Every sport needs a super star, a legend that makes it more interesting for the fans: In the 90′s it has been the always perfectly dressed Dominic O’Brien who won the World Memory Championships more often than anbody else until today. In the last decade however memory sports most valuable player was by far the bold bearded man with the black hat. He has the fastest memory in the world and probably the best humor among all athletes of his kind. Memory-Sports.com spoke with the self-appointed “Geek” about his roots, role models and rivals.

When I was at school I was a typical geek.

Memory-Sports: Tell us a little bit about your youth.

Ben: My youth was completely uninteresting to anyone who wants to know about memory sports. When I was at school I was a typical geek (a late 80s, early 90s geek – I didn’t touch a computer from one week to the next), I was good at maths and I spent every spare second at school playing chess or cards with my equally geeky gang of friends. I did memorise a poem once, at the age of 12, for a school event (Macavity the Mystery Cat), but only because Mrs Slater the English teacher told me to. I suppose you could say that set me on the road to becoming a World Memory Champion, but I don’t think it really did.

Memory-Sports: What was your first contact with memory sports?

Ben: The short answer that I give to people who ask me this question is “I went along to the WMC in 2000 to see what it was like, and I’ve been hooked ever since.” The full answer is a little bit more complicated, but only a little:

In 1997, I read in Mensa Magazine about a brand new event called the Mind Sports Olympiad, which was an Olympic Games for mind sports, with competitions in everything even vaguely mind-related, over the course of a week at the Royal Festival Hall in London. I decided to go along and take part in the World Intelligence Championship, a brand-new competition that involved five full days of IQ puzzles. It was great fun (I came fifth out of about twelve competitors), and I also had the opportunity to check out some of the various other board games, card games and mental skills competitions taking place there. One thing I didn’t notice at all, as far as I can remember, was the World Memory Championship, which took place as part of the MSO that year.

In 1998, when the MSO had relocated to the Novotel in Hammersmith with a greatly reduced budget but was still a lot of fun, I entered a lot of other competitions as well as the Intelligence, and for the first time consciously registered the existence of the World Memory Championship. On the first day of the WMC (it was a two-day competition back then) I heard that the favourite discipline there was memorising a pack of cards, and I was curious to know just how difficult that was. So I bought a pack of cards and that evening I tried to memorise it, by repeating the cards to myself until I’d got them all memorised in sequence. It took me 48 minutes.

I tried to memorise a pack of cards, by repeating the cards to myself until I’d got them all memorised in sequence. It took me 48 minutes.

The next day, I was sitting at a desk ready to start the Mental Calculations World Championship, somebody came in (I think it was David Levy, who in those days was one of the ‘big three’ along with Tony Buzan and Raymond Keene who ran the event) and announced that Andi Bell had broken the world record in speed cards with 34.03 seconds. The disparity between those results fascinated me, and I wondered how fast I could get if I kept practicing. So I did keep practicing over the next couple of years, whenever I had a spare moment. I got down to about fifteen minutes in the end, still without using any kind of memory techniques – I had heard them mentioned in an article (an interview with Demis Hassabis, who said he was planning to learn how to do it) but dismissed the whole journey method as some rubbish that someone had made up to sell books, which couldn’t possibly work.

In 1999, at the Decamentathlon (a competition composed of puzzles in ten different mind sports, including memory), I met Tom Groves, who impressed everyone by memorising a pack of cards perfectly in five minutes and who apparently really did use those memory techniques I’d heard about. But I still wasn’t really convinced. Anyway,  I was still interested in the memory championships, so when I found a gap in my MSO schedule in 2000, I decided to compete.

I tried my hand at the first discipline, hour numbers, without any memory technique, and unsurprisingly got a pretty bad score, and then the second discipline was the poem, which to my surprise (and everyone else’s),  I won. That was fun, I thought. Maybe if I could get good at the other disciplines, I could do well in this memory thing. Some of the other competitors managed to convince me that memory techniques really do work, so I went out and bought a book (Use Your Memory, by Tony Buzan) and read the chapters about cards and numbers – I ignored everything else in the book that wasn’t about the specific events tested in the World Memory Championship. I created a couple of journeys and a set of images for cards, and started practicing. The next day in Hour Cards, using my new system, I managed to memorise three packs, and I was very impressed. I still wasn’t fast enough to memorise a pack in under five minutes, but I got it down to seven and a half that night. I was addicted to memory techniques for life from that point onwards.

Memory-Sports: Who was your role model in your early days as a memory athlete?

