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Congratulations to Braden Adams for his fifth (!!!!!) consecutive victory at the 2024 National Memory Championship!

Congratulations to Don Michael Vickers and Mandy Wang for their second and (very close) third places and thanks to everyone who participated!

Click here for the results of the 2024 National Memory Championship

Congratulations to Hua Wei Chan for his fourth (!!!!) consecutive victory at the 2024 National Mental Math Championship!

Congratulations to Mohammad El Mir for his close second place! Congratulations to 2018 champion Jean Béland for his third place and thanks to everyone who participated!

Click here for the results of the 2024 National Mental Math Championship

 

*Friendly note: This year, participation was made free for local residents. The 15 or 25$ registration fees were redefined as “volontary contributions”. If some participants or supporters would like to help us pay for room rental, color printing and other costs, you’re welcome to do so using the paypal link on the How to help page of this website.

*The CMSA has now been around for 5 years! So far we’ve organized 13 in-person championships and 7 “honorary” online events. Attracting participants isn’t easy. And yet, hopefully we’re still just getting started : ) If you’d like to participate in future events or help us is one way or another, feel free to contact us on our Facebook page or at cmsa@canadianmindsports.com


The 2024 CMSA National Memory Championship will be held on Sunday November 17, simultaneously in Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton.

Disciplines and rules are explained in the memory sports and mental math sections of this website.

Click here to sign up or to learn more about those events.

You’re also welcome to let us know your interest in participating either on our Facebook page or at cmsa@canadianmindsports.com.

As always, our events aren’t just meant for highly trained individuals, they’re designed to be welcoming to people of all skill levels, including complete beginners hoping to develop their abilities. That’s why we have a Regular section for most people as well as an Advanced section for the most well prepared.

Participation is free for local residents. A voluntary contribution is suggested ($15 in the Regular section, $25 in the Advanced section).

For memory, even if you think your memory is terrible, you might be surprised by how well you can perform with some focus combined with a very basic understanding of memory techniques. This page in English or this page in French can very quickly teach you everything you need to know to achieve some good enough results.

As always, you can choose to participate anonymously if you prefer.

It will never be “easy” to solve math problems or to memorize as quickly as you can. However, although the challenges that participants in the Regular section will face are all difficult, they are conceptually simple enough so that almost anyone can try and enjoy them.


* Thanks to Athmane Dadi and the whole team of the Champs School Draa El Mizan in Alger, Algeria. Athmane was planning to travel all the way from Algeria to Montreal along with a team of 25 people to compete in both our mental math and our memory championships. We’re sorry that their request for a travelling visa was unjustly denied and that the trip had to be canceled.

* Congratulations to Kelvin Song, Phoenix Wang and Louis Bao for their remarquable achievements at the Asia Pacific Masters of Memory Competition in China! We’re of course hoping to see you all along with other Landmark Memory Sports students at future CMSA championships.

Click for more details and photos about their recent achievements in China


Canadian Don Michael Vickers breaks new memorization world records for random words

And can you guess what the unofficial world record is?

50 words perfectly memorized in no less than 19.90 seconds!

Click here to know more about how he learned to be so damn fast

 


Thanks to everyone who took part in the 2023 National Memory Championship!

Congratulations to Braden Adams for winning his fourth title of Canadian memory champion! 

Congratulations to 16-year-old Mandy Wang for her outstanding performance and her second place overall! 

Braden Adams established two new Canadian memory records by memorizing 512 digits in 10 minutes and 326 images in 5 minutes.

Mandy Wang won the card event with a full deck of cards in just 48 seconds! She’s also the second Canadian to ever manage to memorize more than 400 digits in 10 minutes!

 


Thanks to everyone who took part in the 2023 National Mental Math Championship!

Congratulations to Hua Wei Chan for his third consecutive Canadian mental math champion title!

And of course, congratulations to Mohammad El Mir for his close second place! And for establishing a new national record at the square roots optional challenge.

Congratulations to 2018 champion Jean Béland for his third place overall! His results remain just as impressive as always.

And congratulations to Prerna Rawat for her fourth place and for her outstanding overall performance!

Click here for the full results

 


Many thanks and congratulations to all participants of the long-delayed online 2023 Honorary Mental Math Challenge and 2023 Honorary Memory Challenge!

Top 5 best overall reported scores in mental math were by

  • 14 years old Mako Inokawa in Tokyo, Japan
  • 12 years old Kaloyan Danielov Geshev in Sofia, Bulgaria
  • 9 years old Manaka Imanishi in Tokyo, Japan
  • 61 years old Marc Larocque in Québec, Canada
  • 49 years old Domenico Mancuso in Italy

Top 5 best overall reported scores in memory were by:

  • Silvio Di Fabio in Italy
  • Don Michael Vickers in Nova Scotia
  • 16 years old Mandy Wang in British Columbia
  • Dmitriy Krasnoshyokov in Russia
  • 15 years old Chuniei Bao in British Columbia

Click here for all mental math results

Click here for all memory results



 


The newly formed Global Mental Calculators Association (GMCA) has a great new website with plenty of helpful resources for anyone who’d like to develop or improve their skills at various forms of mental math. Visit them at mentalcalculation.org and see what they have to offer.

