Braden Adams from Chilliwack, British Columbia, is the new National Memory Champion!
Everyone involved was particularly impressed by the performance on display on September 16, 2018. Braden Adams in Vancouver clearly deserved his first place. He memorized no less than 263 images in 5 minutes, 258 digits in 5 minutes and 155 words in 15 minutes, breaking Canadian records in each of those three challenges.
Ezequiel Valenzuela in Montreal managed to win second place overall, finishing strongly with a full deck of cards memorized perfectly in 1 minute and 10 seconds. At just 17 years old, he’s now the undisputed Junior champion. And that’s despite the fact that the scores you can see below are often just a fraction of what he’s really capable of.
Erik Yucong Li in Toronto ended up in third place, not far behind Ezequiel. He memorized 120 words, 122 digits and a full deck of cards in 2 minutes and 13 seconds.
Valérie Grenon from Montreal was the only person who successfully won against Braden in one discipline. She memorized 58 names in 5 minutes, also breaking a Canadian record. Who knows whether or not she could have ended up in second place overall if she had trained for random numbers and decided not to skip that event. Ten Wang in Toronto memorized 80 words and 31 names and won the beginner section, an impressive performance for anyone, not just for a beginner. We would also like to salute the bravery of 11-year-old Philippe Glaude in Montreal and 16-year-old Shawn Lu and his 8-year-old brother Alexander Lu in Vancouver for taking part in all 3 championships, despite having little or no experience with many of the challenges presented. We hope to see those examples emulated a thousand times in the future.
Important precision: If you happen to be reading this in 2019, you should know that the CMSA format has changed a lot recently. That means that direct score comparisons can’t always be made. In 2018, competitors had 15 minutes instead of 10 to memorize random words, and only 5 minutes instead of 10 to memorize numbers. The championship point system was also completely different.
- For words, numbers and cards, the first number shows the official score while the second number shows the attempted score before the mistakes and penalties. Penalties can be harsh in some cases, so don’t assume that a 168/228 score means that the competitor made 60 mistakes. In a few cases the attempted scores weren’t recorded by mistake, but this omission in no way affect the overall scoring. Attempted scores are only recorded for the sake of satisfying our curiosity.
- For cards the first number indicates how many cards were correctly recalled. Time is included when a competitor spent less than 5 minutes looking at the cards. Being fast only allow you to gain more championship points if you also managed to recall all 52 cards correctly.
- For each discipline we write the raw score on the first line and the corresponding number of championship points (CP) in parenthesis on the last line. The IAM score calculator at iam-stats.com/scores.php is used to convert raw scores into CP. Because our names and faces aren’t quite as difficult as other competitions, the number of CP given for this challenge is multiplied by 0.75 (75%) to avoid making this event a disproportionate source of CP for competitors.
- When you see +60, +40 or +20 next to a given amount of CP in parenthesis, it means the competitor was awarded a bonus amount of points for scoring first, second or third place in this particular discipline.
- Total CP for beginners are calculated differently. Details are explained at the bottom of this page.
- Competitors are listed in first name alphabetical order.