Memory Competitions
I haven't posted in LJ since... since June! As I recover from a Yom Kippur fast, I feel like... might as well share a roller coaster ride I had posted on Discord: my career as a memory athlete up to and including July 27's qualifiers.
I have competed in the USAMC qualifiers since Lumosity games were first added to the qualifiers in 2020. That year, I came in first in the qualifying round due to being able to run up the score on Memory Match Overdrive, a game where you are asked "is this shape the same as what you saw three shapes ago?" as many times as possible in a 60 second period - cf https://www.lumosity.com/en/blog/2020-virtual-usa-memory-championship to see just how well I did (came in 4th - right behind Nelson and right ahead of John Graham; all three of us got our third strike in the same round of questions).
The next year (2021) they added three Memory League trials - images, names, and numbers, to the two Lumosity games (Memory Match Overdrive and Rotation Matrix); while I improved on the previous year in every event, I was caught off guard as to how well others were doing. I didn't even win Memory Match Overdrive because so many people had been practicing so hard that 55500 - which would have won by nearly 15,000 points in 2020 - was only good enough for third in 2021! I would have still qualified (7th place) based on only the Lumosity games, but the Memory League events (5:00 images, 22/30 names, 50/80 digits) sunk my score down to 14th. Almost immediately after that I began practicing more seriously, though mainly relying on free resources from AE Mind (Luis Angel Echeverria) and Ron White's free videos. That got me more respectable scores in the Memory League events, and when Rotation Matrix finally fell into place, I was pretty confident I would qualify in 2022 - and I did: winning the Lumosity games (1st in Memory Match Overdrive with 68800 and 2nd in Rotation Matrix with 46600) and coming close enough to respectable in the Memory League events (14th with 4:00 images, 28 names and 77 digits) that my aggregate score was in 7th place. Training more seriously the next year (2023) I started with Black Belt Memory (Ron White) for a proper foundation and then moved into Nelson's Everest Memory course to really learn how to properly compete. I was firing on all cylinders when it came time to qualify: scored 70500 in Memory Match Overdrive and 67400 in Memory Matrix, winning both events and comfortably winning that round. But that year, I did well enough that I would have qualified (10th place) on the Memory League events alone: 2:30 images (12th place, but a very respectable scaled score) followed by 4:30 names (8th place) and slightly faster than 4:30 numbers on my second try (10th place). That put me in 3rd place overall for that year's qualifying!
As 2024 began, my scores continued to improve and I started to feel like I had a shot at winning the qualifying round for the first time since 2020! By the end of January my best Images score had gone all the way down to 80 seconds, my best Names score was 3:30 (and I was currently practicing at 3:45) and my best Numbers score was 3:15. Even allowing for going 30 seconds slower in competition settings than in practice, my scores were looking like around 7th place for each Memory League discipline, I had plenty of time to improve, and... things were all moving in the right direction until... February 1 came with the invite to the 2024 qualifiers and an absolute bombshell: there would be no Lumosity games in qualifiers that year. Instead, there would be two more Memory League events: Words and Cards. I considered myself pretty good at Cards, with my best time for a deck at 3:45 (considering how for each of the past three years, only one person was able to get through a whole deck in the final round of Double Deck or Bust, I felt that was a pretty solid score), but Words was... a different story. I had recently done my best Words times ever - 50 words in six minutes - but couldn't get faster than that. Nevertheless, though, even expecting Words to be my worst event... I was pretty confident I would qualify, coming in aoround seventh place... until my health started giving way. Between my autoimmune condition starting to give way when I tapered off of the only medication that could reliably keep me in remission, having to move to a new apartment in late May and feeling completely off health-wise shortly after that, my scores seemed to be in free fall. By early July Nelson finally started up this small group and my main goal was to shore up scores getting me ready to qualify on the 27th: we ended up settling for 35-40 words in 5 minutes, a 5 minute deck of cards, 30 names in 5 minutes, 30 images in 1:45-2:00 and 80 digits in 4:00.
Based on previous years, the 10th place score for Images would normally be around 2:00, the 10th place score for Names would be anything from 29 names out of 30 to 30 names in 4:30, and the 10th place score for Numbers would be in the 4:00-4:30 range. So as long as I stayed close enough to my targets, especially with the Names set getting harder... we expected me to qualify pretty comfortably; the expectation was that 5:00 for Cards would be a pretty solid score, and that no one would be able to do all 50 words perfectly faster than 5 minutes considering how hard some of those words were! As July went down, even with my health struggling, I was consistently meeting my marks for Images and Cards, slowly working my way up to doing so for Words, and coming within rounding error (usually getting 29 names out of 30) for Names, but I was consistently struggling with numbers until... eight days before competition I realized that the thermostat in my place had been broken pretty much since I moved in (and Virginia was experiencing a major heat wave). No wonder I was dehydrated all the time! That Tuesday it was finally fixed, and I immediately got my first 4:00 Numbers success in five tries! I no longer felt like I was dying, and... I was fully prepared to qualify!!!!! This led us up to the competition on that Saturday...
