I'm Back Again (for the Nth time)

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Finally got it!

Alright! I don't know how many times I've already said I'll be doing this more frequently and more consistently, so just add this to that number. 2014 has passed without a single post from me, I think over a year lay off would be a nice time to come back. If you are wondering what kept me from doing this, you'll have to wonder some more because I don't exactly sure why. Let's just say I was pre-occupied with other stuff, primarily with memory training and competitions. Since my last post, I finally gained my Grand Master of Memory title went I went to the World Memory Championships in London, UK last December 2013. That's pretty much all that was notable in my performance then other than my personal bests in Names and Faces and Hour Numbers. If I do not care much about competing I'd rest my laurels with that and be content to walk around telling people I'm a GM. But I'm not into that. I'd love to compete as much as possible if the opportunity is there.

WMC 2013 Awarding Ceremonies

And speaking about opportunity, the great mind behind Extreme Memory Tournament has opened the event to the public. Anyone now has a chance to compete in this year's XMT. If any of you are interested in taking this opportunity to travel to San Diego to compete against the World's Extreme Mnemonists, head on over to the XMT training site and register to get your chance to qualify. If you are reading this, as of this writing, there is still time to qualify bu there are only two days left before the first qualifying event wraps up.

Big Ben at Night

Speaking of XMT, I was able to qualify in the inaugural tournament last year by the strength of my performance in the Philippine Memory Championship 2013. My score at that time pushed me high enough in the rankings to be considered among the Top 16 qualifiers. But I ultimately failed to advance to the next round as my performance was utterly horrendous. I can't stop shaking and shivering even though it wasn't really that particularly cold. I was so nervous that I got called out for distracting my competitor. My heart was racing every time I step on to the stage for the head to head match ups. I need to find a way to minimize that so I can perform better. Interestingly enough, I was in the same exact state when I'm doing my qualifying attempts for this year's XMT. I had 14 straight perfect scores with decent times before I made my first attempt and till managed to fail my first attempt and added 10 seconds to my average time. After getting a perfect score on my second one, I was able to do almost 50% on my practice runs while hitting my personal best with the XMT Software. But still failed the following two attempts. With my final attempt, I decided to just go all in and do as fast as I can, thinking that I already had an ok score and botched the previous two so bad that made me just go and throw caution to the wind. Good thing I have been running for a couple months now because my heart is just pounding so hard from the tension that I felt I might just double over. Then boom! I got it. It wasn't going to break the world record or anything but I'm so glad I had it. There was a sudden relief that I felt after finishing. I felt so tired as well. I started around midnight and didn't even realized it was almost 6 in the morning.

Screen cap from my grainy video of XMT card attempts

But there are still four events more to go. And I don't even know how many are trying to qualify since up to now, none of us are submitting their scores. Out of the five that is currently listed, only 2 are legitimate qualifiers. The other three are either already in the top 8 or is the organizer. It seems like people are waiting for each other to show their cards. So, I guess I'll wait till Saturday afternoon to submit mine though. Haha! I don't want to wait till the last hour to submit mine in the off chance that we may lose our internet connection again and risk forfeiting my scores. I won't forgive myself if that happens. Again, if anyone of you reading this wants to get in on XMT, now is your chance. With only just two people qualifying plus me and my namesake, sort of, Johannes Zhou from Germany who are submitting, that leaves us with plenty of room to spare for qualifiers.

XMT leaderboard as of January 3, 2015. Still lots of room for qualifiers.

So, what else have I been doing? I've listening to most of Joe Rogan's podcasts. It's a terrific way to while away your time. It gets you to learn a variety of stuff as well. I liked it so much that I even had to stop in the middle of this post for 45 minutes just listen to his year in review. And speaking of Rogan, UFC 182 is on this Saturday night already. The build for the main event fight between Jon 'Bones' Jones and Daniel Cormier has been ridonkulous! Many will be tuning in for MMA's Ali-Frazier fight.

Anyway, the year is very young and there'll be many more days to post stuff. So I'll just leave it here for now and save some topics for later.

If you got through here, good job! You don't have the attention of a badly trained pitbull. But they're adorable though.

Aaand as usual you can follow me here:

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Philippine Memory Championships 2013 Results

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Philippine Memory Championship Results

2013 Philippine Memory Champion Medal Haul

As much as I'd like to post the results from last weekend's events, I was not able to get a copy of the official results as it was not posted during the competition much like the previous one. But the good thing was, later in the day, it was announced over the PA system who the winners were and their corresponding scores. However, I only happen to have the attention to listen for my scores since taking a nap was main priority then (I only managed to sleep for just a couple of hours), thankfully it was announced alphabetically and I was mentioned early, so I doze off right after hearing mine. Unfortunately, that kept me from taking note of anyone else’s scores, plus there were over a hundred participants to keep tab as well.

