I qualified for the 2016 Extreme Memory Tournament (XMT) and was really excited to go because last year I qualified but some things came up so I missed the XMT. The XMT is totally different from the normal memory competitions. You go head to head against other competitors to see if you advance for the next round.

This year competition was tough! I had not prepared as much as I would have wanted because right before the XMT competition, I was part taking in a game show called SuperHuman. So most of my time was devoted to training for the game show. Even though I didn't do that well in the XMT, I still had a blast meeting old friends and just hanging out.

I have never competed in a competition like this before so I was nervous and excited at the same time. My plan was to go for full accuracy and take the full minute to memorize and hope that my competitor messed up the recall. Let's just say my plan didn't work haha I managed to win just one of my matches but hey, I gave it my best!

Everyone did an fantastic job at the XMT, but I want to give a big congratulations to the people who broke records! Here they are and the records they broke:

Alex: 52 Cards in 16.86 Seconds
80 digits in 17.56 Seconds

Katie: 50 Words in 51.31 seconds
30 Names in 60 seconds

Lance: 30 Images in 13.91 Seconds

Now I want to talk about the surprise events for the matches. The first surprise event was recalling the last match of numbers the competitors did. Now this was a toss up because some people only recalled a few while others recalled a lot. Depending on how the last number match went, people did well and others not so well.

If you didn't review the mistakes you made on the last number match, then you would do poorly recalling the numbers because you didn't check what the correct numbers were. This was an interesting surprise event and I think I could have done okay with recalling, but I don't know if the amount of digits I memorized would of been enough.

The next surprised event was memorizing the order of random sounds. Some of the sounds that were made were so weird! The sounds were played out loud so it was a lot easier to get distracted. Then all the competitors had the sound bites on the computer and they could play them to figure out the order. The twist was that you could hear the other sound bites the competitors were playing. It was noisy and hard to hear the specific sound bite.

The next surprise event was memorizing the path that was drawn on a grid. It was absolutely hilarious because the example path for the surprise event was so easy, but the real event paths had all these turns. Everyone was saying they could do the example, but when they saw the real one, they were like uh nope! haha

The second to last surprise event was memorizing numbers but with a partner. The competitors got to choose any of the other competitors in the room. Then they had time to figure out how they wanted to memorize the numbers. The competitors then had to recall the numbers verbally. The competitor who was actually competing had the final say on what digit they wanted to say, but they could talk with their partner if they wanted to.

This was last surprise event: Alphanumeric. We were all given this sheet before the competition even started, but it made no sense to memorize it right there because we didn't know who would be at the finals. They way the competitors where tested was by Nelson choosing specific parts of the code and asking them to recall the "digits" before the given code or after the given code. One time they just had to recall the letters in the code. It was crazy!

At the end of the XMT, Simon won it and a big congratulations to him on doing a fantastic job! This competitions is a lot of fun and I am going to train a lot so I can go back next year and see what happens!

My First XMT Experience and Summary of The XMT