The 2024 National Memory Championship happened on Sunday November 17, simultaneously in Montreal, Edmonton and Vancouver. Thanks to everyone who participated!
Congratulations to Braden Adams from Chilliwack, British Columbia, for winning his fifth (!!!!!) consecutive title of Canadian memory champion! Sixth if we include another championship organized by IAM in Edmonton in 2017. Braden once again established a new Canadian memory record by memorizing 561 digits in 10 minutes!
Congratulations to Don Michael Vickers from Syney Mines, Nova Scotia, for his second place overall and for establishing 2 new Canadian records! Don established two new Canadian memory records by memorizing 65 names in 5 minutes and 188 words in 10 minutes! 188 words is a more than 40% improvement over the previous record of 133 words. This is the first time in many years that some Canadian memory records are held by someone not named Braden.
Congratulations to Mandy Wang from Vancouver, British Columbia, for her amazing performance and her very close third place! Mandy perfectly memorized 432 digits in 10 minutes and a full deck of cards in 45 seconds! Along with Don Michael, she also broke the previous Canadian memory record by memorizing 161 random words in 10 minutes.
Congratulations to Kevin Matthews from Vancouver, British Columbia, for his great performance and his fourth place overall!
Congratulations to Kelvin Song, Louis Bao and Maverick Xing for their outstanding results at numbers and cards!
Thanks a lot to Joaquim Ayala, Hua Wei Chan and James Gerwing for their help organizing the event! And congratulations to James for currently probably being the only the Canadian in his sixties who can memorize a full deck of cards or 100 or 200+ digits in a few minutes! Thanks to the students of the Landmark Memory Sports Training Centre in Vancouver for their participation.
Also congratulations to Lakmali Werahera for her bravery and her results! She showed up without knowing anything about the event and about memory techniques. An example that we wish more beginners would dare to emulate! She was able to achieve some very good results after just a few minutes of instructions about the rules and about basic memorization strategies. She even managed to memorize 82 digits in 10 minutes using a pre-made number memorization system that we provided. Although natural abilities probably played some role here, I think those results are also a compelling demonstration of the potential power of memory techniques.
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And 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 denied and that the trip had to be canceled.
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Full results
(Explanations about this scoreboard are added below.)
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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. So are scores that are breaking a previous national records.
- 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.
- Some information may be added in parenthesis and italic. For example “10 cards correct (full deck memorized in 3 m 32 sec.)“. In those cases, the first number given is the official score that will affect the final number of championship points (CP). The added information in italic is there just to give a more accurate indication of what the participant is capable of.
- 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.
- 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.
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Here are some of the photos that were taken during the event:
And 1 photo from a previous year, just because this year we didn’t have a good photo of our Edmonton arbiter, 4x Canadian mental math champion Hua Wei Chan. He’s the most handsome guy by far in the photo below.
And here’s Mandy Wang again, back in 2020, after earning first place among Junior participants at a WMSC World Memory Championship event.
And finally, here’s now 5x Canadian memory champion Braden Adams (6x if we include another championship organized by IAM in Edmonton in 2017), back in 2021, when he was preparing to memorize 70 decks of cards in a single day to raise funds for the British Columbia Alzheimer Society.
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*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.
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*The CMSA has now been around for 5 years! So far we’ve organized 13 in-person championships and 7 online “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