My new title. It's so going on all my credit cards, checkbooks, letterheads, business cards, and toilet paper rolls - Grandmaster Dellis. The WMC has come and gone and I can honestly say I'm glad it's over. No joke, it was a heavy competition. 3 days of grueling hours of memorization definitely took its toll. I totally crashed last night when I got home, albeit on a really big high. For one, I came in 7th place (out of 70+ competitors) and almost caught up to the 6th place Ben Pridmore (who was a bit out of practice, but still performed some awesome scores). I think my total score of 5300+ points bumped me up to 20th or 21st in the world (from 24th). Nice.
But coolest of all is the fact that I achieved my Grandmaster of Memory status, which I have been trying to do for quite some time. How do you do that? Well....
1. Memorize a deck of cards under 2 minutes (easy, I did it in 40.65 seconds) 2. Memorize 10 decks of cards in 1 hour (easy, I did 12 and a bit) 3. Memorize a 1000 digit number in 1 hour (easy, I did 1320)
Voila.
As for my scores throughout Day 3:
Random Words - I shot for 208 words, which is a bit less than I normally do. I made some careless errors, so it cut my score down to 177 points. Still not bad, but my mistakes were silly - I confused "crown" with "queen" and "baggage" with "suitcase" UGH!
Spoken Numbers - Three trials to try and memorize as many digits in a row, spoken to you at a rate of 1 per second. The first trial I went for 100 digits but missed the 8th one, giving me a whopping score of 7, haha. The next round I went for 101 and nailed it cold. Third round I was gonna shoot for 200 but I got a bit overexcited at around the 87th digit mark and I stopped paying attention to the numbers. Whoops.
Speed Cards - The final and most exciting event. Two trials to memorize a deck of cards as fast as possible. In my first trial, I stopped the timer at 50 seconds, only to recall everything perfect minus two reversed cards. FRUSTRATING. My second trial (which was more stressful than the first since I needed to secure it or go home a sad little man) I nailed 40.65 seconds. Holy crap - It was my best competition score EVER. I even beat out Johannes Mallow (42 sec), Boris Konrad (43 sec), and Ben Pridmore (42 sec). I was stoked.
Overall, the competition was a great experience. Some parts I could have done better, some other parts I did what I expected, and other parts I surprised myself. With the ultimate goals of placing top 10 and becoming a Grandmaster, I'd say I had a pretty good competition.
Thanks for everyone's support! Now on to win a 3rd USA Memory Championship in March!