Blake's 7, season 1

A personal appreciation of these works of Terry Nation, but no need for consternation, it won't all be in rhyme. That line gave me inspiration, but that kind of application needs a lot of dedication and I just don't have the time.

Sorry, sometimes when I start writing these things my mind shouts things like "Hey, 'appreciation' rhymes with 'Nation', maybe I should write the whole thing as a poem!" and I have to get it out of my system. Anyway, what I sat down to write here was a series of mini reviews of the first year's episodes of Blake's 7 (or, as the logo puts it, "Blakes 7"), the classic British science-fiction series that I've never seen fit to watch before just now. So cast your mind back to January 1978 and take in the new exciting adventures of the titular Seven. It'll be the best part of a month before we find out who the seven are...

#1 "The Way Back"
Blake is one of the drug-dazed working citizens of a futuristic dome-city who's approached by a rebel woman and told that he used to be the head of a rebellion against the Federation government, was captured, brainwashed, made to publicly repent his crimes, brainwashed again and set free with no memory of what had happened before, as an example to the masses. He's sceptical at first, but comes with her to the forbidden outside world and meets the rebellion, only for them to all be found and slaughtered by the creepy black-uniformed Federation troops. The powers that be decide to have Blake framed and convicted of child abuse to stop him being an idol to any remaining rebels, and sent to exile on the distant planet Cygnus Alpha. His court-appointed defence counsel investigates Blake's protests of innocence and discovers the truth, but is then killed by the authorities as Blake departs on a prison ship.

This is a great start to the series, which at this point is strikingly different to any of the other sci-fi shows out there. The cheapness of the sets, props and costumes doesn't detract from the extremely sharp writing and characterisation. It plays with expectations - it feels like the rebels and then the barrister and his girlfriend are going to be central ongoing characters, but then they die. Similarly, with hindsight, it's surprising that we don't see the city authority figures or the slimy Dev Tarrant again, because they look like they're going to be recurring adversaries. Instead, the continuing story just moves onward and into new directions as the series progresses.

And "molesting children"? Surprising that that idea made it into a BBC TV show, and I doubt they'd do it today. It does make the Federation look super-nasty, at least.

Blake in this episode is a bit of a Winston Smith (the 1984 inspiration is very obvious), spending the episode gradually coming out of his trance and starting to recall his past, but he doesn't really do anything except serve as a viewer identification figure. All the active heroic momentum is with characters who die for it. When Blake's put in prison awaiting transportation, he meets two fellow criminals who later turn out to be regular characters but get very little screen time here - kleptomaniac Vila and smuggler Jenna. With hindsight, their characterisation changes a little as the series progresses - Vila here is less comic than he later becomes and seems more of a weaselly smooth-talking pickpocket; Jenna never really has a chance to develop, and despite the talk of her being some kind of space pirate, the high heels, stylish hair, excessive makeup and performance already show that she's going to turn into "the ship's woman" without needing any more personality than that.

Most first episodes end with the status quo having been established and the regular cast in place, but this one, despite being a complete story in itself, is just the first part of a serial. It's cleverly written and it does leave us wanting to come back for more. Four stars out of five. ****



#2 Spacefall"
Aboard the prison ship London, on an eight month journey to Cygnus Alpha, Blake meets his fellow prisoners and attempts an escape. It doesn't work out, thanks mainly to the sadistic first officer Raiker and the general ineptitude of the (suppressant-drugged) prisoners. But fellow prisoner Avon displays his talents and there's always hope of success, until the London comes across an abandoned alien spaceship much better than anything the Federation has access to. When three crewmen are killed or driven mad when trying to get aboard, the captain sends Blake, Avon and Jenna to investigate. They overcome the psychic attacks, take control of the super-ship and fly away.

A great second episode, showing once more what Blake's 7 does best - packing a lot of plot into 45 minutes, and a lot of characters all with their own individual personality, actions and goals. The crew of the London could all be interchangeable prison guards, but instead we get the experienced and somewhat weak-willed captain, the young ambitious crewman and the downright evil Raiker (not only does he defuse the mutiny by announcing that he'll kill a prisoner every thirty seconds until Blake surrenders, after Blake does so he kills a final prisoner anyway, just because he can). Our sympathies are entirely with the crew of criminals - Vila gets some nice moments and the self-interested Avon some excellent ones. We also have Jenna following along behind Blake and being female (although she does repel Raiker's awful sexual advances nicely) and meet big strong man Gan, as well as another prisoner who looks like he's going to join the regular cast, only to die during the mutiny.

Blake gets more of the leading-man role here and we start to admire him as the heroic lead, the only moral man in a universe of evil. Avon, however, quickly turns into the star of the show and we get our first examples of his sarcastic put-downs. The use of computers becomes a regular theme in the series, and here it's done well - in the seventies, there was still a tendency to think of them as adding-machines, but the computer aboard the London does actually control the ship's functions like a modern 21st-century computer would, so kudos for that. ****



#3 "Cygnus Alpha"
Blake, Avon and Jenna get to grips with their new spaceship. Its computer, reading their minds, decides to call itself Zen and the ship The Liberator, and since they've proved able to overcome its attempts to kill them in the last episode, does what they tell it to do. Mostly. Blake, despite Avon's protests, decides to rescue the rest of the prisoners from Cygnus Alpha and then take down the Federation altogether. The Liberator is equipped with teleporters allowing him to beam down to the planet and find that it's run as some kind of religious dictatorship - but a lot of the prisoners are satisfied with that and unwilling to leave for a life doing what Blake tells them instead. Eventually, he's able to rescue just Vila and Gan, and kill off the high priest when he tries to take control of the ship.

Our heroes' story continues, and the cast are beginning to fall into place. The story here, though, is weaker than the previous two, and not helped by Brian Blessed, that master of unsubtle acting, in a central role. The important moment is when Avon and Jenna, left alone on the Liberator and finding that it contains vast amounts of wealth as well as all its futuristic technology, hang around for Blake to return despite the temptation to do a runner. The relationship between Blake and Avon is well-defined already. Between them and Vila, we've got a very compelling cast, making up for the minimal contributions of Jenna and Gan.

All in all, while things are still progressing, this hasn't quite got the impact of the first pair of stories. ***



#4 "Time Squad"
Blake's first step in his campaign against the Federation is to destroy their central communication hub. In the process, he hopes to meet up with another resistance group, but they've all been killed off except alien telepath (only able to mentally project words to others, not to read minds) Cally. Meanwhile, the Liberator picks up another alien ship, this one containing cryogenically-frozen warriors who attack Jenna and Gan. Blake and the gang succeed in destroying the Federation centre and the frozen warriors are defeated too. He proudly announces that the Seven of them - Blake, Avon, Jenna, Vila, Gan, Cally and Zen - will take down the evil Federation.

Another good one in defining the characters and finally setting the status quo for the series - by the end of the episode it's clear who the ongoing cast will be and what they'll be doing each week. Gan gets to show off what makes him special (a "limiter" implant in his head that stops him killing people), but the action on the ship rather suffers from focusing on the two least compelling characters in the series and some enemies who have no personality and exist only to try to kill the heroes - not what we usually expect from the B7 well-rounded bad guys. Similarly, down on the planet there's not much individuality to be seen, just a thing to blow up and a lot of troopers to gun down.

The interaction between the crew is what makes the series special, and there's plenty of that on display here - once again, Avon is the star, but the focus on Cally shows what she can bring to the mix too. It's notable, though, that by this point the idea that Avon, Vila and Jenna are criminals has largely been dropped - Vila's skill at picking locks is more of a heroic attribute, and Avon's continuing unpleasantness is just the way he is as he goes along with Blake's plans. Gan, though we're told here that he's a convicted killer and we're free to start speculating on exactly how much his limiter has changed his personality, is the simple-minded loveable nice-guy through and through.

A fun runaround that promises more adventure for the future. ***



#5 "The Web"
On their way to the next target, Cally is mentally controlled and sends the Liberator to be trapped in a gigantic space web, forcing Blake down to the planet it orbits to investigate. There he finds a race of hostile Decimas and a base of creepy genetic-engineers who created them, and it turns out that they themselves are just the creations of a group-mind head-in-a-jar alien from Cally's planet. Blake is forced to help the genetic engineers with a supply of power cells before they'll let him leave, despite his sympathies lying with the Decimas they want to destroy. Eventually, the Decimas get into the base and brutally slaughter the engineers and their master, while the Liberator crew are freed to go on their way.

The first real clunker of the series, this is what I call "a Star Trek episode". Rather than furthering the ongoing plot of the series, the team stumbles on an alien planet and solves a local problem before flying off into the night again. As a story itself, it doesn't really hold up, but there are still some nice touches that Star Trek would never consider doing - most notably, the division between good guys and bad guys is much more ambiguous; Blake sides with the Decimas just because one of them asks him not to kill it, but they are otherwise violent, nasty little things, and as Avon sneeringly points out at the end, maybe not so deserving of being labelled helpless little victims.

It's for the viewer to speculate rather than anything that's spelled out, but presumably it's Blake who deliberately leaves the base door open at the end of the episode, which says a lot about his attitude. For the first time, though, the low budget makes it difficult to really appreciate the plot - nice though the Decima costumes are (cleverly blending in with the trees), the setting is obviously an English woodland, draped with fake webs and inexplicable Rover-from-The-Prisoner-style balloons. The main bad guy, consisting very obviously of a man sticking his head through a hole with a little puppet body dangling underneath him, doesn't work at all, and the ideas about scientific advance aren't good or clear enough to overcome that.