They’re also planning to start a “Calculation League”, a fully remote, weekly mental calculation competition modeled on the Memory League. It’s expected to start in January 2024.


Braden Adams from British Columbia and Don Michael Vickers from Nova Scotia have recently been interviewed by the CBC and another news site. They are both participating in the Memory League online World Championships.

Although there have been many skilled memory competitors in Canada before, it’s hard to overstate how big of a leap forward Braden and Don’s achievements have been.


Thanks and congratulations to all those brave souls – beginners and world-class experts – who showed up to the 2022 editions of our mental math and memory championships on November 26 and 27!

Congratulations to Hua Wei Chan for his second Canadian mental math champion title!

And congratulations to 18-year-old Mohammad El Mir for his close second place!

Click here for the full results of the 2022 National Mental Math Championship

Congratulations to Braden Adams for his third Canadian memory champion title!

And congratulations to Emanuele Regnani from Italy for managing to get the best overall scores!

Click here for the full results of the 2022 National Memory Championship

 


Other pages that aren’t affiliated to the CMSA that you might want to join or follow:


Thanks to everyone who took part in the 2022 Honorary Mental Math Challenge and the 2022 Honorary Memory Challenge!

No, the photo above of this huge exterior class has absolutely nothing to do with our honorary challenges.

But yes, we did indeed have 364 participants!

The vast majority of those are young people in India working with the Genius Kid organization and competing in mental math. We also saw participants from France, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, United States, Spain, Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, Belgium, and of course Canada.

Click here to see the full results of the 2022 Honorary Mental Math Challenge

Click here to see the full results of the 2022 Honorary Memory Challenge

 

Some already old and outdated posters for the honorary challenges we organized in 2022:

 


Full results of the 2021 Honorary Memory Challenge

  • Thanks to everyone who participated and congratulations for what you managed to achieve!
  • Congratulations to Braden Adams for once again managing to get the best results overall along with some new unofficial national records.
  • Congratulations Silvio Di Fabio in Italy for his close second place overall.
  • Congratulations to 13 years old Joshua Olayanju in New Jersey for his third-place overall, beating all participants of all ages except Braden and Silvio.
  • Congratulations to Don Michael Vickers for his second place among Canadians.
  • Congratulations to Jim Gerwing for his third place among Canadians and first place among seniors
  • Congratulations to Jefferson Song for his first place in the Regular section.
  • Thanks to Landmark Group in Vancouver and congratulations to all their students.

Click here for a link to the full results

Full results of the 2021 Honorary Mental Math Challenge!

Thanks and congratulations to everyone who participated! Congratulations to Hua Wei Chan in Alberta, Canada, for managing the best results overall. Congratulations to Jean Beland in Granby, Canada, for his second place. Congratulations to 10-years-old Kaloyan Danielov Geshev for his third place and for his amazing demonstration a few days ago at Bulgaria’s Got Talent.

Click here and scroll down for the full results, for more “fun facts” about the participants and for a link to a video of young Kaloyan showing off his skills on tv.

 


The plague won’t stop from spreading the gospel of memory techniques in all kinds of ways!

Click here for a compilation of some of the most fascinating and instructive articles and news reports about the art of memory.

New article on CBC.ca: “A memory expert shares tips for improving your recall abilities”. (Click here instead for a much more complete version of the article) The advice mentioned here are meant to be useful to anyone, including people who aren’t interested in using techniques based on stories or images.

Click here for more free resources to learn how to use the amazing art of memory

Want to learn how to memorize with more ease, speed and fun? How to solve a Rubik’s cube? How to do extremely fast and impressive mental calculations? How to relatively quickly develop more or less any new skill? Then check out the “Learn and Train section” in the upper part of this page.

-A


Canadian Memory Champion Braden Adams has been busy forming the next generation of terrifying memory athletes!

They are students from Landmark Group in Vancouver. They got great results at the 2019 National Memory Championship and at our Honorary Memory Challenge. And they just keep on improving…

Are you scared yet? You should be…

SCARY UPDATE: In December of 2020, one of those young students from Vancouver took part in the WMSC World Memory Championship and managed to get first place among Junior competitors at 2 different events. One of those is called Spoken Numbers. You have to memorize digits being read aloud one per second, there’s no opportunity to review and points stop being counted after the very first mistake. Mandy Wang managed to perfectly memorize and recall no less than 164 digits! Even more impressive, she also managed to break a Junior world record with random words. 287 words memorized in 15 minutes with near-perfect recall!

Here’s a picture of 13-years-old Mandy Wang attempting to use her new titles to intimidate all her future opponents.


Here are the full results of the 2019 National Memory Championship and of the 2019 National Mental Math Championship!

Congratulations to Braden Adams for his second Canadian Memory Champion title and for his 4 new national memory records!

Click here for the full results of the 2019 National Memory Championship. We suggest that you pay attention not just to the very best results but also to what the participants in the Regular section managed to achieve. Some of those participants knew next to nothing of memory techniques a few weeks before the event. Even without any kind of obvious natural talent, it’s quite amazing how far one can go with some new techniques and just a few hours of practice.