Ben: In those days, there was only one real role model for everyone – Dominic O’Brien. He was by far and away the best memoriser in the world, and he always won the World Championships comfortably. But his main rival was Andi Bell, and I quickly became a fan of his. In 2000, just before the competition started, Andi came up to me (he had his hair in a ponytail back then, and looked very cool) and said “Hi, I’m Andi, I’m one of the other competitors,” and we had a friendly chat. I was very impressed when I found out a bit later that he was a former world champion and one of the hot favourites. In a lot of mind sports the really good players don’t talk to the nonentities at all, so this was something a bit different. And it turned out that the ‘word on the street’ was that Andi had the potential to be much, much better than Dominic if he could just get his best results more consistently (which he did eventually achieve in 2002, completely blowing away Dominic and everyone else), so I looked up to him as my major inspiration in the early days.

I looked up to Andi Bell as my major inspiration in the early days.

The only thing Dominic said to me during the 2000 WMC, by the way, was “Was it you who was whispering?” – in the spoken numbers, somebody could be heard very loudly whispering the first few digits to himself over and over while the rest of the digits were still playing. But it wasn’t me, it was the guy in front of me. Also in the early days I took a lot of advice from the other British competitors, especially Robert Carder and Tom Groves, who helped me a lot.

Memory-Sports: What made you to come up with the highly sophisticated “Ben System”?

Ben: By 2002, I was a regular memory competitor, but I knew that I had reached the limits of the system I was using. With a basic list of 52 images for cards and 100 for numbers, if you try to memorise a 1000-digit number in an hour, each image will appear an average of five times. If you try to memorise ten packs of cards, each image will show up ten times. And that’s too much,  it’s just not possible to go any further with a system like that. I managed eleventh place in the WMC that year (it was so much easier to do that back then!) using that system and a terrible category-based system for binary that I’d invented myself but which didn’t work at all (I always wanted to avoid translating binary digits into decimal and then converting them into images, so this system was my first attempt at ‘improving’ on the systems everybody else used by creating one of my own. It didn’t work, but that didn’t discourage me), but I knew I could never get any better than that if I didn’t start using a more advanced technique.

In November 2002 I left my job, which I was fed up with (I’d been there since April 1996), borrowed a lot of money at a high interest rate (this debt followed me around and stopped me having any money for a long time until I finally paid it off last year) and devoted some time to ‘working out what I want to do with my life’. This included a holiday in Las Vegas, a one-month course learning to teach English as a foreign language and a lot of sitting around my flat in my pants, watching cartoons. But it also involved taking a bit of time to think about memory techniques and how to make mine better.

The first step was to change to a 1000-image system for numbers. I didn’t want to do it using three Major-system consonants, though, because I thought I would learn them more easily and use them more quickly in competitions if each image was a simple one-syllable word. So I had the idea of using a vowel for the middle digit. So I created a list in that way, and practiced with it (placing three images on a location instead of two, just to see if that would work) until I was fairly sure it was better than the 100-image system I’d been using before. But I didn’t have much time for training, because of all the time I was spending sitting around in my pants, watching cartoons. It was only when I’d completely run out of money and had to get another job that I really started working on my memory system too.

I didn’t have much time for training, because of all the time I was spending sitting around in my pants, watching cartoons.

The inspiration sort of came out of nowhere. As far as I can remember, I was idly thinking to myself ‘What can I do with cards? Person-action-object just doesn’t work for me [I’d tried that in my failed binary system], but how else can you increase your number of images and not have the same old 52 things over and over again? An image for each pair of cards? How many would that be? 2704. That’s not much more than 1000, it sounds possible. But how to convert them into a word?’ I thought about number-suit-number-suit, but that sounded too cumbersome. And I really liked my consonant-vowel-consonant system for numbers. Hey, I thought, there are only sixteen combinations of two suits. Sixteen consonants, thirteen vowels, thirteen consonants – can I do that? Sure, let’s try!

And from that, I realised that there were also sixteen combinations of four binary digits, so I could do that as 4-3-3 and use the same images to make an image for each ten-digit binary number, which is the perfect number to fit each line of 30 digits in a location! And, if I just amended a few of my 1000 decimal images (I still used ‘b’ or ‘p’ for ‘9’ in my first list, and so on), I could have a universal list of 2704 images that would cover EVERYTHING! What a cool system that would be! And so that was the moment of inspiration that turned into a couple of months of work creating images and trying to learn them all.

Memory-Sports: I know you hear that question every know and then. But one last time and you can always say “Read it on Memory-Sports.com!”: How does your system work in detail?

Ben: That really needs an article to itself. I’ll rewrite one of my old forum posts and turn it into a comprehensive “Ben system” guide, some time. But basically, it’s just an image of an object or person for each 3-digit decimal number, 10-digit binary number or pair of two cards, three objects in a location. Simple as that.

Memory-Sports: How long and intensive did you train your system before it was ready to go in a memory championship?