There's some nice Avon-and-Blake interaction again, and with hindsight this episode serves a purpose in keeping the crew busy while word-of-mouth about them spreads, but since that's not revealed until next episode we can't really consider it a plus point for this one. One star. *



#6 "Seek---Locate---Destroy"
Even though they've only done one thing so far, word about Blake and his team of dashing outlaws with the super-spaceship has caught on, to the extent that Blake is now being credited with every act of rebellion against the Federation, big or small. They have to take action, and supreme commander Servalan appoints space commander Travis to the task. He's an old enemy of Blake, and gets to work immediately. Blake's crew destroy another Federation installation with the aim of secretly stealing a decoding device enabling them to spy on Federation communications. Cally is left behind and captured, and Travis uses her to lure Blake into a trap, only to be defeated in the end.

Now we're introduced to the recurring villains of the series, and presented with the first of many inexplicable refusals by Blake to kill Travis. Sadly, it doesn't make much sense, and after a very promising start (in which he investigates the scene of Blake's first raid very thoroughly and correctly deduces what they were after), his plan is badly flawed. If you're going to lure the hero into a trap, then you set the trap FIRST, and THEN send the message that lures him in, Travis! It's just common sense. That rather undermines the nice twist that was subtly and cleverly set up earlier in the episode.

Despite the flaws, this is a good one - most notably, the scientists at the station Blake attacks include one who not only makes an intelligent effort to fight back against the rebels, but helps Travis with his subsequent investigation. He's not particularly evil, even though he's loyal to the Federation, and that's the kind of detail that sets B7 apart from other series. By now the crew are interacting very nicely all the time, and the fact that every episode is written and script-edited by the same people means that they're always consistently depicted. The presence of a ridiculous-looking "security robot" and a glaringly 20th-century-Earth exterior shoot doesn't really impinge on the suspension of disbelief here, which is a great credit to the scriptwriting. ****


#7 "Mission to Destiny"
The Liberator comes across a spaceship circling aimlessly, and our heroes teleport over to find the crew all unconscious. Someone has tried to steal an item of immeasurable value that could save their planet or be sold for a profit, murdering the ship's pilot and sleep-gassing the crew. It's up to Avon to deduce who did it, while the Liberator contends with a meteor shower.

This really shouldn't work at all - it's a whodunnit that's just been transplanted into Blake's 7 with no regard for character or sense. There's no real reason why Avon should play the detective (except his desire to be clever and always right, which is very important to him) and no reason not to just bring the whole crew aboard the Liberator and take them home. Add to that the question of how, having flown through the meteors in such a way that their power and shields have explicitly been drained, the Liberator can then turn round and go back to the ship without any problem, and you've got an episode that just doesn't add up.

Despite all that, it's fun! Avon is brilliant as always, and the explanation of the vital clue, although it would be more at home on Jonathan Creek than Blake's 7, is nicely done. Significantly, all the crew of the ship have the usual complex and interesting personalities, which works well in making them all suspects and in making it a believable story. (Two of the men share quarters, and a modern mind can't help wonder if they're a couple, for all that one of them seems to try to chat up Cally at one point - they certainly bicker like an old married couple, anyway). Not a Blake's 7 episode by any stretch of the imagination, but entertaining enough to merit two stars. It would be three if not for the ending in which Blake casually mentions that he's set a bomb to kill the villain and whoever might come along to meet up with them. **



#8 "Duel"
The Liberator has been caught by Travis's pursuit ships and is in trouble until the inhabitants of a planet nearby use their astonishing powers to transport Blake and Travis down to the planet, freeze their ships in their tracks, and force the two leaders to fight to the death, throwing Jenna and a Mutoid crewmember into the mix just to make it a bit more interesting. The helpless remainder of the Liberator crew can do nothing but watch as Blake and Jenna struggle against their enemies and the environment they find themselves in. In the end, despite the urging of the more bloodthirsty one of the planet's inhabitants, Blake refuses to kill Travis, and by doing so is declared the winner and set free. Travis doesn't learn any lesson from the experience and vows to destroy Blake once and for all.

I categorise "The Web" and "Mission To Destiny" as Star Trek episodes, but I don't give this one that title, even though the basic plot is a staggeringly blatant rip-off of an actual episode of Star Trek. "Duel" develops Travis and the relationship between him and Blake (with hindsight, Travis's time in the spotlight here only leads to future episodes when he plays the part of Servalan's sidekick, but that comes later) and shows the real talent for characterisation that we've got used to by now. Particularly good is the Mutoid, one of Travis's vampire cyborg subordinates, and his attempt, stuck on the planet with no other company, to engage her in conversation and see what kind of emotions and reactions he can provoke.

Travis goes about the task of defeating Blake in an intelligent way, and that he doesn't win out in the end is down to a miscalculation - maybe if he'd let the Mutoid suck Jenna's blood, she would have had the strength to cut the crucial rope with the first swing, or maybe Travis is right to think there wouldn't be time for that before Blake arrives. He's still presented as a plausible enemy, although once again we're given a feeble and insufficient justification for Blake not wanting to kill him at the end of the show.

Also nice is that the godlike being who creates the scenario is assisted by a sidekick who clearly just wants the two opponents to kill each other because she's entertained by the idea, adding a typical B7 ambuiguity to the moral and the good/evil definition. Poor Jenna is still just a damsel in distress, though, and the rest of the crew are sidelined. ***



#9 "Project Avalon"
A mission to meet up with a resistance group headed by Avalon turns into an attempt to rescue her from a Federation base, because Travis got there first and wiped out the rest of the resistance. Servalan is also present, with a killer virus designed to wipe out Blake's team and leave the Liberator undamaged and a trick up her sleeve in the form of a perfect robotic duplicate Avalon.

The biggest flaw with this one is Avalon herself - for one thing, she's supposed to be an interplanetary resistance leader, but from what we see of her her only talent is to stand around and look pretty. For another, the episode ends with Avalon on board the Liberator and her resistance unit wiped out, but then she's never mentioned in any subsequent episode.

Servalan and Travis by this point have rather degenerated into ineffective villains - Travis's whining that he was hindered in his two previous attempts to kill Blake by being under orders to capture the Liberator intact seems like a last-minute justification shoved into the script here, and the plan to let Blake's team into the base to rescue the robot Avalon which will then eventually unleash the virus seems much more convoluted than it needs to be. And once again Blake tries to justify why he doesn't kill Travis at the end, only to leave them in a situation where they would have been killed anyway if not for a quick reaction from Travis to catch the virus-containing sphere safely. Also, the security robot returns and looks stupider than ever.

The interactions between the crew salvage it a little, though there's nothing too special in this episode, and I do appreciate the fact that the planet isn't an "ice planet", it just has a particularly cold bit where the action is set, and also the way that Travis is fired by Servalan at the end, which gives us a sense of progression rather than repeating the same old stories over and over. Still only gets two stars, though. **



#10 "Breakdown"
Gan's limiter is giving him pain, and when Jenna tries to help, he attacks her. When he's subdued in the medical bay, the crew find that he needs intricate neurosurgery to save his life. Their attempts to get to a neutral space station are hindered by Zen's refusal to travel through a 'prohibited' area, forcing Avon to try to override the systems before the Liberator is torn apart by a magnetic field. And then when they get to the station, the doctor sees more profit in letting Gan die and selling Blake and the gang out to the Federation. It takes the whole crew working together to save the day, and Gan.

My favourite episode of the series, just because it gives everyone a moment in the spotlight. Avon is particularly wonderful - his sardonic response to Blake's speculation that one of them could perform brain surgery by having Zen give them step-by-step instructions is hilarious, but his best moment is when he's struggling to make sense of the alien computer technology to re-establish control of the ship and Blake keeps pestering him by asking how long it would take. "I can talk or I can work!" And when he calls back a little later and snaps "Blake, I can't do it, we have to go back," you feel for him, because it's been built up so often that he so much hates to admit failure. When he finally decides to leave Blake's crew, only to come back to them in the end, we're right behind him all the way.

And everyone else is wonderfully on form, too. Blake's threat to the doctor, "I will destroy your hands," is chillingly delivered. Vila's unexpected heroism in deducing that the doctor is 'clever' and taking steps to stop him is very nice. Cally telling Blake that his treatment of Gan is 'barbarous' is her moment of individuality, and this one gives us the best exploration of Zen's occasional frustrating unhelpfulness. He has been programmed to consider a vast swathe of space 'prohibited', and doesn't tell the crew about this because they don't know to ask. Only when it turns out that his estimated travel time to a certain destination is four times longer than Avon knows it to be do they eventually manage to establish what's going on, and he is quite prepared to disable all his control systems when they overrule him and go into the prohibited zone anyway, even if it will kill the crew to do so. It somehow makes Zen into more of a character.

As for Gan, it's intriguing how he cleverly tricks Cally into releasing him, and then goes after Avon, the crew member who dislikes him the most. Makes you wonder if that's his 'normal' personality and the limiter is what makes him into the amiable dimwit we know and love. And then there's the doctor, his assistant and the space station commander, who all get well-rounded and complex personalities and motivations. Brilliant stuff all-round. *****



#11 "Bounty"
Blake and Cally attempt to recruit the former leader of an independent planet to their cause, to forestall a Federation plan to take over the planet and install him as puppet ruler. However, the Liberator is then taken over by Space Arabs who intend to sell the ship to the Federation - and what's more, Jenna is an old friend of their leader and seems to have switched sides!