Congratulations to Hua Wei Chan for becoming the new Canadian Mental Math champion and for his 2 new national mental math records!

Click here for the full results of the 2019 National Mental Math Championship.

Thanks to everyone who participated in one way or another! It was an honor. We can’t wait for next year even more ambitious events.

 

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Here’s an awfully done photo montage showing some of the competitors and some of the people involved in our last national events.

 

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  • The Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers just published this great article and video interview about Braden Adams victory.
  • The Université de Montréal newspaper Le Forum published this other great article in French about physic teacher Patrick Dufour second place performance, about the art of memory and about a conference that Francis Blondin presented shortly before the championship.
  • A few weeks before the championship, Anthony Metivier interviewed Braden Adams for an episode of the Magnetic Memory Podcast.

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The 2019 IAM World Memory Championship in Zhuhai, China

Our friends at the International Association of Memory (IAM) held the World Memory Championship in Zhuhai, China. Zhuhai (珠海市: “Pearl Sea City”) is a marvelous coastal city in the South of China, close to Hongkong and Macao. 20 years old Andrea Muzii from Italy is the new World Memory Champion! Full results here.

[Just to be clear, we at the CMSA are big fans and supporters of IAM, but we aren’t an officially affiliated organization. We operate independently using different rules and events.]

 

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Just made this semi-improvised new logo. Not sure if it’s awesome or a little weird or both. What do you think?

Full credits for the images used: upper-right is Florian Dellé of the awesome memory-sports.com website; upper-middle ; upper-right; middle-left; lower-left ; lower-middle. Middle-right and lower-right are too widely used to point to any particular source.

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If memory techniques are new to you, check out this completely free and very short 5-day, 20 minutes a day training program that we believe will help you spectacularly improve your ability to remember difficult information.

Click here to access your free training program

Cliquez ici pour accéder à votre programme d’entrainement gratuit

Click here to access more free resources about the art of memory

 

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Cubing Competition in Montreal

Saturday April 6, CMSA Board member Valérie Grenon along with Canadian Cubing and others organized a huge cubing competition in Montreal. Over 120 competitors showed up and the event was a great success.

The Journal de Montréal wrote this great article about it.

Join the Cubing Montreal Facebook group if you want to see some images and videos of the event.

Follow the Canadian Cubing website and Facebook page if you want to be informed of all the upcoming cubing competitions in Canada.

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Les résultats du Championnat québécois de la mémoire 2019 / Official results of the 2019 Quebec Memory Championship

La Canadian Mind Sports Association (CMSA) en collaboration avec l’Association des participants à la maîtrise en administration de l’Université Laval (APMAL) tiennent à remercier tous ceux et celles qui ont participé au Championnat québécois de la mémoire du 23 mars 2019 à l’Université Laval.

Les résultats officiels du championnat sont en ligne sur cette page!

The official results of the 2019 Quebec Memory Championship are now online on this page!

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Some fun websites to train the art of memory

In addition to making the effort to turn the names of the people you meet and the difficult words you hear into images, one of the easiest ways to integrate the practice of memory techniques into your life is to go to a training website like Memory League for a short five minutes from time to time instead of going on Facebook. It’s like a video game.

Click here for other great alternatives.

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We’re all over the place!

Our first national competitions had quite an impact and our memory and math champions are now all over the place! We hope that this exposure will convince at least a few people to start learning some new skills. “See what you can do, you’d be surprised” is one of the messages they intend to repeat as often as possible

  • (In French) An interview with mental math champion Jean Béland published in Le Soleil of Quebec city, Le Droit of Gatineau, Le Nouvelliste of Trois-Rivières, La Tribune of Sherbrooke, Le Quotidien of Saguenay and La Voix de l’Est of Granby. He made the front page in at least one case.
  • (In French again) Another interview with Jean Béland on radio 107.7 Estrie (you need to look for the September 20 program to find the link)
  • An interview and a demonstration with competitor Ezequiel Valenzuela and organizer Francis Blondin on Global News Montreal
  • Francis Blondin on CBC radio
  • (In French) On Radio-Canada Première

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Here’s what you’ve missed during the first National CMSA Championships

Here are the official results of the 3 championships that were held this weekend simultaneously in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. There’s a lot to tell, but the bottom line is that we had a ton of fun, we were amazed by the performance we witnessed and very happy to meet some enthusiastic beginners. In Vancouver, Braden Adams became the new National Memory Champion, breaking no less than three Canadian records. Also in Vancouver, 14-year-old Kenny Zhong solved a Rubik’s cube in just 6.63 seconds. In Montreal, mister Jean Béland managed to defeat his strongest rivals and claim the title of National Mental Math Champion. We want to sincerely thank everyone who participated in one way or another! With your help, we’ll be back next year bigger and stronger.

Results of the 2018 Friendly Cubing Championship

Results of the 2018 National Mental Math Championship

Results of the 2018 National Memory Championship

Click here or join this Facebook group if you want to see more photos from the three championships.