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Canada now has a new memory champion and a new mental math champion!
Congratulations to Spencer White for earning first place at the 2026 National Memory Championship and for breaking no fewer than three already amazing national records! The 5-minute images record previously held by Braden Adams has increased from 326 to 459! The 5-minute names record and the 10-minute words record previously held by Don Michael Vickers have increased to 83 names and 210 words! Overall, most Canadian memory records are now at least double what they were back in 2017. Can you name many other sports or championships where the same could be said?
Congratulations to Mohammad El Mir for earning first place at the 2026 National Mental Math Championship! Mohammad achieved the highest scores in all the main mental math events! And all the optional events except for squaring, where Jean Béland managed to outperform him. In just 5 minutes, he correctly calculated the results of 113 problems similar to 37 x 24 = 2,738 and 108 problems similar to 743 ÷ 8 = 92.88, having to “slow down” simply because there are limits to how fast one can write. He also correctly solved 5 “insane” multiplications in 5 minutes similar to 51,837,062 x 88,901,573 = 4,608,396,351,498,530. All of that was done mentally, without noting down any sub-result.
Congratulations to 2018 mental math champion Jean Béland for his second place overall and to first time participant Frédéric Gagné for his third place overall!
Congratulations to Kevin Matthews in Vancouver for his second place at the memory championship!
Congratulations to 13-year old first time participant Louie Liu for his overall performance and for memorizing almost 200 digits in 10 minutes!
Thanks to Joaquim Ayala and Valérie Grenon for their help running the events!
Thanks and congratulations to all participants!
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Before the full results of both championships, just a few more fun facts about the events and the participants:
- 2026 Canadian memory champion Spencer White has been improving at a spectacular rate since last year. He is highly methodical with his approach to building healthy habits and efficiently training various skills. You can learn more about his methods by following him on Substack, Youtube and X. Or by emailing him directly.
- This wasn’t 2026 Canadian mental math champion Mohammad El Mir first impressive performance in a championship. He earned third place at the Mental Calculation World Cup in 2022. He won his age category no less than five times before that. You can read this 2019 interview with him or watch this 2017 BBC video report about his skills. He’s busy pursuing a master’s degree at l’École de technologie supérieure. He can be found on LinkedIn.
- Jean Béland was the Canadian Mental Math champion back in 2018. He goes from school to school as le King des Maths to deliver inspiring talks and useful tips to kids about mental math. He once earned thousands of dollars in a tv show thanks to his quick mental math skills.
- We love it when newcomers or beginners dare to participate whether or not they feel “ready” or well prepared. One example is 63-year-old Anne Stratford who decided to participate at the last minute, after hearing an organizer on the radio. At an event where she had 15 minutes to memorize 50 difficult fake facts and invented words, she correctly recalled 62% of those. Another example is Mark Shouldice who traveled from Toronto to compete as a beginner, shortly after reading the book Remember It! by Nelson Dellis. At the images challenge, he outperformed everyone except Spencer. We wish many more beginners and curious people would adopt this kind of “why not?” attitude!
- Thanks to Athmane Dadi and the whole team of the Champs School Draa El Mizan in Alger, Algeria. Once again, Athmane was planning to travel all the way from Algeria to Montreal along with a team of about 20 people to compete in both our mental math and our memory championships. We’re sorry the project didn’t end up working out after all.
- While the number of participants in our championships remain small, I really don’t think this fact should diminish the accomplishments of the participants. If every single citizen of Canada had participated, I would argue that it’s very likely that both Spencer White and Mohammad El Mir would still have earned first place or at least top 3 or top 5. And I think participants like Frédéric Gagné and Tom Awad and Nikita Lvov would easily outperform more than 99% of people
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Full results of the 2026 National Memory Championship
About this scoreboard:
- The images and names events are the same for everyone. For everything else, the scoring rules and/or conditions are significantly harsher for competitors in the Advanced section. A competitor in the Advanced section may have memorized a lot more numbers and words than indicated on the final scores, by lost many points because of a few mistakes here and there.
- The best score for each event is highlighted in bold.
- 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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Full results of the 2026 National Mental Math Championship
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A few photos:
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For future editions of our championships, we will be brainstorming various ways to try attract a significantly larger number of intermediate and beginner-level participants. Let us know if you’d like to help us or collaborate with us in any way to reach that goal!
*If some 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 8 years! So far we’ve organized 15 in-person championships and 7 online “honorary” online events. Plus 2 other “honorary” online events that are actually ongoing. 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