Braden Adams won the Canadian Memory Champion title for the second year in a row and broke 4 national memory records!
Huge thanks to everyone who participated in one way or another in the 2019 National Memory Championship that was held on November 24 in Montreal and Vancouver! Here are some of the highlights:
- Congratulations to Braden Adams for his first place for the second year in a row. Braden established no less than 4 new national memory records by memorizing 292 images in 5 minutes, 62 names in 5 minutes, 122 random words in 10 minutes and 393 digits in 10 minutes.
- Congratulations to Patrick Dufour in Montreal for his second place in the Advanced section. Congratulations to Kevin Matthews who almost tied with Patrick.
- Congratulations to Cat tuong Le phan for her first place in the Regular section. Her score of 145 images memorized in 5 minutes is the best ever recorded in a Canadian competition by anyone not named Braden.
- Congratulations to Nadya Villeneuve for her second place in the Regular section. Her score of 47 names memorized in 5 minutes (an event that she happens to find particularly difficult) is the third best ever recorded in a Canadian competition.
- Congratulations to Matthew Wilson from New York for his great performance and for his deck of cards memorized in just 62 seconds.
- Congratulations also to all the 9 to 12 years old kids, all students of the WK Education Group, who bravely competed in Vancouver. They all did well in at least some events. Mandy Wang, Zihan Li and Darien Yang managed to, for example, get results of 96, 88 and 86% at a difficult test where they had to memorize 50 fake nonsense facts in just 15 minutes. Mandy Wang is now the new Kid Memory Champion of Canada!
- Congratulations to 60 years old James Gerwing for becoming the new Senior Memory Champion of Canada. Although this time he didn’t face any competition in his age group, we’re unaware of anyone else who is currently able to beat him.
- A few competitors who were unable to compete in person downloaded all the challenges after the championship and tried to simulate the event as faithfully as possible from their home. Their results are posted here.
Thanks to all the competitors and thanks to (in no particular order) Drewe MacIver, Joaquim Ayala, Alecsandre Sauvé-Lacoursière, l’Association des étudiants et étudiantes en physique de l’Université de Montréal (PHYSUM), Sami Rasheed, Hua Wei Chan, Alli Zhang, Elaine Yin and Yan Zhu who all played an important role in organizing this event.
Full results
(Explanations about this scoreboard are added below.)
About this scoreboard:
- The images and names events are the same for everyone. For everything else, the scoring rules and/or conditions are harsher for competitors in the Advanced section.
- The first number in each box shows the raw official result. The second number after a slash sometimes shows the attempted score. With words, for example, a result of 62/64 means that 64 words were written down and 62 of those were corrects. The attempted score has no effect on the final ranking and we only note this to satisfy our curiosity. In this case, we mistakenly didn’t note it for many competitors in the Regular section. In the Advanced section, penalties for errors can sometimes be severe, especially for numbers and words. Therefore, do not assume that a score of 200/300 necessarily means that the participant made 100 mistakes.
- The final column indicates the total number of championship points (CP) and bonus points that have been earned by a particular participant. For each event, a mathematical formula is used to convert the raw result into a number of championship points. In the advanced section, at the end only the 5 best results out of 6 are taken into consideration. In the regular section, the numbers and cards challenges are completely optional and only the 4 best results are taken into account. When you see +25 or more next to a final score, it means that the participants were awarded some bonus points. That can be done either by obtaining a top 3 result among your peers in a particular discipline; by memorizing at least 60, 100 or 150 digits; 20, 40 or 52 cards; or by braking a national record.
- Unfortunately, Jean Béland in the advanced section was sick that day and he had to leave without completing most of the events. Jean got first place at the last Quebec Memory Championship.
- The participants are listed in first name alphabetical order.
- Click here if you would like to see a more detailed version of this scoreboard that includes the specific number of championship points and bonus points earned for each event.
- Click here if you’re curious about all the details concerning Championship Points (CP) and bonus points calculation.
- Click here to read all the rules for all the different events.
Once again thanks and congratulations to all! We hope to see you and many more participants either at next year’s edition or at some of our upcoming provincial memory championships. We had roughly twice as many competitors as we had last year and we fully intend to keep growing. If you would like to help us with our projects, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!
In Montreal the “memory guy” in charge ironically forgot to take pictures during the first parts when everyone was present. But he did snap a few during the last speed cards event.