A few days before the qualifiers Karen Pinson announced the order of events in an email: CARDS, IMAGES, NAMES, NUMBERS, WORDS. This meant the two events where I was most confident at easily meeting my targets were first, and that could 'warm me up' into the harder/iffier events. Getting myself into the mindset of the competition meant preparing which palace to use on qualifier day: I reserved my best palaces (ROSSLYN 2 for cards, my base palace for images, CLARENDON 1/grocery store for numbers, and MARYLAND 1/parents' house for words) for the first try each event and somewhat weaker palaces (Adroit Theory for cards, refreshed base palace for images, ROSSLYN 1 for numbers, and ROSSLYN 3/Teddy Roosevelt Island for words) for my second try; my goal was to make all those second tries superfluous! Two straight days of NAMES disasters (Thursday's 1 minute trial in training really threw me off, and Friday's trial with my computer being so dim that some of the faces were just obscure shadow before fixing them) could have unnerved me, but I didn't need 30/30 anyway... We get to Saturday 7/27: I get my coffee and snacks from the local farmer's market, log into the Zoom at 11:30, and... we see nearly 3 dozen people (only 22 competed last year). We introduce ourselves one by one (plenty of returners who had skipped a few years including the 2018 runner-up and the 2020 champion; lots of newbies including some I knew from Everest Memory) and the rules are clarified: -Lumosity events were gone THIS YEAR ONLY due to platform upgrade issues -30 minutes for 2 tries at each event (barely giving you enough time to clear your head between trials if you need the full 5:00 for memorization and 4:00 for recall) -we return to the Zoom after each event (in previous years we only regrouped once, between Lumosity and Memory League) -12 qualifiers (and likely 2 alternates) the competition looked stiff, but Nelson had prepared me well and my health had returned JUST IN TIME!!!!!
CARDS was up first; I knew I could do what I had practiced and... gave myself the full five minutes. I felt myself walking in a haze as I recalled the cards in order, but was confident when the last one was in place and sure enough the screen went green confirming my time! Now, I had to decide: do I try for an aggressive second trial or do I conserve my energy for later events? I split the difference... "try a faster time, but let it go if it's going to be a disaster"... and sure enough, I only placed 22 cards when I tried for a 4 minute deck. I looked at the standings and saw I was in 14th place (though #12 and #13 were within rounding error, and #10 and #11 were only about fifteen seconds faster) and realized... "I was counting on a good rank in this event; this is not what I expected!" We regrouped and moved on to IMAGES next. I knew a lot of people were really good at IMAGES and only IMAGES, but I stayed calm and did my 2 minutes. There were two I wasn't sure of, but in the end they were sorted out and I got my 2 minute trial. I then tried a 90 second trial and was only unsure of 3 images, and ended up placing one of those 3 correct. 28/30 isn't bad, but you lose all your time bonus... and it was my 2 minute trial that stuck. Seeing a normally solid/competitive time down in 18th place, with harder events coming up, made it apparent that I was very unlikely to qualify this year. "DISAPPOINTING... but at least all the pressure's off; I'm just doing it for myself!
NAMES was next, and... fortunately I had completely recovered from the disasters from the previous two days (Sk8er Boi on full blast, followed by some of The Clash?)... unfortunately, I was still on the wrong side of the 29|30 wall as I blanked on Gail ("I got all the J names right for once... for... THIS?") I then tried a second trial and blanked on a few more names; worse, I realized during recall that Linda (window) and Brittany (birthday cake) were the same person in slightly different poses, and I had used the same physical feature (eyes) to remember both! The best I could do was put the same name down for both... "not improving on 29/30 anyway; just get over this trial" ended up at a 23 - another 18th place here (or tied for 15th depending on how you look at it, though at least I was ahead of the 2020 champ!) Not much time to reflect; NUMBERS was up next. My brother (86) showed up as the Person in loci 1 and 4; my Grandpa Bob (24) in loci 11 and 14; the last case followed by his action (locus 13, 462417, was Trump swimming with a tack/through a bed of tacks)... and the only locus I struggled with was 8 - 192562 (Jackie Robinson screaming at a shin!) Sure enough I had hit my 4:00 goal (well, within a second). Hitting my mark meant time to go for a 3:30 trial, and... again... when it was obvious I wasn't going to hit my mark on the second trial I relaxed a bit, but at least 60/80 was much better than my second CARDS attempt! Interestingly I had my best rank of the day - 13th - at NUMBERS, but the person one spot ahead of me was nearly twice as fast (2:24.45 to my 4:00.85)! Only one event left, and it was the one where I had the least idea of everyone's performance... but no one was expecting what would happen next. (edited)
Prepping for WORDS, I felt pretty confident I would hit my goal... 40 words seemed easy, and I even got cocky and grabbed the four easiest words from the final 10! I got those words, but at the cost of blanking on four other loci (40 + 4 - 2*4 = 36). 36 was still within range, but where would that place me? The answer... eighteenth place on the first round! So, I prepared my weakest memory palace for a second attempt (knew I wasn't qualifying at this point; this was just for fun, just to see what I could do) and... right at the beginning of my recall round, my adrenaline gave way and I was completely spent. I had 17 of the first 20 words down, along with the final locus I memorized (words 39-40, locus 20, right at the statue of Teddy Roosevelt) for a score of 19... and... I pressed SUBMIT and watched scores coming in; my 'eighteenth' had fallen to 21st! With rankings of 14, 18, 18/T15, 13, 21... I knew I wasn't going to be top 12, but might I have been an alternate? I returned to the Zoom with tears in my eyes, feeling like "my best is not enough", and with my emotional mindset not matching the room I went camera off until I could reset my happy mask back on. Everyone else was so happy, so proud, so excited, so relieved... and I... felt like "the end of an era" (even though I was definitely on track to improve from where I was). Sure enough, the scores were announced and... I was not in the top fourteen. 16/31, my actual rank, was middle of the pack. Further, it seemed that although dropping Lumosity events was expected to be a one time thing... the vibe and scores were so favorable (well, for everyone except me) that it seemed that they might decide to make it permanent! At least I proved I could hit my goals and prepare to improve further...
[WORDS ADDENDUM: Nine people managed to get all fifty words before the 5 minute timer ran out, of which the slowest time was 4:06.73. Of those, six beat 3 minutes and two beat 90 seconds! Below those nine we had another seven people missing only 1-3 words, followed by a 44 and three 38s and then my 36!]
still disappointing to go from 3rd place last year to 16th place this year!