Ben: Very intensively – I realised I was onto something good straight away (this was in spring of 2003) and I spent every spare moment practicing. Luckily, my new job, which was awful in every other way, was a 35-minute train journey away from my home. So I was trapped on a train every day with nothing better to do than to learn my list of images. And when I got home, I would use those images in practicing cards, numbers and binary over and over. It was impressive how very quickly I exceeded my previous best in the marathon disciplines. Speed events took longer, but eventually, I was better than I’d ever been in those too. I never used my old system again after I’d created the new one, that would have been too confusing. So although it wasn’t completely ready to go, I used the new system in the MSO championship in August and to everyone’s surprise won it (beating Gunther and Dr Yip, who were two of the best in the world at that time), and then finished third in the WMC in October in Malaysia. I’m still improving, so you could say my system still isn’t completely ready to go…

Memory-Sports: You are still the MVP in memory sports but athletes like Johannes Mallow, Simon Reinhard, Gunther Karsten, Wang Feng, Su Ruiqiao and many more are getting extremely close. How do you deal with that pressure?

Ben: It’s no fun to be the number one. It is so much easier to improve if you’ve got someone to chase. I just try to remember that everyone on that list is better than me at at least one discipline, so I know I can keep improving if I work at it. But when it comes to a competition, I love the pressure – I always get my best results when I absolutely have to get a good score or lose the championship.

It’s no fun to be the number one. It is so much easier to improve if you’ve got someone to chase.

Memory-Sports: Do you think you can stay on top for much longer?

Ben: It depends whether I keep in training, and whether anybody else comes up with a new system that’s better than mine. Right now, I firmly believe that my system is the best there is, and I’ve got a head-start over anybody else who wants to use it, because I’ve been doing it since 2003. But I have to keep improving every year, because everybody else is improving too. And some day, I’m sure somebody unexpected is going to turn up at a competition with a new technique and will completely wipe the floor with me.

Memory-Sports: How much do you train these days?

Ben: Not NEARLY enough. I haven’t really done any training in the two months since the world championship in November. Even when I’m really motivated, I don’t come close to the levels of obsessive training I did back in 2003 and 2004, before I won the WMC for the first time. Sometimes I feel in the mood to train, and sometimes I don’t. I just have to hope that my motivated moods coincide with memory competitions.

Memory-Sports: Have you thought about an even greater system than the Ben System?

Ben: I have, but not seriously. Right now, I don’t need a better system, but that could all change some time soon. Maybe inspiration will strike me, but I’m not really trying to think of improvements at the moment.

Memory-Sports: Give your opponents some hope: What is your greatest weakness?

Ben: My opponents don’t need hope, they all know I’m inconsistent nowadays. Any one of six or seven rivals could have beaten me this year if they’d been at their absolute best. But my weakness is my lack of training, my hopelessness at Names & Faces and my lack of motivation to win the WMC again, compared to someone who’s never won it before.

My weakness is my lack of training, my hopelessness at Names & Faces and my lack of motivation to win the WMC again, compared to someone who’s never won it before.

Memory-Sports: What do you expect from the next World Memory Championship in China?

Ben: I’m hoping for another competition like 2009, with a whole lot of great memorisers producing amazing performances. The last World Championship was the most exciting ever, and I just hope they’re going to keep getting better!

Memory-Sports: Where do you see the sport in 2020?

Ben: The 2020 World Memory Championship will take place on the Moon. Tony Buzan will have recently made contact with the Royal Family of Moon-Men and agreed to hold the WMC there in return for five thousand tonnes of moon gold. Since space travel will still be restricted to astronauts, there will be no competitors at the 2020 WMC (although the press releases will still describe it as the biggest ever – the Moon-Men of course will not be eligible to compete because they’re not citizens of the World). However, down on Earth, there will be competitions in at least twenty countries, and in all of them the standard will be higher than we can even begin to imagine here in 2010. Probably.

Memory-Sports: Under these circumstances I think I should join NASA. Thank you for your time.

Ben’s Memory Statistics

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It’s been twelve weeks after the first episode of How to become a Memory Champion. Since then you learned how to use the method of loci, to make good associations and to create your Major System. Make sure you read the previous episodes because they contain relevant information to understand this article. Today we will focus on the technique how to memorize a deck of cards – the ultimate memory discipline.

Memorizing Cards

If you have ever watched a top memory athlete memorizing a deck of cards, you probably understand the astonishment about this action. Compared to all of the other championship disciplines you actually see what’s going on: The competitor is rushing through the 52 cards in his or her hands, getting only a glimpse of each of them. After an out-of-the-world short time the stopwatch is being clicked and the athlete goes into some kind of meditation, recalling all the images which have been created a few seconds ago. More and more athletes around the world are able to memorize a deck of cards in five minutes or less. 166 competitors (June 2008) already have proven to do this in an official championship in the lasts years. On top of all this Speed Cards is always the last discipline at a tournament and therefore the most exciting one. Many athletes have taken the lead in this very last round.