This one really doesn't work at all. Avon actually sums it up quite nicely - "None of us showed conspicuous intelligence on this occasion." The crew are quite spectacularly stupid, allowing the Space Arabs to capture them and take over the Liberator without the slightest difficulty. Also, what happened to the tradition of giving the guest characters individual personalities? The Space Arabs are cardboard cut-out baddies, the politician is just annoying and serves no purpose in the story except padding it out a little bit longer, and there's just not much to the plot here at all.

Jenna is the weak point more than anything else, though - her story would work if we'd had even the slightest hint that she was the space pirate smuggler that the first episode suggested she was, but there's been nothing else to suggest that ever since then, and she just isn't an interesting enough character or (to be brutally honest) a good enough actor to take the lead role here. Also, the Space Arabs are just as stupid and offensive as I make them sound. *



#12 "Deliverance"
A small spaceship explodes and crashes on a planet where the inhabitants have been reduced to Space Cavemen by a war. It turns out that this is part of Servalan's plan to acquire something called Orac, and she calls a reluctant Travis into her service to help her accomplish it. The Liberator happens on the scene, and searching for survivors, Avon, Vila, Jenna and Gan find a hidden ancient rocket launch base with a guardian who hails Avon as a god. They're left stuck on the planet when the survivor of the crash hijacks the Liberator and orders them to take him to his father and Orac straight away.

It is great to see Avon's reaction to being worshipped; a situation that finally brings out some modesty and even compassion in him. Another episode where we see that he's really started to like Vila, but definitely not Gan. We're given no explanation as to why Blake uncharacteristically doesn't come down to the planet with them, and the dialogue even flags it up as unusual - presumably the real-world explanation is the needs of the plot of the following episode, or the fact that Blake and Cally were in the location filming for the previous one, or both.

Where it suffers is the plot with the hijack of the ship. Ensor the hijacker has to be seriously deranged for it to make much sense, and then it's just a case of Blake and Cally sitting around and waiting for him to die, then going back to pick up the others. Down on the planet, Jenna's contribution is to be kidnapped by cavemen (who have access to an enormous amount of animal skins to make their clothes and tents, even though there are no animals in evidence). But we're set up nicely for the final episode. ***



#13 "Orac"
With the crew having picked up a bad case of radiation poisoning having been down on the planet for too long in the last episode, Blake and Cally need to hurry to find Ensor senior and get the drugs they need from him, as well as saving his life and keeping the super-computer Orac from the clutches of Servalan and Travis. Having done so, they're faced with Orac's prediction of the future - the Liberator explodes.

Super-computers that can predict the future are something I associate with late-1950s Superman comics, but Orac's personality is quite entertaining, making it more of a crew-member than a plot-device. Ensor is an interesting character, too, if a little silly, and his death is nicely written. Servalan, meanwhile, is excellent in this one - out from behind her desk and on her own unauthorised mission, we have the one moment when she's knocked out of her comfort zone by the monster attack, and it shows that she's human after all.

The interaction between the dying Liberator crew is as great as ever, and makes up for the questions like 'where did Servalan get the map' and 'why can't Ensor's impenetrable force field block the tunnels too'. It's a shame the story has to end with yet another instance of Blake declining to kill Travis, seeing as it's the end of the series and that would have given a bit of finality. It doesn't really feel like an ending, so it's a good thing they went ahead and commissioned a second series for the next year... ***

The BBC are trying too hard

Having got the rights to FA Cup coverage back this season, all their commentators and website-news-article-writers are clearly under strict orders to say how awesome the FA Cup is at every opportunity. Even a dull game like the 0-0 draw between Cambridge and Man Utd's second-string players last night was enlivened by the commentators remembering every five minutes to say what a cracking game it was!

Thing is, the FA Cup IS awesome! They don't need to go to such extremes to convince people it's great, it does that naturally. Calm down, BBC people, please.

In other news, we're nearing the end of XMT qualification. Here's my best attempt at remembering 80 digits in under a minute:



A bit annoying that I didn't manage to remember all 80 in my next four attempts at doing a faster time, but 29 seconds is a reasonable kind of time to aim for in the competition itself (with my system, it works out to 27 images, whereas a pack of cards is 26, so under 30 seconds is still a great result - people with a basic two-digit, one-card system will use fewer images with numbers than in cards so might do better times here).

The thing about numbers is that you don't rearrange things into the right order in the recall (like you do with cards and images), you have to remember them all perfectly without any prompts. Despite finding my own "qualification" attempt a bit annoying, I think I still come down on the side of this being a good thing, just because it makes it a bit different and forces people to think about the right strategy to go for in head-to-head competition...

Der der DER der der, der der DER der der...

That was the Blake's 7 theme tune, if you couldn't tell. Possibly it's not as obvious as I thought it might be, even to people intimately familiar with the series.

Anyway, the point is that I am now, officially, a huge obsessive fanatical Blake's 7 fan. Is there a name for fans? I'll look it up. I am one, anyway. I've only watched the first ten episodes in the past week or so, but even if the other 42 turn out to be rubbish (and the online consensus seems to be that they tend that way as the series progresses), I'm sufficiently enraptured by season one that I'm pretty sure I'm a fan for life. With hindsight, I really should have watched it when it was first on telly, and even the fact that I was 15 months old when it started really isn't much of an excuse. Shame on me.

Episode 10, "Breakdown", is the one I've been watching tonight, and it's a perfect example of what I love about the show. On a minimal budget, ten actors on a couple of sets in BBC Television Centre produce a real masterpiece of character drama. That's what the best episodes of B7 (if that's what the official way to abbreviate it is) do - every person who appears in the story has a full, rich, individual personality and they interact in clever and interesting ways. This one is especially good at giving each one of the Seven full scope to explore their characters and motivations in depth (well, except maybe Gan, who spends most of the episode either unconscious or homicidally insane, but even he has his moments).

I won't spoil the story for anyone else who might want to check it out, but I urge you all to go and become a Blake's 7 fan too, please. I'm going to the next convention. If there aren't conventions, I'm organising one. I'll start working on my Avon costume.

I was an impossible case

Names! And I feel like I'm only doing this qualification attempt out of a desire for completeness. I really should make more of an effort to learn how to remember what people are called or what they look like.



I could have manufactured a better score for this by learning in advance the relatively small selection of names and faces that the training software provides, but there doesn't seem much point - presumably in the XMT itself we'll get all-new faces. If I had to qualify, perhaps I would have done that, but then again maybe I'd just have assumed I could get through on my scores in the other disciplines, just like I've done in every other memory competition I've ever competed in...

I missed my twice-daily training on Thursday and Friday because of having to work extra late (big rush to meet a deadline, not an accounting one but it was something everyone had to chip in with), but I'm back on song now. Next week is numbers! I'm very curious to see what the top score will be in that - I'm expecting something under 20 seconds...

I really should blog more, shouldn't I?

Johannes Zhou, star of XMT qualifying, has joined the ranks of memory-themed bloggers! So you can all add that to your regular diet of memory-talk, along with the likes of Johann Randall Abrina and Nelson Dellis!

So, in my capacity as the first ever memory competitor to have a blog* I feel that I should make more of an effort to entertain the world with daily ramblings about nothing in particular. I'll think of something to say tomorrow, probably.


* I have no idea whether or not this is true.

The computer counts as one of the seven

I don't know what made me suddenly feel like googling Blake's 7 on Friday, but I'm very glad I did. It turns out every episode is available on YouTube, albeit peppered with adverts every couple of minutes, I've watched the first four already and I think it's just awesome! I'll get the DVDs when I have the time and money.

Meanwhile, qualification for the XMT continues apace - the deadline for submitting your images qualification attempt is midnight tonight, and nearly everyone has done it already, so we can see who's in those coveted top 16 places, and who's nipping at their heels.

The standard time for images turned out to be hugely wrong, so the scores are a bit distorted and weighted in favour of that discipline; maybe the XMT bosses could change it from 30 seconds to 20 to bring it more in line with the other four disciplines, or maybe that would create a storm of outrage from the qualifiers? Actually, I can't really give a disinterested opinion on that, because while changing the standard would move Simon further ahead of me, it would catch me up with Boris - the three of us are only competing for fun, but wanting to win is all part of the fun...

As for the people who are actually trying to qualify, we've currently got this lineup:
1 Johannes Zhou
2 Yanjindulam Altansuh
3 Enhkjin Tumur
4 Johann Randall Abrina
5 Tsogbadrakh Saikhanbayar
6 Marwin Wallonius
7 Annalena Fischer
8 Tuuruul Myagmarsuren
9 Anne Reulke
10 Enkhmunkh Erdenebatkhaan
11 Marlo Knight
12 Alexander Mullen
13 Purevjav Erdenesaikhan
14 Konstantin Skudler
15 Juliane Fischer
16 Tsetsegzul Zorigtbaatar

A whole lot of those young Mongolians in there - Enkhjin Tumur leads the way with a particularly fast images time. We also have Johann, Marwin and Annalena who all competed last year, didn't do spectacularly well, but will probably be much harder to beat in 2015 now they've got that experience. Yay for Marlo too, and Katie and Clay aren't far outside the top 16 either, so maybe after next week we'll have a big Team Britain in there!

Next week - Names. I got 16 in a practice session yesterday, and that's entirely respectable.

Propelling Pencil Problems Prevent Procrastination

I've got the latest issue of Super Hanjie, and I was intending to sit down and do puzzles this morning, but both my propelling pencils have run out of lead, so I had to do something productive instead.

What I did, in fact, was my final two qualification attempts for images in the XMT - here's a video of the one that was successful:



I'm very happy with that, because those last two images I placed I was very unsure about - I couldn't remember seeing the one that ended up in position 20 at all, and 24 I was pretty dubious about, so it was sort of half guesswork. But it was right, and that's what counts!

