The Mind Sports Olympiad Memory Championship took place on Sunday and Monday, August 18 and 19. The MSO, an annual festival of mind sports, has been running every year since 1997, and there has usually been a memory competition among the many other games happening there. This year was the third in the current format – an IAM international standard competition, which also functions as three separate mini-championships, in case anyone wants to take part in just one particular type of memory challenge.
Left to right: Susanne, Andrea and Lars
The first day is Marathon Memory – 30-minute binary digits, decimal digits and cards, and three trials of spoken numbers too. It’s a long day, really testing the competitors’ endurance and long-term concentration!
The morning of day two is Natural Memory – 15-minute names & faces, 15-minute words and 5-minute images. These are the disciplines where (arguably) traditional memory systems are the least useful, and more ad-hoc creativity is needed if you want to get a big score
And the afternoon gives us Speed Memory – 5-minute historic dates, two trials of 5-minute numbers and the classic end to a memory championship, speed cards! This is the event for the high-speed, high-pressure memorisers!
Full results can be found here – the final scores looked like this:
| 1 | ANDREA MUZII | Italy | 6254 |
| 2 | SUSANNE HIPPAUF | Germany | 3410 |
| 3 | LARS CHRISTIANSEN | Denmark | 2744 |
| 4 | PREEDA HONGPIMOLMAS | Thailand | 2719 |
| 5 | GORDON COWELL | Scotland | 1750 |
Andrea Muzii, fresh from his great performance at the German championship, set several personal records (just like it says on his T-shirt!) over the two days of the competition – 3330 binary and 1537 decimal in the marathon events, an amazing 394 images, a magnificent 504 digits in speed numbers, and finally a 24.63-second pack of cards! And he was still disappointed by it – he was trying for 17 seconds in the second trial, but didn’t quite get the recall right.
Even so, the first trial, under 25 seconds, was enough to take Andrea up to level 19 on the IAM levels system – he started the tournament on 17. Preeda Hongpimolmas, competing in his first international standard championship, memorised 414 cards in 30 minutes and one deck in 33.86 seconds, among other high scores, lifting him up to level 12. And Susanne Hippauf’s new personal best 49 in dates put her onto level 12 too! Gordon Cowell beat his personal best in four disciplines, including a first ever sub-2-minute time in speed cards, of 93.66 seconds, and Lars Christiansen’s scores included a new Danish record of 43 dates. Everybody had something to celebrate!
All the competitors, plus arbiters Nick Papadopoulos and Ben Pridmore