by Sylvain Estadieu
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Just over a week ago, Gothenburg was lucky enough to welcome some of the top European memorizers for the second instance of the Scandinavian Memory League Open. This early spring competition used to be called GMO and was a more traditional 10-event kind of tournament, but at the turn of the mid-decade it all of a sudden turned into this fast-paced, spectator-friendly, one-on-one battle of the minds.
Last year’s edition saw seven residents of the home nation battle it out over two days and ended up with the crowning of Emma Andersson!
This year’s affair was slightly more international one, with competitors from Germany, Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, France and Sweden for a grand total of 16 hats in the ring.
As was the case last year, the duels took place in the largest shopping center in town, during the popular Science fair, inaugurated by a hologram of the physicist Max Tegmark. This brought a number of extra challenges (the setting, not the hologram) as the occasional concert, podcast recording, public announcement or presentation was testing the mental athletes’ ability to filter out all kinds of sound profiles. The upside was the possibility for us to have conversations with the visitors about memory and the optimal routes to public toilets.
Double World Champion Jonas von Essen had gracefully accepted to do a live streamed draw based on the ML rankings the evening beforehand, with Simon Reinhard, Marcin Kowalczyk, Jan Zoń and Jan-Hendrik Büscher being the top seeds:
| Group A | Group B | Group C | Group D |
| Simon Reinhard (Germany) |
Jan-Hendrik Büscher (Germany) |
Jan Zoń (Poland) |
Marcin Kowalczyk (Poland) |
| Florian Minges (Sweden) |
Konstantin Skudler (Germany) |
Sylvain Estadieu (France) |
Niklas Månsson (Sweden) |
| Hordiy Ostapovych (Ukraine) |
Paweł Milczarek (Poland) |
Selim Aydın (Turkey) |
Martin Nilsson (Sweden) |
| Daniel Andersson (Sweden) |
<blank> | Rickard Liu (Sweden) |
Ceyhun Aydin (Turkey) |
The blank space in group B was due to Idriz being sick at the time, he luckily recovered right on time to both compete and monitor the competition.
After some delays due to dodgy internet connections and forgotten passwords, we got started with the group phase. A couple more issues arose during the day, but were dwarfed by some pretty mind-boggling performances including two WRs by Jan-Hendrik in Names (30 in 45.09) and Simon in Numbers after two very close calls (80 in 16.85). Konstantin was the only German to not get a WR but the only one invested in learning some Swedish during the weekend, which is worth a big “tummen upp”.
After doing a bit of overtime, we managed to play all 120 matches (and some), finalized the knockout table for day 2 and went to share burgers and memories about memory on the local Champs Élysées: Gothenburg’s Avenyn.
The system that we had adopted placed the four group winners directly in quarter final whilst the seconds and thirds needed to play a playoff first. Those who finished in fourth place got into their own knockout table with semi-finals and final and a chance to play more matches on day 2.
The quarter final were synonym of surprise event! The SE for that round was a game of names, with a twist … to be revealed after the 20 seconds of mental preparation. All the competitors got to witness the twist as the four first quarter finalists did their best to remember upside down faces but the next group of four was left in the dark as to if the twist was to be identical for them. To everybody’s very own level of surprise, it turned out in the end to be the same, surprisingly tough variation. Note that all surprise events were based on tweaks on the ML platform and are available for all to see on the championship page.
Things went on and all four group winners moved in to the semi-finals. A game of dominoes counted as the SE for that round, a game of Images with pictures of dominoes, that is. Simon got the better of J-H with 26/30 in a fantastic time of 43.10 and Marcin got all 30 dominoes in the right order, which easily beat my own result of 20/20 + 2 random ones happening to be correct. Simon proceeded to beat Jan-Hendrik in Names in a glorious 30 – 28 where the younger of the two was a switch away from a new WR and then in Cards with a safe-ish 27.86. In the second semi-final, the constant meta-trash-talk between Mister Kowalczyk and the author of these lines produced a close match with namely a 74-73 in numbers (both in 22.x seconds) and decks memorized in 35 seconds. The Polish cubing phenomenon, pleased enough with securing the glass owl of the best newcomer let his French opponent the honor of playing for a chance of bringing home the largest trophy.
The final was a rather quick one. The binary-digits-of-variable-lengths used instead of actual Words were more of a challenge for myself than for Simon who, despite a small bump on the road on Names rolled over his adversary and finished him off with a beautiful 50/50 in Words in no more than 52.7s. A very worthy and gracious winner!
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Other notable events:
- Marcin showing Gothenburg how a blind solve is done
- Ceyhun Aydin, our youngest participant, not getting enough with his official matches and taking every opportunity to play training sessions between rounds
- Hordiy, documenting everything and the only one with a national flag
- Daniel and Rickard beating respectively Idriz and Ceyhun in the B-league. Rickard got the final win there as Daniel had used up all his energy in his Duel of the Swedish memory pioneers (over 10 years in the sport for both of them)
Unforgettably (?) yours, Sylvain (Sylle) Estadieu, reporting on his third successive runner-up position in a Gothenburg competition and leaving you with Florian’s video summary of these two days:
 World record by J-H, over 10 seconds faster than the previous one! |
 Not always easy dealing with noise. |
 Marcin not liking the new faces. |
 Simon breaking one of Alex’s world records by almost a second! |
 Trying to learn a new language on the fly, FAIL. |