WMC 2012 is in.....drumroll, please.......er, London? After all that talk of potentially being in Lithuania, Latvia, Malaysia, China, outer space even....it comes back to London. No big deal really; I'm totally fine with it. It makes the whole thing a lot easier to get to, reliable, and less subject to sudden change. Will there be any prize money? Who knows. Probably not. If they decided to stay in London it probably means that there's no big sponsor. Either way, I'm in. I was planning to compete in the UK Championships at the end of August, but maybe I'll just wait till the WMCs since it's in the same place. My goal at this point is one thing and one thing only....to become a Grandmaster.
To become a Grandmaster of Memory one needs memorize a deck of cards in under 2 minutes (easy peasy), 10 decks of cards in an hour (I've done 9 in 30 minutes), and 1000 digits in an hour (I've done 880 digits in 30 minutes). Should be doable. Once I have that, I'll be happy. There's only one other American who has that title (Scott Hagwood) so it would be cool to be the second (David Thomas doesn't count).
Oh, the dates are December 14-16.