Images is really a great leveller - it's new to everyone, obviously, so nobody's had much time to prepare systems and techniques to improve their times. And even if they had, it's memory sports on the most basic level - you're given pictures, and just have to picture them in the right sequence as quickly as possible. And having managed a good time myself, it does wonders for my self-confidence; I do now feel more like I have a right to be at the XMT this year and I'm not just qualified for it on the strength of my past performance.

So now I can turn my fretting from 'should I be there at all?' to 'how are they going to work out the seedings for the group stage draw?' - See, if they go on WMSC rankings, and Wang Feng or Sengesamdan Ulzhiikhutag don't leap into the qualifying at the last minute and come to the XMT after all, I'll be the sixth seed and thus end up in the all-important pot 1 for the draw. But if they base it on something like 'the top four from last year's XMT and the best two quarter-finalists based on their group-stage points', I have a sinking feeling I could end up as seventh seed and thus end up in a group with Simon Reinhard and a couple of names-and-faces experts again.

No, actually, what I need to do is get over the mental block that I'm not as good as Simon Reinhard! That's entirely the wrong attitude, and I hereby slap myself on the wrist for it. I don't have this kind of inferiority complex with Jonas von Essen, and he's the world freaking champion, why am I automatically assuming that I won't have a chance if I'm paired up with Simon? Think positive, Zoomy - imagine you're the best in the world and maybe one day you will be; that's what the motivational speakers say, and who am I to argue?

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!

Stupid addictive internet

I feel quite accomplished for having done two practices each day of the XMT disciplines, plus a five-minute binary, this weekend, despite the quite excessive temptation to play compelling games on the internet instead that's been thrown in my path. I really might manage to do a bit more next weekend, in my continuing quest to get back into memory-man mental fitness, but here's what's been keeping me away from memorising...

The World's Biggest Pac-Man - play thousands of differently-shaped levels of Pac-Man, or design your own!

Hectoc - make 100 from any random selection of six numbers, as in 85+1/1+7+7=100

2048 - match numbers together, slidey-puzzle style, until they add up to 2048

There, now you can all spend your time playing these things too! Nyah!

It's a Ben thing

Looking at videos of myself memorising cards has shown me that I fiddle with my beard when I'm concentrating. I had absolutely no idea I did that. It does explain why last week at work when people were talking about some obscure subject and I was wondering whether to jump in with my huge store of trivial knowledge or just get on with my work, a colleague said "Ben's stroking his beard, that means he's got something to say..."

Obviously it's a thing that I do. I bet it's a real giveaway when I'm playing poker, too.

Go and qualify for the XMT!

Everyone is cordially invited to try to beat this time and submit it on the training website



You're also invited to set your video camera up in the right position so that your head can be seen - I'm slightly concerned that my video doesn't follow the rules and would get my qualification attempt disqualified if not for the fact that I qualify automatically and I'm only doing this for fun. I hope the people in charge would be generous and let me off the hook if I asked them nicely.

After all, I went to all the trouble of setting my seldom-used video camera up on top of my ironing board and a precarious pile of the first books that came to hand. And looking at the eclectic selection of books made me wonder if I really need to have quite so many books lying around the place - there was "The Reality Dysfunction" by Peter E Hamilton (borrowed from a friend many years ago, never returned and never read), "Still - William" by Richmal Crompton, the Bible (can't claim to have read that all the way through either), "Tawny Talent" by Falcon Travis (book about cub scouts that I've owned since I was a cub scout myself and haven't opened or glanced at since those days), "The Woman In White" by Wilkie Collins and "Under The Dome" by Stephen King.

I did do a time of 22.98 in another qualification attempt, but wasn't anywhere close to getting the recall right...

Or let's talk about comics!

What I should have mentioned yesterday is that it was Stan Lee's 92nd birthday. He's still awesome. People who say "he created Spider-Man" or any other cool superhero you could name are missing the point, you know. It wasn't a case of "wow, a man with sort of spider-like powers, what a brilliant idea!", it was "hey, a superhero with real-life problems that I can relate to!" It was the whole different approach to comics that Stan Lee pulled out of his brain in a creative few years in the early 1960s, and that's why he's still so awesome fifty-something years later.

Let's talk football

There needs to be more about football on the internet, after all. So let's hear it for Southampton - half-way through the season and they're in the Champions League places! I'm pretty sure nobody expected that; or at least I know I didn't. At the start of the season I was saying 'oh, that's a shame, they had a great season last year, but now they've cashed in and sold all their star players, that's going to backfire on them in a big way, I bet they get relegated now.' Well, that shows what I know. Three cheers for the Saints.

That leaves me with a bit of a dilemma as a non-specific-team-supporting football fan, though. I really want Arsenal to finish fourth again, mainly because I'm such a big fan of homeostasis, but now I also want Southampton to finish in the top four because they've confounded my expectations so hugely. Which means I won't be satisfied unless Man Utd have a really disastrous 2015 and slide out of contention, and that's not a nice thing to wish on such an illustrious team. I suppose I'd also be satisfied with the same thing happening to Chelsea or Man City, but let's be realistic here, that's not going to happen.

If it's any comfort to the Man Utd fans out there, I don't care in the slightest about West Ham, so Man Utd can finish 6th (after Spurs - homeostasis again) and still qualify for the Europa League, probably. I don't mind that.

Let's get ready to rumble. Extremely.

Qualification for the XMT starts on Monday, at midnight UTC (which turns out to mean GMT, I had to look it up). There's a video demonstrating how to do your own video of qualification attempts - you get five attempts at the discipline of the week, which next week is cards, followed by images, names, numbers and words, and your attempt has to be caught on camera, to discourage cheating.

I can still think of ways to cheat - villains will probably have some sort of dual-screen set-up with their henchman, Igor, scribbling down the cards very quickly and quietly and holding up a crib sheet off-camera for Doctor Diabolical to sneakily read from - but I recommend that rather than relying on Igor's handwriting being good enough, you play by the rules and qualify honestly. It's much more fun that way! Also, the prize for just turning up and not being able to memorise anything isn't enough to cover the cost of your travel and Igor's salary, so crime just doesn't pay.

I myself will be doing qualification attempts and even filming them, even though I don't need to, because that's exactly the kind of thing I need to keep the training motivation flowing. I'll share the videos with you all here, assuming I can get my head around the necessary technology.

I'm dreaming of a white Boxing Day

Hey, look, it's snowing!

Doctor Who is still rubbish nowadays

To be fair, the season-ending two-parter was fun to watch - I don't mind it being a re-write of a story they've already done over and over again if it's still entertaining. But the Christmas special didn't have that excuse, and good grief, can they really not think of a better idea than the dreams-within-dreams thing? Here's hoping they've hired some new writers for 2015.

In other news, I'm still faithfully training in each XMT discipline twice a day at least, and have resolved to do some work on the national-standard disciplines as well on some kind of regular schedule going forwards. The Welsh championship in March isn't too far away, and it'd be nice to go to a competition feeling like I'm prepared and able to put in a good score. To be quite frank, the scores I got in 2014 were really disturbing - I've been out-of-practice before and still produced much better performances than that, but lately I seem to have sunk to a whole new level of unpreparedness. Which is strange, because while I haven't done any kind of regular training, I have managed little bits here and there - I guess the years of not really devoting myself to memory practice have caught up with me. We'll just have to see what I can do about that.

And then there's the Tenth Cambridge/Friendly Memory Championship to think about, too! I'm thinking of holding it in June next year, to avoid the really congested May of the 2015 memory championship calendar. Anyone with any preferences for date should shout out now. Location may or may not be Attenborough - after being baked alive there in 2014, it's possible that we might find a place not dominated by such a big window and lacking in air conditioning, but I'll keep you all informed about that...

Let's get training!

We now have a training website for the Extreme Memory Tournament! It's the kind of thing you have to pay $25 to use, which isn't something I generally approve of, but on the other hand we probably should stop expecting people to run these tournaments and give us money for free, because it's not a very sound business model. And it only equates to £16 in real money, which is hardly anything, so go on and pay it with my blessing.

In all seriousness, it's great to have something that provides a framework for a little bit of daily training - I did one of each discipline last night, and then again this morning, and I'm planning to stick to the two-a-day routine I established last year. I'm going to do the official qualifying thing too, even though I'm automatically qualified already, just because it's a challenge to aim for. It'll be embarrassing if my best scores aren't good enough to qualify, but hopefully I can avoid that. I did 26.79 seconds in the cards this morning.

The new images discipline is fun, it's sort of like the words, with a cards-style recall and the particular difficulty of maybe getting two images that are really quite similar and having to quickly think of a way to tell them apart. And the change to 80 digits in numbers makes that one quite a lot more difficult - last year I juggled the last five images, 15 digits, in my short-term memory (quickly reading and then repeating the words to myself rather than focusing on what the images looked like), and obviously that's a significantly smaller proportion of the numbers now it's gone up to 80, so I don't expect the times will be proportionate to the super-fast ones people recorded in 2014.

But we'll just have to see what happens - it's great to have a new memory challenge, and maybe it'll inspire me to do a bit of normal training, too? The sky's the limit.

The Haikou Adventure

If you haven't seen it already, check out Nelson Dellis's blog of his World Memory Championship exploits!

