Memory Competitions for Beginners

Memory sport is a set of timed recall events on random material, and the way in is narrower than it looks. Your first event is Memory League Images, which you can play tonight in a browser with no system to learn; your second is Words; your third is five-minute Numbers, the first event that needs equipment. The equipment is three techniques: the method of loci to store images in order, the Major system to turn digits into images, and PAO to do the same for cards. Your first target is one perfect row of forty digits in five minutes, and twelve weeks at half an hour a day is enough to sit a national championship and score in every five-minute discipline.

What a memory competition actually is

Every memory competition has the same shape: a desk, a sheet of random material (digits, a shuffled deck, faces with names under them, a column of words) and a clock. When the time ends the sheet is taken away; after a break you get a blank recall sheet and a second clock, and you write down what you saw, in order. An arbiter marks it, you score points per item, and the points are totalled across events.

The material is random on purpose: there is nothing to understand, so the events measure technique rather than education.

Who runs memory competitions: WMSC, IAM and Memory League

The WMSC (World Memory Sports Council) runs the original World Memory Championships, created in 1991 by Tony Buzan and Raymond Keene. Its ten "classical" disciplines and scoring rules are the standard, and national championships in its orbit use the same rulebook at shorter times.

The IAM (International Association of Memory) was announced in mid-2016 (its announcement letter is dated 5 July 2016) by competitors and organisers who had previously been involved in WMSC events, and is headquartered in Munich. That year most national organisations, except China and Arabia, left the WMSC for the IAM, and since 2017 both bodies have held their own world championship, so the sport has two world titles and two record lists. The IAM uses the same ten disciplines, with 5-minute concrete images in place of 15-minute abstract images and a ranking that counts your three most recent competitions rather than your best one.

Memory League is different in kind. It began as the Extreme Memory Tournament, founded by Nelson Dellis and Simon Orton, with championships in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and became the online platform at memoryleague.com: one-minute events, head-to-head matches, played from home in a browser. Its rules were developed with the IAM in November 2020, and its World Tour has run since 2021.

National bodies add formats of their own. The USA Memory Championship is open only to United States citizens aged 13 and over: four online qualifying events (Names and Faces, 15 minutes to memorise and 20 to recall; Speed Numbers, 5 and 10, two trials; Speed Cards; and Speed Poetry, 15 and 20) send the top scorers to a live final of elimination events. The Canadian Mind Sports Association runs a fifteen-minute Exam Cramming event that, in its own words, does not exist anywhere else, and warns that apart from IAM images its rules are not quite the same as everywhere else.

The ten classical disciplines

The WMSC's Arbiters' Handbook (third edition, 2022) defines each discipline at three levels, National (which it also calls "speed"), International and World. The material is the same; only the clock changes. Times are memorise / recall in minutes.

The amount of material is set at the current world record plus twenty percent, so nobody finishes the page; the Spoken Numbers "record attempt" is that length, and each attempt is marked before the next.

How the scoring rewards accuracy over ambition

Take Speed Numbers. Digits come in rows of forty. A perfect row scores forty, a row with one error (a missing digit counts) scores twenty, and a row with two or more errors scores nothing; rows you never attempt cost nothing. So three perfect rows score 120, six rows with one mistake each also score 120, and six rows with two mistakes each score zero. Only an incomplete last row is treated gently: a point per digit if it is perfect, half that with one error, nothing with two.

Random Words work the same way in columns of twenty: 20, 10 or 0, and a plural, a synonym or a gap is a mistake. Random Cards are the harshest: a perfect deck scores 52, one error 26, two or more 0, and two cards written in each other's places count as two errors, so a single swap wipes out the deck. Abstract Images carry a live penalty: a correct row of five is plus 5, an attempted row with any error minus 1, a skipped row 0. Dates are plus 1 for a correct year and minus 0.5 for a wrong one, blanks free. In Names and Faces every correctly spelt first or last name is a point and a blank is 0.

Speed Cards is scored on time. A full correct deck scores 8007.5 divided by your time in seconds to the power 0.75, calibrated to give 1,000 points for a deck in 16.02 seconds: a deck in 60 seconds is about 371 points, in two minutes about 221, and a deck that uses the full five minutes about 111. An incomplete deck is scored as if it took 300 seconds, multiplied by the fraction of cards correct before the first discrepancy, so 30 correct cards is about 64. The 12.74 second record works out at roughly 1,188.

One strategy falls out of all this: decide before the clock starts how many rows you will attempt, and attempt nothing you cannot do perfectly.

Memory League: one-minute games and how a match works

Memory League compresses all of that into sixty seconds. Six games make up the competition pool, Cards, Images, International Names, Names, Numbers and Words, each with one minute to memorise. In Images, the game most beginners start with, level 1 shows six pictures and level 10 shows thirty; after the minute they come back shuffled and you have four minutes to drag them into their original order. Training games are free up to a daily cap (ten a day below level 6, three above it, per a February 2024 forum thread); a beginner's guide from August 2023 put full access at 25 US dollars a year. Check the current terms.