The Different Card Systems

Other than the number systems you will most certainly not start with a cluster for your card images. To refresh your memory, a cluster is containing a few information stored in one image. Due to the 52 cards in a poker deck, a 1st-level system is much more elaborate than its little brother for 10 numbers. You’ll need at least 52 pegs to translate each card into a different image. There are many different approaches to create them.

The easiest one I know (as long as you don’t already have a Major System) was created by Steffen Bütow (former German Speed Cards record with 45.82 seconds at the North German Championship in 2003). It categorizes the four colours into four categories and than uses a number-form system to translate the cards. Because it is very intuitive and based on visual associations, you will be able to memorize it in a few hours.

Another approach is by using the Major System (or any other system you used as a 2nd-level number system). You just take those images and use it for the cards, too. By doing that you don’t have to learn any new images. I will explain this approach in detail below.

Then there are a few simple cluster systems like person-object (PO), person-verb (PV) and person-verb-object (PVO). For those you create your first 52 pegs with the system of your choice and then extend it to 104 or even 156 pegs and more with natural associations. The most evolved system for cards was created by the actual World Memory Champion Ben Pridmore and is a true 2nd-level card system.

The 1st-Level System

Although there are several cluster systems for cards I will start with a simple 1st-level system. It is relatively easy to learn. Since we already created a Major System in the last episode we will use it now for cards, too. The advantage is that you don’t have to create and memorize 52 new images. Another benefit is that each time you train either number or cards you also train your images for the other discipline. The downside is that you have a smaller variety in images which probably could influence the clearness of your mental pictures. In my case it doesn’t!

If you look at the logic behind the 52 cards you realize that there are many numbers among them which makes it easy to use the Major System.

Let us assign our Major pegs now to the cards: If you look at the logic behind the 52 cards you realize that there are many numbers among them which makes it easy to use the Major System. The thirteen cards of each colours are divided into the numbers two to nine, the Jack, the Queen, the King and the Ace.

1. We divide the 52 cards into the four colours and sort them. Personally I ordered the four colours like their worth in the German card game “Skat” which is Diamonds, Hearts, Spades and Clubs. But you should order them as you like.
2. If we use the Ace as the number one we have a perfect order from Ace to King regarding the natural numbers for nine of the thirteen cards.
3. There are now different approaches:
   1. We assign the cards logically to our Major pegs. What I did is to use the Diamonds Ace to ten for the numbers 01-10. Now I do a trick: Instead of breaking the great congruence of the numbers by using the digits 11-13 for Jack, Queen and King, I switch now to Hearts. Hence I assign 11-20 with Ace of Hearts to ten of Hearts followed by Spades for 21-30 and Clubs for 31-40. Those first 40 cards are easily allocated and memorized. Each time you see the six of Spades you will remember that Spades is in the 20s and therefore it must be your number 26! Quite easy so far.Now to the tricky part: 41-43 will become the persons of Diamonds, 44-46 the persons of Hearts, 47-49 the persons of Spades and 50-52 the persons of Clubs. Those last 12 cards are not very intuitive and easy to learn, but nevertheless not that difficult after all.
   2. Alternatively you can assign the persons of Hearts to 51-53, the persons of Spades to 61-63 and the persons of Clubs to 71-73.
   3. Another approach would be by assigning all Diamonds to 1-13, all Hearts to 21-33, all Spades to 41-53 and all Clubs to 61-73. You should decide which way makes more sense to you. Maybe you come up with another way of using your Major System. Like everything in memory techniques you should find the way you like best.

Maybe you already realized it by yourself: Your handsome 2nd-level number system had just been reduced to a simple 1st-level card system!

The 1.5-Level System

After you created your 1st-level system and used it a bit you will find out that it is quite an effort to memorize a deck of cards. The reason for this is because of the fact that you don’t use any clusters whatsoever. You just assigned one image for each card. Therefore you need 52 journey points on your elephant path to memorize the whole deck. With numbers you could already memorize 104 digits with the same amount of locations.

A great way to improve your system is by creating a cluster for your cards. An easy solution is the PO (PV, PVO) System. To be perfectly correct it is actually not a proper cluster because you don’t increase the amount of data per image. What you do is to increase the amount of data per story and therefore per location. The first thing you might come up with is to use more than one image on each journey point. But that is very risky because you could forget the correct order. By using 52 persons and 52 objects you will always know that the person comes first and the object comes second. It doesn’t matter in which order you remember them.

