Results of the 2022 National Memory Championship

The 2022 National Memory Championship happened on Sunday November 27 simultaneously in Montreal and Vancouver.

Congratulations to Braden Adams from Chilliwack, British Columbia, for once again winning the title of Canadian memory champion! Braden established two new Canadian memory records by memorizing 474 digits in 10 minutes and a full deck of cards in 30.4 seconds.

Congratulations to Emanuele Regnani from Rome, Italy, for managing to outperform all other participants!*

Congratulations to Kevin Matthews from Vancouver, British Columbia, for his second place among Canadians.

Congratulations to Suzanne Zaccour from Gatineau, Québec, for her first place in the Regular section. Congratulations to first-time participant Noémie Lachance for almost equalling Suzanne’s performance. And congratulations to Sophie T. and Pierre Fréchette for being brave enough to take part in a memory championship despite having no previous experience with memory techniques.

Thanks a lot to Joaquim Ayala, Valérie Grenon and AÉBBIUM (Association de biochimie et bio-informatique de l’Université de Montréal) for their help.

*In this particular case, the answer to the “Who got the best overall score between Braden and Emanuele” question is slightly complicated. Explanations will be added at the bottom of this page.

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 best score for each event is highlighted in bold.
  • 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 correct. The attempted score has no effect on the final ranking and we only note this to satisfy our curiosity. 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 breaking a national record.
  • The participants are listed in last name alphabetical order.
  • 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.

Here are some of the few pictures that were taken last Sunday:

Here’s Emanuele Regnani showing off his skills at Italia’s Got Talent earlier this year:

And here Braden Adams last year, preparing to memorize 70 decks of cards in a single day to raise funds for the British Columbia Alzheimer Society.

The CMSA National Memory Championship will be back next year in (probably) multiple Canadian cities with (probably) a much larger number of participants. Let us know if you’d like to help us or collaborate with us in any way to reach that goal!

In the meantime, whoever you and wherever you are, you’re formally invited to take part in our upcoming online, free and unofficial “Honorary Memory Challenge“.

Addendum: Who got the best overall scores between Braden and Emanuele?

The complicated answers to that question:

  • On one hand, it doesn’t really matter. Neither Braden nor Emanuele feels any particular need to claim that they “won” against the other. Technically, international competitors like Emanuele are only competing against others in the “Open section”. This separation is in place to make sure that being first or second or third in Canada will always mean something, even if the very best international competitors from around the world were to show up to our event and outperform everyone by a large margin.
  • On the other hand, it’s still interesting to determine who outperformed who. Braden and Emanuele were by far to most skilled participants in our event, and they are both of roughly similar ability levels.
  • All that being said, Emanuele got the best raw scores overall. But Braden earned enough “bonus points” to climb back up to the first place. Braden ended up with more championship points in total, but one could say that the symbolic first-place overall title should have gone to Emanuele.

In this particular case, some aspects of our “bonus points” system ended up making the difference in a way that could seem unfair. The details of this system are explained on this page. Here’s the particular rule that tilted the balance:

So because Emanuele was competing alone in the Open section, he didn’t earn any of the ranking bonuses (150 additional points total in this case) that Braden earned. That’s the “unfair” part.

Again, none of this really matters.

Although we can’t retrospectively adjust the scoring rules after an event, we’ll consider amending some of those rules before our next event.