A match runs until one player has at least 4 points with a 2-point lead, or eight games have been played; a game won is 1 point, a draw 0.5. The players alternate choosing the game, you cannot repeat a game you chose, and each player may pick only one of the two Names games.

The World Tour is three Seasons (round-robin divisions with promotion and relegation), three Slams (16-player knockouts: the top ten of the world ranking go straight in, everyone else through a month-long open qualifier) and a World Championship, all played from home. For Slams and their qualifiers you play under your real name, filmed live with monitor and hands in shot, on Chrome and Zoom.

What counts as a good beginner score

Here is the ladder as this site reads it; where the two bodies' record lists differ, both are given.

Three fixed numbers help. The WMSC sets 2,099 points across the ten disciplines as the minimum a winner must reach to be titled Memory Champion when a category has fewer than three competitors. The rung between beginner and record is its International Master of Memory norm, which the 2022 handbook puts at 1,100 digits in an hour, twelve decks in an hour and a deck in sixty seconds or less (the older figure still quoted around the web, 1,000 digits, ten decks and a two-minute deck, was the original Grand Master standard). And in 2006 Joshua Foer, a journalist with an ordinary memory, won the USA Memory Championship after a year of training with the method of loci and a PAO system, setting a United States speed cards record of one minute forty seconds; the book is Moonwalking with Einstein. The deck guide on this site puts a two-minute deck at about three months of regular practice, so Foer's time is a fair target for your first half year.

The techniques every event runs on

The method of loci is the storage layer for everything: a route of fixed places in a building you know, with images set down along it in order. Numbers need a conversion from digits to images, which is the Major system (the chart of all one hundred pegs, with Anki decks, is on the Major system page); the Dominic system is the alternative the WMSC leaflet names. Cards need the same conversion for fifty-two cards, which is what PAO does, one person, action and object per card; the PAO list guide is about building one that holds. Words are already pictures and need only the link method or a palace. Names have their own face-name method. Keeping a system sharp between events is a spaced repetition problem. The technique hub lists all of them.

Which events to enter first, and which to skip

The order below is the order in which the events need equipment.

Images first. No system to learn: a palace with one row of five per place (a beginner's guide to the Memory League version says thirteen places is enough to start) and a rule about which rows to attempt.

Words second. Still no system, because a word is already a picture. A column of twenty is one link chain with a clock on it.

Five-minute Numbers third. The first event that needs a system: one image for every pair of digits, the Major system's 00 to 99. Then a row of forty digits is twenty images along twenty places.

Speed Cards fourth. Fifty-two images and a palace of at least eighteen places if you group cards in threes. The deck guide on this site is the training path for it.

Names and Dates are worth entering untrained, because every correct answer is a point and a blank costs nothing.

Skip Binary, Spoken Numbers and the hour events at first. Binary needs its own conversion layer. Spoken Numbers arrive at one digit a second with no going back and are counted only to your first error. The hour disciplines are an endurance sport, and the palaces to hold them are a second year's project.

A twelve-week plan from nothing to your first event

Budget half an hour a day. That is the load Mullen describes, roughly a quarter on speed drills and three quarters on full events.

Weeks one and two: places and pegs. Build a first palace of ten to twenty places, following the loci guide, then a second. The stock palaces have twelve to sixteen rooms each, enough for Images and Words, but a row of forty digits at one image per place wants a route of your own. Do the Major in ten minutes journey and adopt the hundred pegs into your dictionary. Play Memory League Images daily, alternating practice days with palace-building days.

Weeks three and four: numbers under a clock. Run the numbers drill daily with two-digit groups and a short timer, which is exactly the conversion Speed Numbers tests. At the end of week four, print a page of forty-digit rows, set five minutes, and score it by the rulebook. One perfect row is the target.

Weeks five to seven: cards. Work through the paid deck journey ($5), seven stages from the four suits to a full fifty-two-card attempt, then move to the cards drill, which sets the count from five cards to fifty-two and the memorising timer from fifteen seconds to two minutes; recall is untimed. Five cards until it is boring, then thirteen, then twenty-six, each at sixty seconds. Take full decks with a physical pack and no clock (a first one takes ten to twenty minutes, which the drill cannot hold) until you are near two minutes, then in the drill at its ceiling.

Weeks eight to ten: breadth. Add names, using the face-name method on any team page with twenty faces, and dates, treating each year as two pairs of digits. Join a Memory League season, because a match teaches the pace of recall under pressure that solo training never does. Time a full deck once a week.

