Phil Chambers – Facebook Live Transcript, Sunday 8th March 2020
Watch the video here.
Hello [welcome] to this Facebook Live for the World Memory Sports Council. Today is International Women’s Day, and it’s really gratifying to know that the current World Memory Champion, and those of the previous two years were all young women, so it shows we have absolutely no gender bias in the competition. So that’s a real positive for today being International Women’s Day.
Before I start, I’d like to repeat the plea that I made on Wednesday. We’ve got the UK Open Memory Championships, which is going to provisionally take place on the 27th and 28th of June and we’re looking for a really stunning venue to hold that in. So if you know anybody who’s got a venue with two rooms, one holding about 10 people, boardroom style, for the arbiter’s room, and the main competition room holding about 20 to 30 people, exam style with a row of desks at the front for the invigilators to sit at, that will be available on those two dates, please let them know that we’re interested. We’d love to get in contact and talk to them about that. Obviously, we’d like to make this a non-profit event. But we need to make sure that the room costs, if any, are within our budget from the entry fees. So please think about us if you come across a suitable venue, and we can obviously help the organisation that sponsors for that with publicity and PR, and various mentions in our posts about the event.
So moving on to the main reason for talking to you this Sunday is I’m going to talk about the one day schedule. So when we’re running a one day memory championships, the schedule for that following our new amounts of recall time, and the amounts of memorization material. We always have the World Record plus 20%. It’s about the material that we present for memorization. So in a one day, we start at 8:30 in the morning with registration and welcome message – physically sitting down to do the first discipline at nine o’clock. That’s Abstract Images. We can provide 20 pages of images. That’s the world record plus 20%. But of course, if the competition is such that the competitors are not at that level (20 pages is a lot of printing) so we can provide less than that if that’s appropriate for the level of competitors. It’s obviously important for them to have enough information to do their best, but not being given unnecessary information that they’ll never get to when they’re memorising. So images 15 minutes memorization, 35 minutes recall, and then ten past 10 we move on to Binary Numbers second discipline, five minutes memorization with 47 rows of binary digits, ones and zeros. And then 20 minutes to recall the information from that one. Then we have a 15 minute break 10:40 – 10:55. At 10:55 we start Names and Faces 58 faces – five minutes memorization and 20 minutes recall. Short break, and then at 11:35 we start Speed Numbers: 19 rows of digits with 40 digits per row, five minutes memorization and then 20 minutes recall for that. This then takes us up to lunchtime so you have an hour for lunch 12:10 to 1:10
Ten past one we start the Random Numbers: 15 minutes memorization, 35 minutes recall and 35 rows of digits – Again same layout as the speed numbers we did before lunch, so 40 digits to a row. Then 2:15 to 2:45 Random Words, 156 words, five minutes memorization 20 minutes of recall time. Then 14:50 – 15:45 is the Cards. Obviously, the number of decks of cards is at the competitor’s discretion. Current World record is eight decks but they can choose how many decks they want to attempt. 10 minutes to memorise, and 30 minutes of recall time, so it is plenty of time to write them down and check they haven’t made any mistakes. Then we have another 15 minutes break 15:45 – 16:00. At 16 hundred hours we have the Historic and Future Dates – 180 dates, five minutes memorization 20 minutes of recall time, takes us to 16:30 when we have the Spoken Numbers. Two trials – First trial just to get some points on the board is 100 spoken digits, one a second. And then we have the world record plus 20% which is 656 numbers for the second trial. It’s always a very difficult discipline to memorise, although the World Champion got a perfect score last year in the championships with all three trials 100% Recall. It’s quite a challenging one, that one. And then 18:00 to 19:00 it is the final event, which often decides the competition: Speed Cards two trials. Maximum five minutes memorization time and five minutes recall time for each of the trials, best of two. Then from 19:00 till 20 hundred hours, we’ve got an hour then to reconcile the scores, check that everything’s in order, and all compiled. And then we have the awards ceremony, eight o’clock to 9:30 with the awards, celebrations, trophies, medals, certificates, photographs, all those sorts of things.
So it’s a very long day. Starting at 8:30 in the morning, finishing at 9:30 at night, but it proves that you can just about fit in the new recall times into that schedule. And of course, you can be pragmatic with this. If the competitors have finished their recall within the time, so if you’ve got 30 minutes recall time and they finished in 20, of course, you can move on to the next discipline, and condense the amount of time that you have to do or increase the length of breaks and so on. So it is a slightly flexible schedule. It does show you can fit 10 disciplines into one day. If you find that too tight, of course, you can split across two days. And as we say, with the UK Open, we’ll be doing an International Format – much longer disciplines and that will fit into two full days for that one.
Hopefully, it’s been useful to show you how these things run. I’ll give you more information about various memory disciplines and memory events next week.
Talk to you then.
Thanks for listening.
Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
https://youtu.be/b5DZ3B4gijA