Sunday 4 October 2009

Sweden Open Memory Championships and Me

So Swedish Memory Championships...Was unexpectedly great. I remember being all hyped up before the competition for about a month thinking I could actually do it this time, actually get all my best scores...but no practice left me devoid of such confidence. I just expected to get around 3800-4000 points total score. Never expected to get 4613 points, I was so delighted, we stayed up at Idriz's office til 2 am waiting for the results.

The venue was great, should have more competitioins with a viewing window. The presence of food throughout the competition was unquestionabley great, probably why I did so well.

So I've jumped from 44th world ranking to 35th world ranking to 25th world ranking, within a month.

The one area which I wasn't so happy with that I shrugged off at the end is that the first disciplin random words, I was deducted 100 points for writing down "refractory" instead of "refrectory". Fair enough, I consoled myself, it will feel even better when I'm in the top 20 next year, knowing such pedantic measures are adhered to.

The Germans were suprisingly cool, we played a few games the first night and talked throughout the championship. Was nice of them to speak English just for me and Dionne haha.

There was this nice feeling at the championships, everyone sharing ideas, no animosity or ill will, I think because everyone is competing with themselves rather than others. Dagfinn, Idriz, Florian, Johannes, Simone, Corinna, Ferdinand, Mattias, Christopher, everyone was entertaining and chilled out, best championships yet. Lots of socialising, probably because we were all in a foreign land.

I get this feeling memory sports will be super popular in 2012 you know because of the Olympics. So I'm aiming to be World champion by then. It's a bit of a long shot but this is probably the one thing I'll ever be good at, not only that I like it.

The thing I'm doing at the moment for the World Memory Championships 2009 is preparing all me locations, but outside location. Up until now I've only ever used indoor locations, perhaps they'll be even better. I'm going through the locations and numbering them so I know exactly where I should be at and number of digits (during hour numbers).

If I screw up on a section it should be okay as only that portion is affected. I'm memorising in groups of 20 locations, 120 numbers, 10 journeys, so I should get 1200 numbers for this discipline. Which allows me the cushion of 10 mistakes for the minimum standard of getting a grandmastership.

Been reseaching a lot of career options lately, something involving: youths, patients, lab work, science writing, presenting, lecturing, consulting...? oh and evolution and nutrigenomics.

Gonna have to get ready for the gym soon, I so was not meant to go to the gym, not in my gene structure at all. Probably chest and triceps today.

Adieu.