Ok, so I"m gonna let out a bit of stuff about the competition. First off, my goal this year was to beat the 2012 Nelson <--- that guy was a guy you did NOT want to mess with. I had trained a ton in the past 3 months and was hitting PRs like crazy, so I was expecting to do better than last year. Here are my comments/results in order of events:
1. Names and Faces - This one is always a crap shoot. I"m really good at it but my scores can vary depending on the kind of names they provide (80-110 points). I ended up on the lower side with 87....which was still decent enough to pull 6th place, but not better than last year"s 101. I was slightly bummed but also knew that that could happen. They were really tough names. To give you an idea, at the USA competition I can typically score 160 names no problem (Bob, Steve, McAllister, Joe, Bradshaw, etc). So to barely scrape 90 points just gives you a taste of the difficulty.
2. Binary Numbers - I"m not so great at this one (only because it"s the one I practice the least). That being said, I bested my older score of 1515 digits in 30 minutes with 1650 or something like that. Yay. Doesn"t come close to the top scores (near 4000) - but I"m okay with that. Happy that"s over. No more binary for a year!
3. Hour Numbers - I can do 1800-2000 digits in an hour. I wanted to go for a solid 1800. In the hour I got through 1840 digits and thought I knew them pretty well. During the recall I had a few holes in my mind, so I knew I"d hit some penalties, but I thought I"d hit about 1600. Nope, it was 1482 (which is the year the Hunchback of Notre Dame takes place in....and it bested my previous year"s score of 1350ish). Not stoked but was somewhat happy with this. Other people got some ridiculous scores over 2000. Impressive as hell!
4. Abstract Images - Beat my score of last year by 30 or so points (232). I went for 250, which is 5 pages of random blobs. I thought I nailed it, but clearly made a few mistakes. No worries. 232 was still good enough for a top 10 finish in the event. Yay!
5. Speed Numbers - YES! I"m most happy about this. I did 339 digits perfectly in 5 minutes. That"s my best Speed Numbers score in all of my competitions EVER. I have been waiting to get a number close to what I actually do in practice. Here it is. Now I can put that to bed and start pushing higher for the 400s. Johannes Mallow broke the world record by 1 digit (501)....so amazing.
6.Historic / Future Dates - Was disappointed with my performance here. I had been practicing this a ton and was getting around 70 dates pretty consistently. My pacing out of the gate was slow for some reasons and I could only get through 50 dates during the competition. I made a couple mistakes so I got a score of 48, which was one less than last year"s 49. ARGH!
7. Hour Cards - Was aiming for 18 decks, but got through 16.5 safely. I was 100% sure I nailed them all. I spent hours checking over my recall sheets for mistakes, but it all looked good. They said casino pa natet I only got 14.5 which I challenged (you can challenge scores and have them re-check it), but for some poorly organized reason, they promised to check my cards but never did. Not cool.. Anyways, 14.5 was better than last year"s 12.5. So, a win for me.
8. Random Words - My favorite event. I went for 232 words in 15 minutes and frustratingly got blanks on a couple words, which caused some penalty points, giving me a score of 182 (which was still quite good and better than my score last year)....bummer but not too much of a bummer.
9. Spoken Numbers - One of my best events. But for some reason I froze and I don"t know why. I couldn"t do anymore than 78 digits in a row (they say the digits out loud, 1 per second). I can usually do over 100 and sometimes 200. We had 3 trials, but I was mostly rubbish in each of them. Congrats to my buddy and fellow American, Brad Zupp, for solidly memorizing 112 digits. So sweet!
10. Speed Cards - I absolutely bombed here, which is so unlike me. I guess I was just off my game at this point. Not really sure what happened. The worst part is I went "slowly" with a "safe" time of 1m15s. I started weirdly over-thinking things in my head switching things that I initially had correct during the recall. Grrrr. At this point I was just going safe so my overall total score for the whole competition would be better than last years. I messed up the first attempt so the second attempt I was like, "just nail it, who cares how fast/slow you go".....so I did it again safely in 1m09s. But...again....confused myself during the recall, swapping 2 cards. So it was another botched trial. I got very minimal points as a result and it caused me to have a lower score (by 100) than last year.....
*BANGS HEAD AGAINST WALL*
I might be too hard on myself (definitely), considering I finished 12th overall out of about 100 competitors from around the world. But for me, that"s not good enough. I know I"m better than what I did. Anyways, failures are what I thrice off of anyways....so onwards to the next competition.