Nelson is quite right to start with the post-competition meal, which as I've mentioned before is always the highlight of any memory championship - the Indian restaurant down the road from the hotel was really nice, and the drinking competition was a fitting end to three solid days of memorising. My own slow drinking time happened to be exactly the same as the world record time for speed cards, which gave everyone a laugh, and after the meal we all (that is, me, Phill and Jake from Team Britain, Nelson, Brad, John and Ademola from Team USA, Boris, Florian and Tsogbadrakh) went back to the closing ceremony and found that cheap cans of lager made the usual interminable event comparatively fly by!

But to start from the beginning, departing from Manchester at some point in the early morning, travelling via Amsterdam and Beijing to Haikou and getting to the hotel about half past one in the afternoon of the next day, local time, is the kind of thing that disturbs your sleep patterns. I really didn't sleep more than a couple of hours a night while I was there, which didn't help my performance in the competition. Granted, a lack of training contributed perhaps a little bit to that as well... But having arrived, I went straight to my room, had a nap, then went for dinner (KFC) with Simon, Boris, Florian, Søren and Søren's wife (whose name I must try to remember next time), and got prepared for the excitement of trying to remember things for three solid days.

Two things I learned on the long flight over: the Chinese subtitles for the Big Bang Theory seem to include explanations of the untranslatable plays on words as well as translations of what the characters are saying, and the film "Edge of Tomorrow" is completely, surprisingly, awesome! I'm sure everyone's describing it as a cross between Groundhog Day and Independence Day, but that's not entirely fair, because Independence Day was rubbish. It's actually a cross between Groundhog Day and a REALLY GOOD alien invasion movie!

Things I learned after arriving - I still get mobbed by fans who want a photo with me (or, moving with the times, "can I take a selfie with you?"), even though it's five years since I've done anything impressive in the memory competition world. And, more importantly, it's still great to go out, eat junk food and talk at length about memory systems with other enthusiasts. I must spend more time doing that in future, it's the only cure for lack-of-motivation!

"Your name here, make the game more meaminful", was the bold and slightly unusual slogan on the giant World Memory Championship poster in the hotel lobby for everyone to sign their names on. Phill, Jake and I (the entirety of Team Britain) had a chuckle about the spelling mistake before Phill unveiled the new and extremely stylish Team Britain T-shirts, with personalised designs on the front and back. Mine had "Zoomy" in big letters on the back, with "Ben Bridmore" underneath it. So, you know, most of the letters were right, and a little dab of tippex would have made it say my actual name, but we left it as it was. More meaminful that way.

Oh, and this whole thing was captured on camera, so I hope it'll be a highlight of the finished documentary! The Chinese team were all sporting uniform shirts saying they were at "The 23rd Word Memory Championships", so really, we were just following the trend.

Rather than writing about my own performance, which was uniformly awful, it'd be better to focus on the battle between the two people sitting either side of me in the front row of seats - Simon Reinhard to my left and Jonas von Essen to my right. It was a close contest all the way through, which took me by surprise a little; judging others by my own standards as usual, I had assumed Jonas would struggle to keep in training the year after winning the championship for the first time, but in fact he was hugely on the ball, all the way through. It all came down to a thrilling finish with the speed cards, just like all the best championships do!

Going into the final discipline, Jonas was ahead by 357 points, but everyone knows that Simon is capable of super-fast times at speed cards, while Jonas hasn't yet been able to get under 30 seconds. (In my day, nobody could get close to 30 seconds, and there were only a tiny handful of people who could do under 40, but it's a new world out there...) Not being involved in the fight for the top places, I could play about with possible permutations on my spreadsheet to my heart's content - if Jonas did his roughly-estimated 'safe' time of 41 seconds, Simon would win it with 23. If Jonas did 35, Simon needed just over 21...

Actually, Jonas did do a perfect pack in 35.55 seconds in the first trial. Simon attempted 21.95, but didn't get it right. That time wasn't quite quick enough, anyway - 21.35 would have done it. So in the second trial, he went all in, and stopped the clock in just under 19 seconds! But, sadly, it wasn't quite correct, and Jonas retains the World Memory Championship for another year!

Results can be found here - of note are the performances of Team Mongolia, spearheaded by Sengesamdan Ulziikhutag (difficult to pronounce but also very difficult to beat at memorising!) and numbers-master and master-boozer Tsogbadrakh Saikhanbayar. I really hope to see them at a lot of competitions in the future, difficult though it always is to get visas in and out of Mongolia. Marwin Wallonius was also hugely improved and awesome this year - flatteringly enough, he was still asking me for advice on how to improve his systems while producing the kind of scores I couldn't even dream of. And Boris Konrad was as consistent as ever; this is his tenth consecutive World Memory Championship that he finished somewhere between 4th and 8th! That really takes some doing, since the scores get higher every year and the people at the top keep changing...

Between Germany, Sweden and Mongolia, it's hard to imagine how Team Britain can ever force its way into the top three, but that's our resolution. I really want to get back in training and challenge for the title again, and I throw down the gauntlet to all other British memorisers - somebody beat me! We've decided that losing to my own countrymen would really give me the kick up the backside I need!

Big cheers and thanks and wild admiration as always go to the people who organised the whole event - Phil Chambers was struggling with a terrible cold, but ran things perfectly. Dominic O'Brien was a great ambassador for the sport as always, and caught at least one genuine cheat! Andy Fong, Angel Lai and Elaine Colliar got everything running extremely smoothly, Tony Buzan was his own inimitable self, and an army of arbiters did a sensational job! Roll on next year, when I might even get back into the top twenty...

XMT is coming...

Are you ready?

I am, anyway, but I hope you're all keeping an eye on the website and getting prepared for the qualifying.

Meanwhile, I'm going to belatedly fill you all in about the adventures I've had in China, just as soon as I get a chance. Watch this space. Or take a break now and then to watch the telly, I won't mind.

China awaits!

The World Memory Championship in Haikou is almost upon us! I'm much much less prepared for it than I ever have been for a world championship before, so I'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun. I hear that there are more competitors than can fit into the competition room, so it's bound to be an interesting event, and I'm flying out tomorrow morning! Via Amsterdam and Beijing!

I actually can't remember the last time I went somewhere exotic. Was it San Diego, in April? I probably shouldn't complain that I'm only having two trips to different continents this year, should I?

Doctor Who is rubbish nowadays

And to think I spent most of last year being awestruck by how wonderful it was, too. It's like they've genuinely run out of ideas - everything we've had in 2014 (and the Christmas special in 2013) is just re-hashing the same stuff they've done over the last few years, without any kind of original thinking behind it. It's not Peter Capaldi's fault, you could see he'd do a good job if they gave him a script that let him say or do anything, but they really need to re-think the whole thing and go with something new.

Get rid of the contemporary Earth setting for a bit, it's been done to death, and go out exploring the universe of time and space, will you? It's a time machine...

Another extremey update

I should address this now, before anyone gets some funny ideas. Obviously there is a lot of money at stake here, and having a qualifying round online is going to bring up all sorts of questions and concerns for most serious competitors. Specifically with regards to cheating.

But rest assured. First of all, all online submissions must be accompanied by a video. The requirements will be EXTREMELY strict (continuous filming, no cuts or edited segments, shot at a specific angle, with certain things that must be in view of the shot, etc.). Any case that is questionable or leaves us unsure, will be disqualified. Obviously there will be some level of subjectivity. The judging committee will be made up of a few of us who are organizing the event (we are all very involved in the memory world and know what's up), and we will always hold the right to reject, question, re-try, accept anyone we choose (if you don't like that, then you don't have to compete, simple enough). The goal is to be as fair as possible, obviously. But we are going to look at every case with the same amount of care as any other. For example, If we've never heard of you and you come in with an absolutely crazy amazing score, you bet your butt we are going to look into that very carefully. But also, if you're the World Memory Champion and you hit a world record, we will equally look into that as well. That's not to say we will assume it's cheating, but we will make sure it is legit as best as we can so that every one has an equally fair chance of making it into the 2015 XMT.

So there you have it. While this is supposed to be a fun and exciting competition amongst competitors who are passionate about memory sports, a day will come when someone wants to cheat their way to victory. Yes, this competition has rules and regulations, but it's still relatively "mom and pop" run. Simon Orton and I (Nelson Dellis) created this thing and will NOT stand for cheating.


So let that be a warning to you all (imagine me waggling my finger sternly at this point).

For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn't at all saying that any of my memory friends and loyal blog-readers would even consider cheating in my last blog entry! Anyway, I like this strictness, it gets my whole-hearted approval. I also want to try the qualifiers as well, even if I don't have to, so I'll try to dig out my old video camera and see if I can get it to work.

Other Extreme things that have occurred to me - in this year's competition, we had twelve matches each in the group stage; in the new format it'll be twenty. That's quite a bit of brain-strain for one day, even if the matches are just one minute of memory and four minutes of recall - will we see the best results at the start and competitors will burn out later on, or will we warm up to the task and be flying through the memorisation at record pace by the end of the day?

I didn't mention the new prize money distribution before, but that's very nice, and reduces the amount of money that one person can grab all for themselves by being better than everyone else (this is good news for everyone except Simon, obviously). $100 for each match won is an especially nice touch - will it reduce the incentive to try for a world record if you've already qualified for the knockout phase? Probably not, knowing memory people. We're not the type to go for a 'safe' hundred dollars and give up the chance of two thousand, especially since that comes with the accolade of having the best result.

And the inclusion of a knockout 'round of 16' is awesome, meaning that twice as many people get the fun of an Extreme Memory Task! With the top two in each group and also the four best third-place-finishers all qualifying, that should reduce the 'group of death' factor and make it less likely that someone really good will be narrowly edged out...

Let's get extreme! Again!

