WMC No. 3! I’m home after three long weeks—a Florida wedding followed by the 2017 IAM World Memory Championship in Jakarta, Indonesia. I can’t resist giving a shoutout to my friends Saumya and Khush for an awesome wedding week. Those guys know how to throw a party! After five days in Palm Beach, Cathy and I hopped back in a plane trying not to think about how we’d be spending the next 50+ hours traveling. Fort Lauderdale to Memphis, to our hometown of Oxford for a night, back to Memphis, to Atlanta, to Tokyo, to Jakarta. A slew of Silicon Valley, Modern Family, and Last Week Tonight episodes later, we were riding through the hot Indonesian night with fellow American competitor John Graham, Mongolian competitor Yanjaa Wintersoul, and WMC organizers Yudi and Bey. After two days of milling around the city—seeing the National Monument and an Indonesian puppet show, among other things—I found myself face-to-face with another WMC. Things were destined to be different...
Read more2016 European Open Recap
This past weekend I had the opportunity to go to London for the IAM’s first European Open Memory Championship. A lot of firsts for me on this trip: first time I’d been to England, first time I’d competed at a memory event not in the US or China. Originally I’d had a conflict, but things shifted at the last minute, so the preceding weekend Cathy and I found ourselves huddled around the kitchen table booking airline tickets. The event—like the recent UK Memory League Championship—was held at the London headquarters of Peak, a brain-training app which also sponsored the event...
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