Creating a PO System is extremely intuitive and easy to memorize because you use your own natural associations.

Creating that list is extremely intuitive and easy to memorize because you use your own natural associations: If your number 40 (ten of Clubs) is RoSe (object) than your natural association could be Sleeping Beauty (person). If your 23 is NeMo (person) your object could be a submarine. It is so easy that you wont really have to memorize it at all. You just have to come up with your best associations once, write it down and you will realize that it is still there the next time you are recalling it. If it is not popping into your head immediately there might be a better image for you.

Instead of objects you can also use actions (verbs). Some athletes (including myself) are using a PVO System with all three lists. You could go even further and add as many other different lists you want.

The memorization process is slightly different to your normal stories because you will have to combine at least three elements with each other: the person, the object and your location. Make sure you clearly distinguish between all of your persons. Otherwise you will just remember that someone was dancing with a microphone on your bed. Each person should get at least one unique attribute like a huge belly, a beard or a hat. That’s all and you already saved 50% of your locations.

But there is also a downside to this system: As more lists you use, it exponentially reduces your creativity and increases the necessity for a very clear and good story. And that takes precious time which you don’t have in a memory competition. Therefore I would not suggest to go any further as a PVO System. And even this is already very limited because the whole story is defined by the order of the pegs. I already started to train PV instead of PVO (which I was using for about four years) because I like the freedom in creativity. But this is another question of personal interest. If you go for a 1.5-level system you should start with PO (or PV) and slowly upgrade the system to your needs and skill if necessary.

The 2nd-Level System

Ben Pridmore was the first athlete with a true 2nd-level card system. It creates a proper cluster by combining two cards to one image. For doing this you need 52×51=2652 images, which is a massive amount of pegs. And this system is for cards only! Actually I don’t really know how Ben (or Simon Reinhard and Dennis Müller) created and memorized this system. I will ask one of them and report it in an upcoming episode. But you get the point: It is an extremely powerful system and much more evolved than its smaller brothers. Even PVO is in my opinion far less sophisticated.

Nevertheless I would nobody recommend this system except you aim for the memory crown. And even then you can do it with a smaller system. Three times World Memory Champion Andi Bell memorized a deck of cards in 31.16 seconds with a PVO-System (156 pegs). But on the other hand have a look at the two top scores in Speed Cards: Ben Pridmore with 26.28 and Simon Reinhard with 27.36 seconds each of them using a 2nd-level system. I quote chief arbiter Phil Chambers:

Phil Chambers: I believe that technique wins out over natural memory most of the time.

That’s it for today. I hope you found this article useful to create your own system for cards. Please feel free to use the comments for any questions, critic or different point of views. And to give you a little insight in the practical use of your new system, I add Simon Reinhard’s national record in Speed Cards. Watch it, love it, learn it!

Awesome Memory: German Speed Cards Record from Flauwy on Vimeo.

South German Memory Champion Simon Reinhard is memorizing a deck of cards in 27.36 seconds and creates a new German record. See this marvelous accomplishment with your own eyes.

Learn the techniques yourself – it is easy and fun. Everyone can do it!

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In the third episode of How to become a Memory Champion you will learn how to memorize numbers with the Major System. It is a powerful tool which is used by the majority of mental athletes. Since it is based on a phonetic system, you will easily memorize all the images and go on to use it in action. But you must be careful with it: It will blow your mind!

Learning the Major System seems to be a big obstacle for many people. But it is very easy to memorize and a lot of fun to use!

The challenge of numbers

The memory of a human being varies from person to person. Although we all share more or less the same brain-physiology, there are huge differences in the way we all think and remember. Some people are excellent when it comes to memorize digits. They still remember the phone numbers from their friends in primary school. Others however forget the four digits of their cash cards in an instant. I have no actual statistics about that, but I assume that most people have problems with numbers. So why do we forget about digits so easily?

The reason why numbers are so troublesome for many people, is that they are an abstract entity. They characterize an amount of something, but are nothing we can see, hold or feel. We can’t even discribe what they mean. Sure, you can try it for a very low digit. But when it comes to more than ten you will have huge problems. The conclusion for us is, to make numbers more concrete.

How to memorize a number

To manifest a number you have to alter it into something else. It doesn’t really matter into what, as long as you can imagine it. Since we have a decimal system, we need to translate at least ten images for each number. The lists you create out of those objects are called “peg lists“. Once you memorized such a list, you can use it over and over again.

One approach is through the shape of each number. For example: The “two” looks just like a swan. But don’t bother learning such a simple system. Why? At first, you don’t use the power of clusters. That means, putting several informations into one image. To remember a phone number with eight digits, you would also need eight images. Although it helps to remember it, the effort is to big for such a simple task. Second of all, ten images are not enough to have a variety for different stories. Imagine you have to make a story for a number with four “twos”. You would have to put four swans in your mental image. If you want to memorize digits effectevly, you will need a more evolved system. So let’s skip this and go on to the 2-digit-Systems.