Woohoo, great news from the Extreme Memory Tournament!


Hello Extremers, finally some updates concerning next year's competition. Here are the new and sexy facts:

1. Dates: May 2nd and 3rd, 2015

2. Location: Same as last year at the fabulous Dart NeuroScience center in San Diego, CA.

3. New event: 1-minute Images (and no it's not silly Abstract Images). I'll let you guys try and imagine what that might be...more specific details to come soon.

4. XMT training website to go live in December. So you and everyone else can get their practice on.

5. Bumping up to 24 competitors, instead of 16. See #6.

6. Qualifiers: The top 8 competitors from last year will be automatically invited. The remaining 16 slots will be determined by a series of online qualifiers (on the XMT training website). Literally ANYONE can attempt to be qualify for the XMT.

7. Money: The prize fund has been bumped up to $76,000. Oh yes! No travel stipend this year, but everyone who qualifies will get SOME money, with many more incentives during the 2-day competition as well. See HERE for the specifics.

The Basics
•The Competition will be...◦two-day event held on May 2nd and 3rd, 2015
◦
held at the Dart Neuroscience Convention Center in San Diego, CA

◦
sponsored by Dart Neuroscience and Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL)

◦
offering money prizes from a pool of $76,000


•
24 of the top mental athletes in the world will be competing to ensure that the competition is at the highest level. The top 8 from last year's XMT will automatically qualify for the 2015 XMT. The remaining spots will be determined by qualifying rounds, which will be held over 5 consecutive weeks starting mid-December 2014 (see below).

•
The competitors will be split up into 6 groups of 4, mixing the best and worst in each group to maintain fairness.

•
The competition will be run first in group stages (Day 1) and then single-elimination Round of 16, Quarterfinals, Semifinals, Runner-up Match, and Finals (Day 2).

•
All matches will be head-to-head competitive style, with competitors facing each other (1-on-1).

•
All events will be digital. All memorization/recall will occur on a laptop. For XMTs, a laptop may or may not be used (this will be announced prior to the task).


* * *

Qualifying Rounds

Starting mid-December (exact date TBD) and spanning over the course of 5 consecutive weeks, those who wish to compete in the 2015 XMT will have to submit their best scores on to the XMT training website for each of the 5 events. Competitors will have limited attempts and time to complete their BEST performance of the selected event of that week (the events will be the same ones from the competition: Names, Numbers, Cards, Words, and Images). The best 16 total scores over all events after the 5 weeks will be invited to compete in the 2015 XMT. More details to come...

* * *



More on the site, go and check it out!

First thoughts, apart from the general "yay!"... six groups of four, five disciplines, still one day for the first round, we must be doing it with four matches simultaneously. That'll give us 45 rounds, as compared to the 48 we had this year.

How does the seeding work? And will it take into account that I barely whined, moaned and complained at all about ending up as fifth seed for the 2014 event because Ola landed one measly point ahead of me in the recalculated world rankings, and then ending up totally in the Group of Death, and everything. Here's hoping it works out a bit more easy for me in 2015, but then on the other hand I do love a challenge...

Top eight from last year qualify for this one - sorry about that again, James.

And the qualifying tournament is what intrigues me the most, even if I don't have to qualify. I mean, it's really easy to cheat at online score-recording. And if there's a prize for just turning up, surely someone out there will be tempted to qualify dishonestly? There's some very strange people out there, after all - remember Evil Eugene Varshavsky?

Incidentally, how the heck did I remember Eugene Varshavsky's name after five years without even having to look it up? Maybe I'm turning into a name-memorising expert!

The new discipline "images" sounds an excellent choice! When Nelson started talking about adding a fifth discipline, I thought it would destroy the balance between system-memory and more-natural-ish-memory, but if the images is a completely-natural-ish-memory thing, it works! I'm looking forward to it!

Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs

There are people out there who think I sound very northern, but they should hear the people I work with now. It's true, Yorkshire is a very different world. I have to get into the habit of saying 'while' to mean 'until', and owt and nowt at every opportunity.

Ultimate Master of Memory

There's a sort of wild discussion going on at the Facebook world memory championship group at the moment about the sheer volume of people who can call themselves "World Memory Champion" or the like, and what to do about it. Without wanting to jump in and derail the conversation , I thought I'd blog about what seems to me the main problem - people keeping old titles forever, even if they're not relevant any more.

I've always said that people shouldn't still be called 'Grand Master of Memory' if they qualified for the title in one of the old ways that doesn't even get you more than a little pat on the back nowadays, scores having improved so much. But then, I've always disliked the kind of person who comes to memory competitions just in order to get the easiest possible "official" title and then uses it for their career as a dubiously-qualified motivational speaker or life coach. Really, if I had my way I'd scrap the whole 'grand master' thing - there are lots of mind sports out there where the only title to strive towards is world/national champion, and having this subordinate level of grandness just encourages the wannabe-millionaire-businessman type to come to our nice competitions (as opposed to the nothing-better-to-do-with-their-time memory competition enthusiast, who should be encouraged hugely, of course).

I also don't call myself a World Memory Champion, by the way. If pushed, I'm a former World Memory Champion who isn't all that good any more. I say, current achievements in the last twelve months should be all that counts for any "official" accolades.

Old age

I'm pretty sure I never expected in my wildest dreams to be thirty-eight. I'm really not sure what to do about it now...

The fields of England

The announcer on the train has just said, about half a dozen times, that the next stop is Duffield. It's actually Dronfield, but it's an understandable mistake, since this line goes through all the Fields on its way up north - Duffield (though it never stops there), Chesterfield, Dronfield and Sheffield.

One day, I'll find the time to look up what the Duff, Chester, Dron and Sheff mean...

Memories of China

Well, I've booked my flights to China in December, so it's official, I'm going to the World Memory Championship. I would really like to be able to do some training before then, so we'll just have to see what happens, but everyone should set a reminder in their new-fangled electronic diaries or file-o-faxes for December 11-13 and keep tabs of what's happening to me, British team-mates Phill and Jake (now I'm singing the Adventure Time song) and the rest of the world's competitors. My metaphorical money's on Simon Reinhard.

Trains, and training

I've resolved to write something in my blog every morning on the train to work - it's all about getting into a regular schedule, which is also what I need to do with memory training (although that'll be in the evenings at home, not on a train). Anyway, people* have asked how my new job's going, and the answer is, it's great! As a general rule, I don't enjoy my 'real' job, because I see it as something that mainly exists to finance the things I do for fun, but this one is certainly a lot more enjoyable than my previous one - even the hassle of getting there and back isn't as bad as all that...

I also need to keep up with the plan of learning to drive and getting a car, so as to join the hordes of commuters who complain about the traffic every day, rather than about the trains. Driving is hard, you know.

*Well, one person has asked, and I assume that maybe one or two other people I know are vaguely curious

Witney and Wisdom

Back home from the national othello championship in Witney, near Oxford. Which is a surprisingly big town for somewhere without a train station. And although my beating-everybody streak didn't quite last all day, I did only lose one game out of the nine in total over the weekend, to Guy, and so ended up playing him (he lost his first game, against newcomer/old-timer Richard) in the grand final!

That's the first time I've ever come anywhere near being in the final at the nationals! And although I was severely burnt-out, brainwise, by that point (how I won my last couple of games before that I'm really not sure) and lost miserably, it's still rather cool. I think I'm going to adopt the German style and call myself the Vice-British-Champion for the next year! So three cheers for Guy, not just for winning, but for organising the tournament and for enlisting seven of his relatives to come and play too! The next generation of othello champions - two young Plowmans (Plowmen?) and four young Brands - all had a great time and were a lot of fun. I also made a concerted effort to learn all their names at dinner (Pizza Express) last night (since they were all impressed by my amazing memory skills and I called Mark 'James' at the start of the meal, not helping my genius reputation), and I still remember them now!

Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste...

Apparently all the children in this country know, word for word, a Horrible Histories song listing all the kings and queens of England in order. It's getting harder and harder to be the only person who knows things.

But it must be getting easier to be in the lead in the British Othello Championship after the first day, because that's what I'm doing. With a mixture of veterans and Brand new players (in the form of the Brand family), we've got a strong field of 16 competitors (a really nice number for Adelaide to work out the pairings for each round, especially since nobody was unkind enough to throw a spanner in the works with a drawn game), and I've beaten four of them in a row today. It won't last.

It's a living

I've got a new job, up Sheffield way, and it's not only going to pay me actual money for working there (always a plus when it comes to jobs), they're throwing in some extra cash for me to learn to drive and get a car. So I'm going to be a real commuter, and all I need to do is find a driving instructor who's elderly enough not to notice that I'm 37 rather than 17 and so won't jeer at me.

So now I'm currently working out my four weeks' notice at my current job, and then I'll be (eventually, probably) on the road!

Oh no, it's winter again!

The nights are drawing in. Dark at 8:30pm? That's no fun.

MSO Memory

In hopes of getting some people to come to the competition next year, let's talk about the MSO memory competition (or the Memory World Cup, if you want to use its official name). It might need a little refining of the rules before the people who take memory competitions more seriously start showing up - the score calculation was along the lines of "Well, I guess the one who remembers the most stuff is the winner, I haven't really thought about it" - but the idea of everything being scored up to your first mistake, and the very short recall times encourage a different approach to memorising, which is always a good thing!

You have to judge how much you can perfectly remember in the time limit, which is a fascinating balancing-act, much more so than a standard-style event. More World Cups, please! And World Cup competitors!