But, here's what I do know. When monster memorizers like GMs Erwin Balines and Mark Castañeda are away, I get to take home all the golds for the day. Not exactly all of it since, only I won most of the events, except for the random words and spoken numbers event, I got bronze and silver for those. I also get to call myself the First Philippine Memory Champion as well! That has a nice ring to it, might I add. But if anyone asks if I'm truly the first Philippine Memory Champion since, you know GM Erwin just tore through the competition last May where I just came in third, I'd refer you to this bit on the rules about Titles. It says that “The overall winner of the Championships will be entitled to call themselves THE MEMORY CHAMPION (of the current competition year) regardless of the age category in which they have competed.” So, GM Erwin Balines was definitely the first to win a Philippine National Memory Championship, which makes him the First Philippine Memory Champion but technically, according to that bit about title nomenclature, I get to call myself the First Philippine Memory Champion too! But GM Erwin is surely more fitting to be called the First Philippine Friendly Memory Sports Champion, because he obviously looks friendlier than me.

Anyway, here's more info about the tournament that I can safely dish out to you, Ms. Sharmaine D. Dianquinay turned out to be THE runner-up of the championship after some bit of confusion during the awarding ceremonies. They announced her as the fifth place finisher despite having several silver medal finishes and won the gold at spoken numbers. Apparently, with all the hubbub of trying to keep the awarding ceremony at pace to keep the respected guest from bailing out before the overall standings were awarded, some mix up with the scores were made that resulted to the said confusion.

Among the juniors and kids division, the Landicho brothers kicked ass as they both placed at the top of their respective divisions. Miguel Iseah, fresh from winning this year’s Thailand Junior Open Memory Championship just a couple of weeks ago, topped the junior division while his younger brother, Rommel, took the kids division crown. Much like the competitors from the National Open on Memory Sports last May, these kids had just months of training heading into the Philippine Memory Championships as well.

Philippine National Memory Records Broken?

A new record: an intermission number by the Kalokalikes
at a memory championship event.

I think there were quite a number of National Memory Records broken last Saturday and Sunday. But we need to see the final official results posted first before we can make sure of it because I’m just going by what I remember hearing from the announcements and that is not quite reliable. Having last May’s championship ending with superb results muddies up the record as well. So, I’m now confused which national records to consider. For one, the NOMS had no official arbiter, deeming it ineligible for the official rankings. But on the other hand, those results did happen and I was even there to witness it.     

Having said all that, here are the possible records being broken.

Kevin Tenoso and some other person, made a rousing start last Saturday when they score over 400 championship points in the 5 Minute Random Words event where they also got Gold and Silver. And if you are not familiar with how many words you need to memorize to get that score, it’s 50+ words. And the current official record is held by Ms. Sharmaine Dianquinay with 50 words memorized in 5 minutes (The unofficial record is held by GM Erwin with 60 words.)

In the 5 Minute Binary Digits, I was able to break the official national record held by Eon Lee of 345 binary digits by tying GM Erwin’s unofficial binary record of 510 digits.

With Names and Faces, it gets a bit tricky. I was able to beat the official record of 36 points by Ms. AB Bonita with 39 points but that wasn’t enough to beat her unofficial record of 42 points.

The current official record in the 10 Minute Cards is just several days old. It was set by the Beauty Queen, Ms AbbygaleMonderin at the Thailand Open Memory Championship this month with 156 cards (2+ decks). The unofficial record, on the other hand, was set by GM Erwin last May with exactly 208 cards or 4 decks. I managed to beat both records as I cheekily memorized a little bit more than 4 decks of cards just to get past the record, a mere 12 cards more to be exact.

New Speed Cards National Record: 36.25 seconds

And finally, I was able to clear my nerves when it came to speed cards. I’ve been trying to hit below one minute ever since I started competing but I managed to let my nerves get in the way. I thought I was going to break into the one minute barrier last May but I stopped the time at exactly 60 seconds. My heart was racing at that time, especially when I failed to put the cards in order for my ‘safe’ first attempt. But I don’t know why I was unexpectedly calm during the whole two days for this event, maybe it was the lack of sleep or the thought of not having the top two memory guys to compete with, but I felt good on those two days. On my first attempt, I went through the cards deliberately and stopped the time at a little over 50 seconds. That was good enough to tie or beat GM Mark’s official record of 50.86 seconds by just hundredths of a second. I happen to recall the deck perfectly that made it official. Now, I had to weigh in if I’d go balls to the wall and break THE actual World Record of 21.19 seconds of or just go little bit faster than my previous attempt. I didn’t let my hubris get in the way this time, as I opted to go with my second option. And it ended up perfectly again as I managed to hit 36.25 seconds, enough to blast through my personal record barrier and the official record. With that result, I also get to land exactly at the top 10 of the fastest speed cards time in the world and possibly break into the 5000 championship point barrier as well.          

