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2012 Japanese Memory Champion Takeru Aoki
enjoying a memory boost. |
The 2013 Memory Season has officially started with yesterday's Japanese Memory Championship where last year's champion faltered to 3rd place. Details regarding the competition are yet to be released by the organizers but I will update as soon as it is available.
The Japanese Memory Championship is the first national tournament for the year but unfortunately, it is a closed tournament. Meaning, foreigners are not allowed to compete. It is also quite different from the format of the other national tournament, which, as one competitor noted, easier than your regular tournaments (I've lost track of their official website, but I'm guessing they have less rows of data in their memory sheets).
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| What are you waiting for? |
The first open tournament of the year, where anyone can join, is usually the Welsh Open organized by Dai Griffiths. But with the new wave of popularity by Memory Sports, we've now seen two new open tournaments to be inaugurated this coming March. The first of which is the Mongolian Championship on the 9th, to be held at... again, as with most memory tournaments, details will be updated as soon as it is available. However, on the same month, merely two weeks apart, the second open tournament that will make its debut, is the Italian Memory Championship organized by Matteo Salvo. It will be held at Cicerone, Italy on the 23rd of March. And unlike most memory tournaments, and also a rarity in this niche sport of ours, it will be giving away cash prizes other than what I call "prestige" prizes. A whopping 1500 Euros for the top athlete and a corresponding prize for the second and third place winners. It is not clear though, if each winner of an event would get cash prizes too. Regardless, that's good news for those of mental athletes who've been waiting for a chance to gain some monetary return with their efforts. Full details can be found at the organizer's
website.
The third tournament to debut this year have set up shop in Hong Kong. It is set on the 28th and 29th of September. I love that Andy Fong and the rest of the
Hong Kong Memory Sports Council were able to organize an open tournament here in South East Asia. Travelling will be a lot easier for us Asian Mnemonists.
It looks like it is going to be a fun year for Memory Athletes. Memory tournaments are slowly popping up as more Mentathletes organize tournaments in their home countries. Another new tournament might also be launched this year, as there are rumblings of a memory competition being organized here in my country on April. So, we might also be adding the Philippines to the upcoming memory championship list in the near future. I just hope we're able to get ourselves organized.
Here's the complete list of announced memory tournaments for 2013. I just hope we could add the World Championships in this list already.
Upcoming Memory Championships for 2013
Update:
Michael from the comment section pointed out that there's also a
Slovenian Championship on the 16th of March. It will be the Fifth iteration of the tournament but World Memory Statistics only had just records for the 2009 event.
There are also two events to be ran by the
Arabian Memory Council, the 2nd Algerian Memory Championship on July 3-5 and the 2nd Arabic Memory Championship on December 19-21 to be held in Dubai, UAE.
Thank you for reading!