Week eleven: the mock competition. Over a weekend, run all ten disciplines at national times with printed sheets, marked by the rules above, and total the points. It shows which events give you points, which give nothing, and what the sixth event of a day costs.

Week twelve: taper and enter. Light drills, early nights, and a written decision for each event about how many rows you will attempt.

Your first competition day: entry, kit and tactics

The WMSC's leaflet for new competitors gives three steps: read Dominic O'Brien (it recommends You Can Have an Amazing Memory), join a memory club, and enter a local or national competition. It adds that more than one World Memory Champion reached the top with little more than a year of preparation, and that the World Memory Championships themselves set minimum achievement criteria, published each year, which you must reach to take part. The 2026 World Championships in Ho Chi Minh City (11 to 13 December) take online registration at wmc35.com for a fee of 200 US dollars, and their page says all memory athletes are welcome, so read the year's entry page before assuming a bar.

Entry is by age category, judged by your age in the calendar year: Kids, 12 and under; Junior, 13 to 17; Adult, 18 to 59; Senior, 60 and over. Juniors and kids may elect to compete in the adult competition.

The handbook's kit list is short.

• Your own decks for both card disciplines, handed to the arbiter for shuffling (the day before at the World Championships, before the start elsewhere); for Random Cards each deck is numbered, initialled and bound with the elastic band provided.
• Recall papers of your own, or a transparent film with ruled lines for Binary, only if approved beforehand.
• No phones or tablets in use, and anything that bleeps muted; ear plugs and headphones are allowed, because silence is not guaranteed.

Three procedures trip beginners. In Binary, mark the end of your last row with "end" or a line, or the arbiter assumes your recall stopped at the last 1 you wrote. In Random Cards there is a break of five to fifteen minutes between memorising and recall while decks are collected. In Speed Cards the deck must stay in clear sight with your wrists at desk level; a Speed Stacks timer starts when either hand leaves the pads and stops when both return.

The best written day-of tactics come from the Canadian Mind Sports Association's guide to its championship. In Images, leave blank the rows you are confused about and answer every row you think you have at least a one-in-four chance of getting right. In Names, review each row once, quickly, as soon as you have memorised it. In Words, memorise twenty, review, memorise twenty more, review, then review the forty; at recall, write the words you reviewed once first, then the forty you reviewed twice. Its closing line is that this is mostly just a game, so focus, but relax. Our own addition: sleep the night before, and find a quiet corner between events.

Made, not born: what the research on memory athletes shows

In 2003 Eleanor Maguire and colleagues studied superior memorisers, most of them leading World Memory Championship competitors, against matched controls. They found no structural differences in the athletes' brains and no advantage in general intelligence. What they found was a strategy: nearly all the athletes used the method of loci, and when they memorised, the regions associated with spatial memory, including the hippocampus, were active in a way the controls' were not.

In 2017 Martin Dresler and colleagues compared twenty-three athletes from the world top 50 with controls matched for age, sex, IQ and handedness (the seventeen athletes who sat the word test recalled 70.8 of 72 words twenty minutes after seeing them, their controls 39.9), then took fifty-one untrained volunteers and gave a third of them forty daily half-hour sessions of loci training over six weeks. The trainees went from about 26 to about 62 of 72 words, far more than either control group gained, and their five-minute word scores on the training platform from about 17 to about 42; the recall gain was still present four months later, and how far each novice's connectivity had moved towards the athletes' pattern predicted that gain.

Honest limits: cost, time and everyday memory

Memory sport trains the events. Maguire's athletes beat controls on digits and faces but not on abstract snowflake patterns their technique could not encode, and a year of speed cards will not stop you losing your keys. The techniques transfer (the same encoding memorises a speech or a syllabus), but competition is a sport with a scoreboard, not a brain-training programme.

The costs are real: classical events charge an entry fee and are held in a hall you must travel to, sometimes abroad.

Speed at the top is years of drilling. Alex Mullen, three times world champion, uses a three-digit number system built on the Major system, a two-card system of 1,352 images and about three thousand places across roughly eighty palaces; a beginner with a hundred pegs is running the same engine in first gear.

Common questions

Is there prize money? A little. The USA Memory Championship advertised a $5,000 first prize in 2020; champions who make a living from memory do it through coaching, books and speaking.

Do I have to enter all ten disciplines? Nothing in the handbook's discipline rules requires it: missing rows, columns and decks carry no penalty, and a discipline you sit out scores zero. Its one all-ten rule is for competitors chasing the International Master title at a World Championship, who must compete in every discipline and total 3,000 points.

Start with one row

The first target is one perfect row of forty digits in five minutes: twenty images from a set of a hundred. Open the numbers drill, set two-digit groups and a sixty-second timer, and type back what you see with your pegs; when that is clean, take a printed row against the clock. Everything after it is more rows.