The different peg systems

The smallest cluster for decimal digits are 100 images for each combination of two numbers. There are two common peg systems to accomplish that. The second most common one is the Dominic system. It was created by eight-times World Memory Champion Dominic O’Brien and is based on persons. This system is great, but (in my personal opinion) not as good as the Major System.

Due to its phonetic basis, the queen under all mnemonic systems is the easiest way to associate images with 100 numbers in a short time. And you have a great alternation in different objects. In the end it doesn’t matter what kind of system you use if you have the same amount of informations stored as images.

The Major System

The Major System is a phonetic technique to “translate” numbers into words. It starts with converting digits into consonant sounds. After that you add vowels before, between and after those letters. The phonetic rules have hooks to remember them very quickly. That helps you to reconstruct the words in the learning phase. After a while you will have strong associations with each number from 00 to 99. It seems like a huge effort to make things easier for your memory. But it isn’t that difficult and in the end you will never have to think about it again. You will just know it.

Another great thing about the Major System is the fact, that it is based on levels. You can improve it by adding a third number to your cluster (3^rd level). That would mean to memorize 1.000 objects, before you can use it (or 900 since you already learned the first 100). But that is nothing you should think about for startes. Actually you are able to get the memory crown even with a 2^nd-level-system. There are only a handful of people using a 3^rd-level-system. And there is a nice alternative: With PVO (person-verb-object) you only need 300 images and your clusters include even six digits. I don’t say one or the other is better. They both have their qualities. But all that is something you first need the basics for. I will come back to the high-end-systems in a future episode of “How to become a Memory Champion”.

The rules: 86 is a fish

The following rules are the basics of the system. You have to memorize them in order to create and reconstruct your pegs. I teached them to dozens of children. They were all able to learn them in about ten minutes. Without an oral explanation, it might take a little bit longer, but you get my point: It is very simple!

Let’s have a look at the rules:

[table id=2 /]

Since I use the slightly different german version of the system, I rely on the great explanation on Wikipedia, to describe it further:

• Each digit maps to a set of similar sounds with similar mouth and tongue positions. The mapping is phonetic, so it is the consonant sounds that matter, not the spelling. Therefore a word like “action” would encode the number 762, not 712; and “ghost” would be 701, while, because the “gh” in “enough” is pronounced like an “f”, the word “enough” encodes the number 28.
• Similarly, double letters are disregarded. The word “missile” is mapped to 305, not 3005. To encode 3005 one would use something like “mossy sail”.
• Often the mapping is compact. “Hindquarters”, for example, translates unambiguously to 2174140, which amounts to 7 digits encoded by 12 letters, and can be easily visualized.

You see, the big fish (86) under the peg systems is quite a powerful technique to memorize numbers.

Create your own list

If you are sticking to the rules above, there are few things you can make wrong. You can even use abstract words like “time” if you have a strong visual association for it like a clock. Stay strictly with the rules in the beginning. It will help you to memorize the words. Later you can jump around and use any words to replace your weaker images. I changed several pegs in my system over time without using the Major System anymore. But to learn the whole pack at once, the rules are a must have.

Another thing to consider is, to exclude words with more than two consonants from your 2^nd-level list. That makes it easier afterwards to expand your system to the 3^rd-level. And you even don’t have to come up with the correct words yourself. There are free programs for that, which help you to find proper images:

• 2Know Mnemonic Software
• Mnemisis
• In German only – a free online Major-Code: Zahlen merken

How to use your Major System

The easiest thing about your Major System is to use it. You already learned how to create your path with the method of loci in the first episode of How to become a Memory Champion. Bring those two systems together and use associations like you learned in the second episode. That is all. You should now be able to remember as many numbers as you like. Just translate the images you remember back to the digits. With the help of your elephant path you will bring them back in the right order.

Do you remember my example with the banana and the table from the second episode? If not, I will repeat it for you: You want to remember the banana and your journey point is the table. In this case the banana would be your word for your 3^rd-level association 922 (BaNaNa). Now you use your imagination to create a little story worth remembering. And it is even easier than to memorize exactly the word banana (like you must in the championship disciplines for words), because it doesn’t matter if you remember one or many – the number stays the same. Ok, you may argue that BaNaNaS should be the number 9220, but you do know if you use a 3rd-level or 4th-level system – so every optional consonant is irrelevant. Let’s have a look at a few possible associations with the banana and the table:

• The table is not made of wood, but out of bananas instead. You better do not stand on it!
• There is a boxing ring on the table, where two bananas fight to the death.
• Why to make it complex? Just take the banana and smash it on the table. Weeks later you will still find parts of the banana all over your place.