That’s all the info that I have for now. I’ll post more about the changes in the Philippine Memory records when the official stat comes out. Meanwhile, here is some bit of trivia that I found out while doing this, did you know that Jamyla Lambunao has the unofficial world record at Spoken Numbers with 70 digits? Yep, that’s right, the official world record stand at 60 digits set by the young German Konstantin Skudler at the 2011 World Memory Championship.

UPDATES: Official results are in!

Random Words: Kevin Tenoso tied GM Erwin's the unofficial record of 60 words last May. The "some other person" who had 400+ points was Miguel Iseah Landicho with 53 words.

Overall Champion: Abrina, Johann Randall
2nd Place: Dianquinay, Sharmaine
3rd Place: Miguel Iseah Landicho

Division Champions

Adult 1. Abrina, Johann Randall
         2. Dianquinay, Mary Sharmaine
         3. Azarcon, Laila

Junior 1. Landicho, Miguel Iseah
          2. Tenoso, Khevin
          3. Cruz, Laura Sofia

Kids 1. Landicho, Rommel
        2. Nanzan, Jamillah
        3. Jagua, Ro Linus

The Top 10 Finishers

Rank	Memory Athlete	Championship Points
1	Abrina, Johann Randall	5,021
2	Dianquinay, Mary Sharmaine	2,987
3	Landicho, Miguel Iseah	2,442
4	Tenoso, Khevin	2,144
5	Azarcon, Laila	1,818
6	Ocray, Robbie Shem	1,773
7	Carandang, Christopher E.	1,596
8	Cunanan, Argie	1,568
9	Landicho, Rommel	1,401
10	Desingaño, Rachelle	1,370

Aaand as usual you can follow me here:

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We are Champions!

This is an image of  a medal for a tarpaulin that I was making for my Memory Training Workshop on Photoshop. I was editing it on a separate file to lower my memory usage since my laptop can't handle huge files. While I was working on it, I had this idea to make it a separate piece altogether, much like a motivation pic that we often see go around on social networking sites. What do you think? How can I make this better?

The quote on it was from MMA pioneer Mario Sperry. He was heard saying this while motivating his athletes, The Blackzillians, specifically, Former UFC Light Heavy Champion Rashad Evans. Evans was training to reclaim his title. The way he said it and how his athletes reacted was very moving. It is glimpse on a champion's mindset going into battle, something that we can apply in our lives.

Here's a video of it (Too bad, I can't find the video where this excerpt came from.): 

WMC 2012 Preview: A Different Take

Tomorrow is the start of the 2012 World Memory Championship. In anticipation of the said event, I’ve posted a preview and gave a prediction on who might turn out on top for this weekend. But my methods were a bit shoddy since it was only based on the athlete’s past performances and not their current feeling or perception on how they trained or might perform. As Tobiasz Boral of Poland points out, that "anything is possible!" Luckily, an astute observation was made by Dai Griffiths, a fellow mnemonist from Wales, pointed out to me a stat on the competitor’s list that may actually give a hint on how a participant may currently gauge their training, preparation, and performance. As Dai said (not his actual words), the number of cards brought or requested from the WMC, as seen from the competitor’s list, will give an accurate forecast on how each contestant expect to perform this weekend. Assuming that the same preparation went on with the other events, it will take into account their confidence going into tomorrow’s memory tilt, which we can then use to predict how the tournament will play out. So, what I did was get the average of three highest card requests from each country and rank them from the most to the least. Those with less than 3 members will still be divided by three, as per tournament proceedings. 

The Results: Team Standings Projections

Having done that, here’s how it looks:

Projected Rank	Country	Card Ave
1	Germany	28.3
2	UK	19.7
3	China	19.3
4	Philippines	16.3
5	Sweden	16
6	US	15
7	India	14
8	Hong Kong	12.3
9	Netherlands	10.7
10	Denmark	10
11	Indonesia	8.3
t12	Norway	8
t12	Poland	8
14	Italy	7
15	France	6.7
16	Australia	5.7
17	Finland	5
t18	Ireland	2.7
t18	Pakistan	2.7
t20	Singapore	1.7
t20	Malaysia	1.7

There you have it, it is pretty much the same as yesterday's prediction where Germany would end up as World Champions except for the major jump by Sweden from a projected SECOND, to a FIFTH place finish behind the Philippines. A definite order was also established between the US of A and the Philippines, where the US is seen to land at sixth, behind Sweden. This method also allowed us to rank the rest of the teams, unlike before wherein we were hindered by the lack of information on other competitors. 

See the Individual Standings Projections after the Jump..

Preview: World Memory Championship 2012

Alright, since I'm definitely will not be competing, I've decided to take break from training and do a short preview of the 2012 World Memory Championship instead.

