slept about two hours in three days, I then flew off to Nanjing, where I was warmly and enthusiastically received by the TV people - I basically had my own personal attendants for all the time I was there; the director of my particular segment of the challenge and an interpreter who spoke really excellent English. There was also a steady supply of Chinese junk food - McDonalds, pizza and Chinese working lunch boxes - which was more than enough to keep me happy.

My challenge involved delivery boxes - each one had a 12-digit code number on it, and the audience members wrote down their mobile phone numbers on the receipts. I and my opponent then had two hours to memorise the numbers, and then one random code number would be shown on screen and the winner was the first to remember and dial the correct phone. My opponent was Li Lu, who as well as giving me a new teddy bear (Briar or Xiongda from the cartoon Boonie Bears) spent the week talking as if it was a great honour to even be in the same room as a super-brain like myself. In reality, she's the world number 36, and you don't get to be that without being pretty darn brainy yourself, and she was actually quite a bit better and faster at this challenge than me.

The Germans had already filmed their clash with Team China a few weeks previously, and despite Boris and Simon both sporting stylish beards (I've started a real trend there), China triumphed, so it was important to get revenge on behalf of Europe. On the other hand, the Chinese team then consisted mainly of double world champion Wang Feng, and he wasn't in this one, so perhaps we had it a little easier. The most important team task, though, turned out to be deciding on a slogan for us all to chant at the start of the show. After objecting to "Veni vidi vici" on the grounds that it's singular, past tense and all about conquering Britain, we settled on "To victory!"

And certain team members who shall remain nameless had great trouble remembering that two-word slogan, so I have to admit our rallying cry wasn't as good as our opponents'.

I had some quite extensive makeup before appearing in front of the cameras. Normally it's just a case of plastering a lot of powder on my bald shiny skull to stop the reflections of the studio lights dazzling everyone, but they really made a big deal of painting my face orange (on Chinese TV it's apparently the done thing for people's skin to look as pale as possible, and this makeup compensated for that) and fiddling with my eyebrows and everything. They even styled my hair, including hairspray, which is quite a feat when you consider my hair consists of just a few sparse strands on the sides of my head.

I had brought along my black turtleneck, thinking it'd look suitably smart and stylish, but although they did try filming with it (and even sewed up the big hole in the shoulder), they eventually gave up and picked me out a new suit - navy blue trousers and jacket, white open-necked shirt and colourful silk cravat. It looked frankly magnificent! I am so going to wear that kind of thing as part of my regular rotation from now on.

I won't spoil the results of the challenges, since it'll be available for the world to see on the internet when it's broadcast, but I'm sure it'll look awesome and be well worth the two solid days of rehearsal followed by about 14 hours continuous filming. I would love to do this kind of thing every week now - anyone else want me on their TV shows?

Let's have a party with Charlie Brown and Snoopy

Some people, when they find themselves with a huge list of things that really need to be done over the course of a weekend, prioritise the most essential tasks and use effective time management techniques to make sure the best job possible is done. Others give up on the whole thing and decide to devote their time to something reassuringly completely unnecessary and yet entertaining enough to distract them from all those other things they were meaning to do.

With that principle in mind, I hereby rectify the shocking absence from the internet of a really good visual analysis of the relative prominence of characters in the early years of the Peanuts comic. The following graph is a moving annual total of appearance in the daily comic strip; each point shows the number of strips that character has been seen in for the year up to and including that date.

When the strip launched in October 1950 its three regular human characters - Charlie Brown, Shermy and Patty - shared the spotlight, and it's actually Patty who makes the most appearances in the first couple of months. Snoopy, who at this point is an entirely normal dog, plays a supporting role. By the start of 1951, though, Shermy's appearances have already started to dwindle and Charlie Brown becomes established as the star of the series. Shermy never gets any real kind of personality, strangely enough. He's one of life's straight men whose job is to stand there and listen to the punchline once in a while.

The introduction of Violet in February doesn't change the dynamics very much, as there's not much difference between her and Patty, who still features more often. More interesting is when Schroeder makes his debut in May, as a baby who can't yet walk or talk (or even play the piano). He grows up surprisingly quickly, and by the time of Lucy's debut in March 1952 she and Schroeder both are just slightly smaller than the other characters.

Lucy immediately zooms to prominence in the daily strip, mostly at the expense of Patty, although it takes her several months to transform from the baby of the group into the kind of personality she eventually settles on. Linus, when he makes his debut in September, is much more of a slow burner; he remains a baby for a much longer time and settles into a pattern of only occasional appearances for the best part of three years, seen more often only than Shermy (who at one point in 1954/55 shows up only twice in nine months, but doesn't quite get forgotten about altogether).

We settle now into a pattern of Charlie Brown featuring in the majority of strips, with Lucy the other central character and Snoopy gradually getting more anthropomorphised as time goes on (his thought bubbles make a debut around this time and he starts to dance on his hind legs on occasion). Schroeder, Violet and Patty are the supporting players, and it's interesting how closely the lines for Schroeder and Violet stick together on the chart - it's unusual for them to appear together, but they each alternate in strips alongside either Charlie Brown or Lucy.

The other supporting characters of the 1950s don't get much exposure - one-joke character Pig-Pen is used sparingly and Charlotte Braun, although introduced as a new main character, is dropped completely after just a couple of months. There's an almost complete and total lack of other characters, even in the background nor even as passing mentions.

In July 1955 Linus suddenly becomes much more interesting - armed with security blanket and unique philosophy he ages to just a little smaller than the others and starts to play a central role. With Patty and Violet fading to near-Shermy levels of obscurity, the more familiar main cast of Peanuts is in place. We're still a long way away from Snoopy's eventual domination of the strip (in 1957 he'd just started to walk on two legs from time to time), and the sixties add some more major characters to the mix, but I thought seven years was about as far as it was worth going with this. All those other things to do, you see...