Back home

And the weather's been miserable all day, too. It's been really nice all week-and-a-bit, more or less, lots of sun and warmth with just the odd shower but not at a time when I was outdoors. I remember the first few years I went to the MSO it was always baking hot that week.

Anyway, on Sunday it was othello, and I won the gold medal against a lot of opponents who either hadn't played for at least a decade or were new to the game. Still, it was fun! That brought my total medal haul up to two gold, one silver and two bronze - funnily enough, at the memory championship I got a (smaller-sized) medal haul of two gold, two silver and two bronze, so I wanted to find a way to get another silver at the MSO. That would have meant being much better at anything that was taking place on the last two days, though, so I just had to stick with my total of five.

A great event, all in all! I'll go back next year! I'm an MSO person again, it's official!

Memory memory memory

It's the usual dilemma - do I write about the UK Championship before I've got the results to hand, and forget something or get something completely wrong, or do I wait until then and get everyone nagging me about when I'm going to give my rambling bloggy account of the event?

Well, there's no MSO today, so I'll write a bit and maybe fill in the gaps at a later date. The competition took place in the headquarters of TVapex, who did a live streaming of the last bit of the championship (sorry, if I'd known about it earlier I would have mentioned it here) and had a nice venue for us, with a stage at the front, good sound system for Chris's music and the right amount of desks. I did a quick interview with a local radio guy who thought my first name was David and my surname was Pridditch, and so was someone I can hugely sympathise with. Saying hello to the other competitors and trying to remember whether I'd met them before and was supposed to know who they are, I had conversations like "I'm Milan, I talked to you at the World Championship, I was asking you about what brand of cards you use, don't you remember?" Of course, I said. It's nothing personal, it just takes me two meetings at least before I can remember people.

Indeed, meeting up with Yanjaa at the train station to get there involved a bit of guesswork - I saw someone with the kind of hairstyle I was pretty sure she had, standing in the middle of Liverpool Street station and looking like she was waiting for someone, and just sort of walked in front of her, prominently wearing a hat, until she saw me and said hi.

More competitors need to follow the lead of Krzysztof Kuich and wear a T-shirt with their name and nationality prominently written on it. Compulsory name-badges worldwide would make my life so much easier. I may not have the results here, but I did write down everyone's names on a piece of paper, so that I could blog about them without forgetting them entirely or forgetting just how many unnecessary Zs their names contained.

Team England were me, Marlo Knight, Clay Knight, Phill Ash, Jake O'Gorman and Mohammed Afzal Khan. Jake was accompanied by his girlfriend Starr Knight (no relation - I very much approve of everyone at these competitions having the same surname, so hopefully Marlo and Clay will have success in their plans to get their nineteen siblings competing too. That's not an exaggeration, by the way.)

There was a three-man Team Wales - James Paterson (no relation to the writer with two Ts), Daniel Evans (no relation to the tennis player) and Dai Griffiths (returning to competing instead of arbiting for the first time in six years). And a huge international contingent, made up of Yanjaa Altantuya (Sweden), Wessel Sandtke (Netherlands), Javier Moreno (Spain), Søren Damtoft (Denmark), Krzysztof Kuich (Poland), Milan Ondrašovič (Slovakia), Melanie Höllein (Germany), Sebastien Martinez (France) and Ekaterina Matveeva (Russia). Isn't that a great sampling of European memorizers! And I've made a real effort to remember what they all look like, too.

The team of arbiters was small but widely experienced and capable - Nathalie Lecordier, Peter Broomhall and David Sedgwick, under the watchful eye of Phil Chambers and Chris Day. A great gathering, all in all!

As for the competition itself, I was probably more out of practice than I've ever been; I just haven't been able to do any training at all for months. We started with names and faces, which was a pitched battle between James and Yanjaa, then I got a really terrible result in binary which Phil described for the cameras the next day as being astonishingly wonderful, and we followed that up with abstract images, speed numbers and hour numbers, which all followed the same kind of pattern for me.

There was, however, a close contest going on, as we found out when we got the results on day two. James, Yanjaa, Marlo and Milan were all tussling for the top position, setting personal bests, national records and other milestones. And everyone else was happy with their results, too (Søren and Wessel at the head of the chasing pack) - hopefully in my role as the old man with a huge supply of anecdotes about memory competition history, I enhanced their experience as well.

I did rather better on day two - in words I got a low score with lots of little mistakes, but the important thing was that I was memorising a lot more fluently than the day before. 30-minute cards I got 11 packs, attempting 12, which was enough to comfortably beat everyone else even if it's below what I'd normally go for, dates and spoken numbers were okayish, and I just about managed a pack of speed cards, getting 38.11 in the second trial with a recall that took a lot of brain-racking. Milan, though, was the star of the day, getting a time of 29.96! That makes him the seventh person in the under-thirty-seconds club, which really isn't such an exclusive thing any more.

We should get a clubhouse and a secret handshake.

Anyway, that made Milan the winner! By virtue of Marlo and Yanjaa not managing to get a complete pack, I ended up second, pipping James to the post by the narrowest of margins and annoying him immensely, since I did basically the same thing in the crucial speed cards at the XMT. It was a great event! I'm looking forward to the next one already, and maybe I'll manage to do a bit of training and keep up with all these youngsters next time...

Oh, and

I've changed the format of the blog - I got annoyed by not having any "older/newer posts" buttons. It's still the most boring, basic format that has those, so I'm not getting too fancy or artistic...

Fun with numbers

Day one of the UK Memory Championship and I'm too tired to write it up at length - 18 competitors with a really wide range of nationalities (ten or eleven countries, depending on whether Wales and England count as one or two). I did badly, all in all, which is only to be expected with my not having done any training, but it's all to play for tomorrow. Probably.

Erratum

(from Monday night) - Saravanan, not Suravanan.

Anyway, I was the first one out of tonight's poker, but it was hardly my fault, someone else just got the outrageous luck that I always rely on. Still, it gives me time to mentally prepare myself for the UK Memory Championship over the next two days! I have to get up early tomorrow to get a train down to Ilford and find the venue - luckily, I'm meeting Jake and Yanjaa along the way, and I'm sure they've got some kind of sense of direction. So the only problem I'll have is the fact that I've done no training at all for months...

Today at the MSO was mental calculations (all the fun of a maths exam! I sometimes wonder why I enjoy this kind of thing so much...) and mastermind, at both of which I ended up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. Aww, I'm half way through my week of mind sports already!

Addendum

Switching to poker instead of backgammon was a good plan - I came third! I'm still not a huge fan of lowball, but I suppose it grows on you. So that's one gold, one silver and two bronzes in three days so far, which is a pretty good haul! Still loving the MSO!

Things we learned today

Josef Kollar the ever-present MSO star is friends with Real Musgrave, the creator of pocket dragons. This is a pretty major thing to only find out after seventeen years, isn't it? I'm pretty sure my pocket dragon t-shirts have been to the MSO quite regularly over the years...

Also, I'm not good at oware or quoridor. Possibly I'll drop out of the backgammon tonight and play poker instead. I'm not good at poker either, but losing at poker is more fun than losing at backgammon.

Mind matters

You know, I vaguely remember that the last couple of times I went to the MSO, I felt like I didn't enjoy it as much as I used to, and maybe it wasn't really my thing any more. I don't know why that was - I've had huge fun there this last couple of days! Games to play, people to meet who I haven't seen for years, ways to stretch my brain into unusual shapes working out strategies on the spur of the moment, it's just brilliant! It's official, I'm an MSO man again.

In continuo this morning, I started off against Matt Cordell, one of the few people who really knows strategy for the game and thinks ahead, instead of just putting the tiles down wherever it looks like they'd score a lot of points, and got completely thrashed, but then I narrowly won one and narrowly lost another (against the game's creator), so all in all that wasn't too bad a showing.

During the day there was an ongoing saga of whether the Memory World Cup was going to happen. Nobody else from the memory world had signed up (shame on you all!), and indeed nobody else from any other world either. But the organisers were very keen for it to happen anyway (rather keener than I was to be in a competition with just myself and maybe someone else making up the numbers), so it did, and I'm very glad it did! We had organiser Etan competing, and newcomer-whose-name-I-should-have-written-down-because-I'm-probably-spelling-it-wrong-now Suravanan, and yes, it was an excellent competition that needs to happen again next year! I'll write about it at length when I get a bit more time.

I also spoke with organiser Tony about maybe holding an XMT tournament in a hotel alongside a bunch of other mind sports next January or March. I'll keep you informed.

Continuo overran, so without more than a few minutes for lunch I went straight into Blokus, which turns out to be an excellent game (it involves placing tetris-ish-shaped tiles on a board so that they touch at the corners, and blocking off your (three) opponents. I won my first ever game, against two experts and one beginner - with a bit of luck, but this kind of thing was exactly what I always loved about the MSO - learning a new game, working out on the fly what would be a good way to play it and maybe occasionally confounding people who know the 'right' way to play and win and weren't expecting me to play the way I did. That only works with brand new games, obviously, and only if I'm lucky - I lost my next two games horribly, but then ended up with the same two experts on the final round and won it, jointly with one of them. So I ended up somewhere in the top half of the final rankings, which goes to show something, but I'm not sure what.

Then it was the memory in the evening, but I seem to have already talked about it, and chronology be damned. I did win, though. So that means in the first two days I've had a bronze, a silver and a gold!

Medaled for England

Granted, it wasn't all that difficult to win medals at the MSO today - we had four players in the Stratego Duel and five in the Classic, and in the latter the bottom three all finished on equal points so it turned into an everyone-gets-a-medal kind of event. But the point is, I was third in the Duel and second in the Classic, so I ended up with two medals and the satisfaction of knowing I didn't come last. And I didn't quite come last in the poker this evening either; I was the second one out.

