Review: South German Championship 2009

Posted on 02. Jun, 2009 by Flauwy in Memory Championships, News

Germany’s regional championships of this season are over. After a great competition in the north, now the south scored with two new German records, 23 newcomers and a head-to-head challenge for the visitors. MemoryXL did an excellent job and created a memorable event for the competitors. Read all the details of this gorgeous championship.

The Youths Event

On Saturday morning the Best Western Queens Hotel was filled with the young competitors and their families. Sixteen competitors came to Karlsruhe to juggle numbers, cards and words in seven different disciplines. Only one, Antony Amalanesan, competed in a memory championship before. All the others have been a newcomer in this sport.

Although there haven’t been any new records in the youths event, they did a great job. Especially the children stood out and bet the older juniors in several disciplines. It was a relaxed competition, with much laughter, playing kids all over the place and a well structured schedule. In the breaks we watched the juniors training with Sport Stacks. The sport where you stack cups in lightning-speed have been a sibling for memory sports for several years now. Since you train both sides of your brain with it, the relation between both sports is pretty obvious. But the main reason of course is the brilliant Stack Timer, a digital counting device, which is used for Speed Cards at memory championships.

After six disciplines, the results for juniors have been pretty clear: Antony Amalanesan, the only experienced competitor in the whole youths event, was leading his age group with more than 200 points. The scores in the children’s group however have been very close to each other.

In the end, Antony Amalanesan won the juniors competition before Laura Baumann (best newcomer) and Silvan Frisch. The crown for the children’s event went to Lucía Schmid (also best newcomer) before Marvin Listander and Michael Jall.

The young South German Champions

Results – Children

Results – Juniors

The Award Ceremony

On Saturday evening, MemoryXL created a funny and interesting ceremony for the kids and their families. Vice-President Michael Gloschewski explained a Person-Object-System for beginners and everyone was able to memorize 20 digits after that.

Johannes Mallow tried to memorize the birthday of ten visitors and created good laughs when he forgot three of them. You know, he is holding the world record for dates. Don’t bother Hannes, you’ve been charming anyway. :biggrin:

The Sports Stacking Team from Crailsheim

The Sports Stacking Team from Crailsheim presented a colourful show with their cups.

The highlight of the ceremony have been the head-to-head challenge: 8 athletes got 60 seconds to memorize as many numbers as possible. After that they had to recall one number in rotation. It was fun (although I was one of the athletes who didn’t survive the first round :pinch: ) and very interesting for the visitors.

The show was great and definitely the best regional ceremony from MemoryXL so far (together with this years North German ceremony). Well done.

The Adults Event

Simon Reinhard's new German record in Speed Cards

On Sunday the atmosphere was much more quiet than the day before. That wasn’t only due to the departed kids but also because of their siblings and parents. Grown-ups usually don’t bring their parents to a competition. Dorothea Seitz on the other hand taught her parents the memory techniques and braught them with her as competitors. Nevertheless there was excitement in the air. Ten of sixteen competitors have been newcomers in the sport.

The veterans squad was formed by the Simone Nicklas, Dr. Ferdinand Krause and former South German champion Simon Reinhard. Also Dennis Müller and Dorothea Seitz joined the team out of competition. Both of them are taking every chance they get to train for the big fishes later this year.

The competition started with a fire cracker: Simon Reinhard broke his own German record with 77 names in five minutes (old: 76). It is a great score but still a long way to Katie Kermode’s world record with 94 names.

With 153 Abstract Images, Fabian Saal jumped from zero to rank 12 in the world (in this particular discipline) and made room for speculations about another new rising star in the memory world (next to Katie Kermode and Dennis Müller). Since it was his first competition, we probably can expect a lot more from him in the future.

In the discipline Words, Simon probably just missed a potential new world record, by falsifying the correct answer in the last minute. He ended up with (still brilliant) 89 words in five minutes.

Always last but never least we came to a firework in the discipline Speed Cards: With a huge distance to his rivals, there was no pressure for Simon whatsoever. He could easily go for a record and he did. In his first attempt, Simon memorized a deck of cards in 26.88 seconds (Ben Pridmore’s world record: 26.28 seconds) but he made a mistake. In the second attempt he tried it again and memorized his deck in 27.36 seconds – and recalled it correctly. A new German record and the second person in the world next to Ben Pridmore who ever came under the magic obstacle of 30 seconds. Incredible! He became South German Champion again before Fabain Saal (best newcomer) and Giselher Mandl.

The adult South German Champions 2009

Results – Adults

Conclusion

Once again we have seen a magnificent memory championship with many new faces and great scores. Especially Simon Reinhard’s new Speed Cards record will join the hall of fame of marvelous memory moments. And best of all: I got it on video – all of it! So prepare yourself to see a human being memorizing 52 cards in only 27.36 seconds. When the video is edited I will publish it immediately. It wont take long. Promise.

Credits

With the help of Isabell & Stephan Jaki, MemoryXL has been able to organize this great event. If you are German and interested in professional training for learning techniques, you should check out Isabell’s Website.