That’s it! You are now able to start your training. The actual world record in 5 minute Numbers is 405 digits by Johannes Mallow. He is using a 3^rd-level Major System.

Tell us what system you are using.

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He is the youngest star among the memory elite. With only nine years old he won the World Memory Championship Children’s Competition in 2008. Although the rivalry in this age section isn’t too strong, he got brilliant scores in Bahrain. In 30 minutes he memorized 513 binary digits – moderate for a grown-up athlete but outstanding for his age. Memory-Sports journalist Florian Dellé spoke with his former student from Berlin.

I would let the shoe bounce up and down on the chair and let it jump from one armrest to another. Your stories has to be as crazy as possible.

Memory-Sports: When did you start your memory training?

Konstantin: I watched the North German Championship in 2004 as a spectator. After that I joined a memory class in a club for highly advanced children.

Memory-Sports: How did you come up with that subject?

Konstantin: We’ve got mail from the club, that a new memory class is starting soon. So we went to the competition to get an impression. I learned that memory training is related to numbers. And since I always liked numbers a lot, I wanted to learn the techniques.

Memory-Sports: What do you remember about your first steps?

Konstantin: I remember clearly my first personal best with 24 digits.

Memory-Sports: What techniques did you learn for starters?

Konstantin: We learned the Master-System with 100 images and created a journey with 26 stations – for half a deck of cards. Today I have 227 stations.

Memory-Sports: What have been your first competition?

Konstantin: That was the North German Championship in 2005. I placed sixth and it was a lot of fun.

Memory-Sports: Have you been very ambitious from the beginning?

Konstantin: Actually I first started to train at home, when I placed only seventh in 2006. So I trained for the next championship in 2007.

Memory-Sports: The World Memory Championship is on a whole new level than the North German Championship. What did you like most about that event?

Konstantin: That it has been over several days. So we got the opportunity to see a little bit of the small country Bahrain. Did you know that it only takes half an hour from north to south on the main island? There are 23 islands all together and only three are settled. On the second largest is the airport, in the north of the largest one are most of the markets and in the south is the Formula 1 racing track.

Memory-Sports: No I didn’t know that! – What is the best thing about a memory championship?

Konstantin: You can get in competition with your rivals and find new friends. I met Timo Sprekeler for example. He became North German Champion in 2008, where I wasn’t competing. I bet him then at the following German Championship. Recently I met him again at this years North German Championship, but we weren’t competing against each other. He already joined the juniors and I compete still in the children’s group.

It isn’t fair that there are no rankings for children. Otherwise I would definitely be among the the best.

Memory-Sports: What is your favourite discipline?

Konstantin: Numbers, because I am good at it. Also you have to be less creative than with Names & Faces for example. It is just easier. On the other hand I wasn’t so bad with the names either.

Memory-Sports: Do you train a lot?

Konstantin: Only for competitions. For the World Memory Championship I started training two months and for the North German Championship about three weeks before the event.

Memory-Sports: Do you recognize your improvements?

Konstantin: Yes – I got 96 binary numbers last year and this year I already got 192.

Memory-Sports: What is your best training result?

Konstantin: Only 180. So it was my personal best, too. But I was lucky: The last row was an unbroken sequence of zero and one. When I saw that pattern it was easy to memorize.

Memory-Sports: What do you think could help, to make the sport more popular?

Konstantin: It would help to beam all the numbers for example on a big screen. That way the spectators could try it themselves. Another interesting thing would be, to see what the competitor is just writing down.

Memory-Sports: Can you please give us a few hints how to make a good story? How would you associate a shoe and a chair for example?

Konstantin: I would let the shoe bounce up and down on the chair and let it jump from one armrest to another. Your stories has to be as crazy as possible.

Memory-Sports: Are you quick with your images?

Konstantin: Yes, I can recall my Master-System in 95 seconds – that’s less than one second for each image.

Memory-Sports: Do you have any particular goals?

Konstantin: I want to get under the top 100 in the world ranking list. For that I have to get about 2800 points. At the German Championship I already got 1800, but it doesn’t count, since it was a children’s competition. It isn’t fair that there are no rankings for us. Otherwise I would definitely be among the the best.

Memory-Sports: Who is your role model?

Konstantin: Boris Konrad, because he’s got the world record in Random Words – and I am good with words, too.

Memory-Sports: When will you compete again?

Konstantin: This year at the German Memory Championship and then in November at the World Memory Championship again.

Memory-Sports: Thank you for the interview.