Now, you might say "So, what you're saying is, you finished second-to-last in everything?", but that's a very glass-half-empty way to look at it. And did YOU win two medals at a prestigious annual mind sports event today? No, I didn't think so.

Hot and friendly!

The ninth Friendly Memory Championship attracted a crowd of people in a very hot room on a very hot day at Attenborough Nature Reserve. I had been worried at one point about not having enough arbiters, what with the ever-present Dai living in Hong Kong, but he's back in Britain and was there to help out, Nick The Greek came to arbit too, and with the ever-awesome Phil, we practically had more arbiters than competitors.

The competitors were the Knight brothers Marlo and Clay (note, he's called Clay and not Cole, as I said in my blog about the Welsh championship. I nearly got it, and we were in a part of the world where they dig coal out of the ground a lot more than clay, I'm sure), other English friends Phill and Jake (a pairing of names that had me singing the Adventure Time tune to myself all day) and Scandinavian Søren and Yanjaa. The latter was new to me, but she's been touring the world of memory competitions lately, and is super-enthusiastic about the whole thing, which is always good to see! I like it when people come to these events with the clear intention of being the world champion. Mongolian-born, Swedish-residing and attributes her American-accented English to Cartoon Network, which I approve of hugely, of course.

We also had Jon from the telly, filming bits and pieces but generally just being there to find out what memory competitions are like and get to know the people - I think we made a good impression, since he came to the pub afterwards as well, and the post-friendly-championship drink is always the best way to get to know us. And we had newcomer Bryan, who couldn't be persuaded to give memorising a go, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

The event perhaps didn't go entirely smoothly - the heat in the room killed the overhead projector quite quickly, meaning we couldn't use my trademark Powerpoint slides, and it probably stopped everyone from achieving their best scores. I also had a problem with the spoken numbers - I'd prepared them on Powerpoint as usual, but found they wouldn't play on my new laptop (rather too late, during the competition, I realised that this was because the sound files were stored on the old laptop). No problem, though, I'd just bring my old broken laptop instead. But then it dropped dead the night before the event, so I had to resort to plan C - using one of the online spoken-number generators. But it didn't work quite right, possibly because of a dodgy internet connection, and the other one (plan D) wasn't working at all. So we did Plan E, involving Jake's iPhone (or whatever it was) and the WMC Ladder app.

That worked fine, so we didn't have to go with Plan F, which would have been me reading the numbers out myself. Still, it was the kind of flamingo-up I would have been hugely sarcastic about in my blog if it had been someone else's competition, so I'll just invite you all to make fun of me for being so generally rubbish, please.

Marlo led from start to finish and took home the grand prize (a bottle of good champagne that my boss gave me a while ago - I don't like champagne, so I thought it'd be better appreciated by a specially-selected memory competition winner). Yanjaa was a very strong second, and Søren an excellent third.

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 10

And finally! The climax of every memory competition (nearly)

Speed cards is fun to watch and exciting to compete in and makes a great finish to competitions. But what would the scores be like if it was the first of the ten disciplines? Or somewhere in the middle? A lot of the time, the competitors have to get an okay-but-not-spectacular score, to make sure they finish in the position they're aiming for, so there's not always a lot of opportunity to go for that record-breaking fast time.

And speaking of records, when will we see a sub-20-second pack of cards? And on a related note, why was 30 seconds seen as the "four minute mile" of memory competitions for so long? Yes, it's a nice round number, but back in the day, people were really really serious about it as being our Everest.

Long long ago, back in 2006, there was a competition called the Speed Cards Challenge, which consisted of nothing but head-to-head speed cards. It was great, and should happen again. The XMT comes close, obviously, and it'll be interesting to see how the speed cards times go in the future with that - memorising on a computer screen is probably a bit faster than memorising physical cards; it's harder to drop them on the floor, anyway.

I might not hold the record any more, but do I hold the record for the most sub-30-seconds packs in competitions? I probably do, but I don't want to count in case I'm wrong...

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 9

Spoken numbers!

The world record is getting close to a perfect 400, which was the level at which they changed it from one-every-two-seconds to one-every-second, back in 2001. Will it be changed again? One every half second? Every three-quarters-of-a-second?

There's always the question of language - the attempt to provide the numbers in the language of the competitors' choice way back in 2005 didn't work as well as it might, but it was the right idea and it's strange that nobody's wanted to try it again. So, will it always be in English at every memory competition except the German ones?

I've always suspected that the people who are good at spoken numbers are the people who don't review their written numbers many times, but go through them slowly and carefully to start with. I can't really back this suspicion up with any kind of evidence, though - maybe I'll gather some one day.

The interesting question is why not have other spoken discplines? Or flashing-up-on-screen disciplines? Or, well, any kind of alternative to things written on paper? I can't think what that other alternative would be, but I'm sure there is one out there somewhere.

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 8

Historic Dates! Also known as Historic and Future Dates. Or just Dates.

The most recently-invented discipline apart from Abstract Images, this one came along in 2001 - I wasn't really involved in memory competitions back then, but I think it came about because they'd decided it would fit the whole millennium standard idea better if there were ten disciplines rather than nine, and Gunther dreamed up this one. He made most of the rules in those days, actually.

The dates range from 1000 to 2099. I have no idea why that was chosen, but it suits my system very nicely, so I can't complain. For the 2000s I use the images starting with H from my cards list. It's a lot more inconvenient for people with a two-digit-image system, because you get a lot of 19s, 18s, 17s and so on.

As has also happened with abstract images, the 1000-point standard lagged behind the top scores for quite a while, leading to the top scorers in this one getting a disproportionate amount of points compared to the other disciplines. I've always thought it would be better to go back to the system of the top score in each discipline gets 100 points, and everyone else's score is proportionate to that.

Thinking up a brief description of a historical event is easy at first, but once you've done a few hundred of them, it gets harder and harder. Actually, it's interesting to go to different events and see how the individual writers of each list approach it. Some people are 'funnier' than others.

Back in ancient times (2002), a few of the events on the list were sort of jokey and related to the year listed, which really shouldn't be done. I'm pretty sure they're always randomised now.

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 7

It's the discipline whose name really doesn't describe it... Abstract Images!

Here's some useful trivia for you - the first time abstract images was ever included in a memory competition was at the very first Friendly Memory Championship (or Cambridge Memory Championship, as it was called back then), in 2006. Gunther Karsten got the highest score, with 200.

Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again, but we need to do something about Abstract Images. Get rid of it altogether, or change it so that it becomes the kind of test it was supposed to be in the first place. See, you don't need to look at the shapes of the images at all, mostly, you just need to look at the pattern they're filled with. There are 158 of these patterns (I counted them again, I always tell people it's 140-something, but it's definitely 158), and it's pretty simple to learn to recognise them and assign an image to each one, for the purpose of memorising them.

All well and good, but there's no practice material available - the only person who can create abstract images is Phil, and he has to manually convert them into black and white, because the wonderful image-generating program that works so hard to create different shapes that nobody needs to look at creates them in colour, and it was decided early on that colour images would be too easy to memorise without looking at the shapes. This means that long-time competitors have a big advantage over beginners here (and I'm going to keep on saying that, despite Jonas setting world-record scores as soon as he started), and that the whole thing is far more removed from the understanding of 'normal' people than any other discipline in memory competitions.

And it was supposed to be a test of 'natural' memory that would be difficult to apply systems to. That was the original idea behind it, and it was completely subverted by the WMSC getting an external company to create the program and somehow not being able to afford to get them to change it when the program they provided was nothing like what it should have been. I don't know, I just despair about the whole thing, I really do.

On the other hand, it's fun! I like to go down the columns and memorise the images in that order, so that when it comes to the recall I have a choice of five options for each image. It uses up a lot of journeys, though - one day, if I don't manage to get the whole discipline scrapped, I'll think of a way to convert each image into a number from 0 to 9, and turn three of them into one of my objects...

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 6

More numbers...

In the world championship, this makes more sense. There's a 60-minute numbers event, and a five-minute numbers where you get two attempts of which the best one counts. In National Standard competitions like this one, we get a 15-minute numbers and a 5-minute numbers - it's a bit too similar for my liking.

'Speed numbers' is what this discipline was traditionally called, but that kind of name is discouraged nowadays, because it causes confusion with speed cards (in which speed is what counts). But I really think we should follow the old German example and give the disciplines individual names - "5-minute numbers" sounds so sterile. Let's call it the Numbersprint.

I once held the world record for this discipline, with 333. We've had a 50% improvement in the years since then!

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 5

Cards!

Everybody loves memorising playing cards! When the World Memory Championship was first invented, it was done with the knowledge that the two memory-themed world records anyone had heard of were memorising pi to thousands of places, and memorising a shuffled pack of cards amazingly quickly. And in those days, 'amazingly quickly' meant three minutes!

Memory competitions traditionally finish with the speed cards and have a 'marathon' cards discipline somewhere in the middle, although in National Standard competitions, the marathon is only ten minutes long. Ten packs in ten minutes has never been done, but I'm sure it's possible. I used to practice with nine, and it was a challenge, but if I'd spent the last six years doing more training, I might well be up to ten by now. I wonder who'll break that barrier first?

If there's one thing I'm particularly proud of in my memory-contest accomplishments, such as they are, it's the 'Ben System' for cards. The idea of turning two cards into one simple image was unthinkable until I did it, and now it's quite commonplace. But who'll be the first to do three?