As some of you know, this coming weekend, December 14-16, 2012, the world's best mnemonists will converge in London to pit their memory skills with one another to find out who has the World's Best Memory.

Who will be the 2012 World Champion of Memory?

I think this year's championship will be quite predictable. With the current World Champion, the Chinese Wang Feng opting for retirement, and the Top ranked Johannes Mallow and World No. 3 Simon Reinhard breaking the 2000 digit barrier (Random Numbers), the only Non-Chinese to do so, it would seem that the Germans will be battling amongst themselves for the title. It would also be entirely possible that there will be a full on sweep in the Individual Championship, as three out of the Top 5 in the world rankings comes from the Deutschlands.

But of course, we can't discount the former Three-time World Champion in Ben Pridmore, if he sorted out his motivation issues and got his Eye of the Tiger back again, and World No 10 Boris Konrad, another German. Other possible mentathletes to break into the Top 3 are Swedish break out star Jonas Von Essen currently ranked at no 13 and American Climber Nelson Dellis (Rank No. 24).

Having said all that, my money is on Johannes Mallow. Aside from being the World No. 1, he made this cool training video for the 2012 World Memory Championship: 

Team Championships: Country vs. Country

As I've mentioned above, it seems that it is a lock for Germany in Team Championship as well. For those of you who don't know, Team Championships are based on the cumulative scores of the top three performers of each country. That is how they edged out Team China in the 2010 WMC, even when Wang Feng did his monster performance, the Deutsche Team had more athletes with better scores. And now that the team sent by China lacks the usual top performers from the previous year's team, we'll try to figure out which team will possibly contest for the top spot. Or in other words, which teams are fighting for second. 

The easiest way of predicting which team may reach the podium is to get the average of the top three athletes of each country according to the World Ranking. Of course, it will not take into account how each athlete/team prepared for this year's WMC. We may (or may not) have some break out performance by some of newer memory athletes. 

So, basing on their current ranking scores, the German team has an average of 7, 967.3 points between their top three athletes. Followed by Sweden with 6,703, and rounding up the Top 3 would be China, with 4,971 The Chinese score was based on their recent performances on Chinese Memory Championship 2012, since some of them aren't ranked yet. It should be noted that their National Championship is in the same format as the WMC's. Coming in at fourth would likely be the UK (4,139.67), followed by the Philippines (3,358.7) or the US (3,346*), depending on how the other two American athletes perform in support of Dellis'.

There you have it, I would guess that China and Sweden will battle it out for Second, and the UK, the Philippines, and the US of A will duke it out for fourth. And of course, the Black, Red, and yellow flag will be flying in for the Gold.

Record Breakers

Almost every year, there are a couple of World Records being smashed in the World Championships. I bet it would be the same this year. The events rife for breaking would likely be the Binary digits, Abstract Images, and Spoken Numbers.

We've already seen Johannes Mallow getting reaaally close with Ben's long time record in Binary with a 4,095 in this year's Memoriad, just 2 rows short in breaking it. We'll see if doing it with Pen and Paper will make a difference this time.

The Abstract Images was recently broken by Simon Reinhard at the S. German Championship 2012 and it was almost rewritten by Jonas Von Essen at the Friendly Championships last October. I have no doubt it will be surpassed again this time.

The World Record in Spoken Numbers currently stands at 300 digits. If wasn't for a computer glitch that caused a disruption during the memorization phase for the 400 digit trial, it would have been an even crazier number. Although the German Superstars are close enough with a personal records around 250 digits, my personal bet to break the 300 mark would be my compatriot Mark Anthony Castañeda. Unless he is bitten by a jitter bug or actually frost bitten in -5 degree weather in London, my money is on him.

Other possibilities, Hour Cards can be broken by... Ben again. The Speed Cards event is a tricky thing to break in the World Championship. Unless you are not concerned with how you will end up in the World Championship Leaderboard, like Wang Feng who had captured the Gold by the time the event was ran, or someone who had no other intention but to break the record, you'd go all out and zip through the cards as fast as possible. Otherwise, you'll have to play it safe. With only three people that can do a deck in under 30 secs and most of them will probably vying for the World Championship title, it will unlikely be broken this year. But the exciting thing is that the Speed Cards event will most likely decide this year's World Champion.
 
Recap

There you have it. I know I may not be going out on limb with my predictions here but I think this is how it will go down. As a Memory Athlete sitting out in this year's competition, I'm definitely looking forward to how this event unfolds.

My predictions: 2012 World Champion: Johannes Mallow
                         Dark Horse: Jonas Von Essen  

                         2012 Team Champions: Germany 

That's it for now, I hope you enjoyed this, feel free to leave your comments below!





*If Dellis' fellow Americans added up to 5,000 points.