Konstantin’s Memory Statistics

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She was a lovely and normal teenager. But about two years ago Dorothea Seitz started to train memory techniques. Now she is still lovely but stands out of the crowd: In October 2008 she went to Bahrain and competed against 43 memory athletes from all over the world – and became Junior World Memory Champion. Dorothea is able to memorize 189 words in 15 minutes and is not afraid to turn eighteen to compete against the adults. Memory-Sports.com spoke with the sixteen years young lady:

A competition is always a struggle against yourself. It is not about what others think of you, it is about achieving what you aspire.

Memory-Sports.com: When did you first hear about memory sports?

Dorothea Seitz: It was in early 2007. I read something about it online and wished for a book according to the techniques. The one I got was “A Sheep Falls Out of the Tree” by Christiane Stenger. I was fascinated how quick my progress was.

Memory-Sports.com: Did you imagine to follow Christiane’s footsteps and become Junior World Memory Champion?

Dorothea Seitz: No, but I always thought about how great the feeling must be, to be some kind of champion.

Memory-Sports.com: What is your favourite discipline?

Dorothea Seitz: In the beginning I trained binary numbers exclusively. Although it is the discipline with the least daily meaning, I really liked it somehow.

Memory-Sports.com: Did you have any expectations for the North German Championship 2009?

Dorothea Seitz: I always expect too much from myself and get disappointed. My goal was to reach the 4.000 points, but I didn’t. And I wanted to compete with the adults, to prepare for next year, when I become eighteen.

Memory-Sports.com: So you keep on memorizing and don’t stop on top of your success?

Dorothea Seitz: No, it would be to easy to call it quits and keep the title. A competition is always a struggle against yourself. I want to accomplish my personal goals and prove it to myself. It is not about what others think of me, it is about achieving what I aspire.

Memory-Sports.com: Since it is your last year as a junior, which championships are you planning to visit?

Dorothea Seitz: I will go to Hamburg this summer and compete at the German Championship. And of course I will fly to Bahrain once more to the World Memory Championship – to try my luck again.

Memory-Sports.com: You would have placed third, nearly second in the adults event at the North German Championship, if it wouldn’t have been noncompetitive. Are you confident to get into the act, when you will join the adults events next year?

Dorothea Seitz: I am pretty encouraged, especially since I thought about giving up the memory sport on the first day of the competition. But that’s the case at every championship I compete. Now I am highly motivated to go on, since I got a few results I never accomplished before at a tournament. Actually I am satisfied with every discipline except Speed Cards.

It’s fun to train my brain and seek for bigger and better challenges.

Memory-Sports.com: With some of your scores you are already able to hold the candle to the most of adult memory athletes in the world. In Random Words for example, you memorized 189 words in 15 minutes – that’s rank 5 in the world. What do you think about that?

Dorothea Seitz: Words are something I am good with, because you don’t need so much of a technique rather than your natural memory. With numbers and binaries you need much more training, to become excellent. I prefer language orientated disciplines, like Poem, where your techniques don’t have such an impact on your results.

Memory-Sports.com: What are your goals in Memory Sports?

Dorothea Seitz: To get better in the world ranking list, which is difficult in the moment, since the junior scores are not part of it. Apart from that I will go on, because the other athletes are great. And of course it’s fun to train my brain and seek for bigger and better challenges.

Memory-Sports.com: Did you experience anything negative because of the sport?

Dorothea Seitz: Most of the people don’t know it and think strangely about what I’m doing. My classmates call me “World Memory Champion” and “Super-Brain”. They don’t mean it basely, but it’s very annoying. People who don’t know me better, define me through this accomplishment.

Memory-Sports.com: Do you think, there is any potential for memory sports to become a sport for masses?

Dorothea Seitz: I wish it very much. But even on my school, with many highly skilled students and a special class for memory training, there are only a few interested in it. It would be great if the sport would make it big.

Memory-Sports.com: Would you like to compete against your inspiration Christiane Stenger?

Dorothea Seitz: Sure, but I don’t think that she still is in training. She is not competing any more and I doubt getting the chance to match with her.

Memory-Sports.com: You are following Christiane Stenger in other aspects, too: There is a rumor, that you are writing a book about memory techniques – is that right?

Dorothea Seitz: Yes, I was asked to write one and I agreed and signed the contract.

Memory-Sports.com: Do you have any help?

Dorothea Seitz: No, I will work on it allone. On one hand I will write about the history of the techniques and my personal experience. On the other hand I will go into detail about mental arithmetics, speed reading and other possibilities to train the brain. It will probably be called “Neurons on the ready, go!” because that’s the start signal on the championships. I want to popularise Memory Sports and show to the people, who are always missunderstanding me, what I am doing. It will be released in April, 2010.

Memory-Sports.com: We are looking forward to it. Thank you for your time.

Dorothea’s Memory Statistics

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