Bahrain attracts largest number of competitors ever for World Memory Challenge

More than 50 competitors have already applied to take part, making it largest number of competitors ever to enter the event in its 17-year history.

Last year's event was hailed as 'the best ever' by the founder of the event Mr Tony Buzan. Mr Buzan, the inventor of Mind Mapping®, and acclaimed author and speaker on mind development, will be in Bahrain in October to oversee the 17th World Memory Championship, an event which he founded in London with Ray Keene OBE another memory expert.

Competitors have already signed up from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, USA, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, England, Wales, South Africa, Malaysia, China and Hong Kong highlighting Bahrain in the world's media.

Mr. Fuad Mubarak, Deputy CEO of INTELNACOM, announcing the statistic said:

"The success of last year's event and the welcoming hospitality that Bahrain has to offer, has been instrumental in bringing in a record number of competitors this year. It is, of course, an added bonus to have the competition within a mind games festival making this an edu-taining event for all."

Over 3 days of competition global competitors will face some gruelling mental challenges, from memorising a sequence of random words in fifteen minutes, (Boris Konrad holds the World Record of 227 words), to remembering the sequence of playing cards in as many decks as possible in one hour. In this discipline Ben Pridmore holds the World Record of 27 packs. A prize fund of US$30,000 is on offer to competitors with a top prize for the 'World Memory Champion' of $10,000.


This year the festival is including an Inter-Schools Challenge and an Inter-University Challenge, as well as some opportunities for the visiting public to take part in learning the mind games as well as to interact with some giant games at the event."

Ben Pridmore, the current UK Memory Champion, is very much in form and is tipped to take the world crown in Bahrain. In a recent Television documentary he was filmed breaking his own world record for memorising a deck of shuffled playing cards in a blistering time of 24.68 seconds. In a recent interview he said "I don't have a naturally brilliant memory, it's about learning techniques. It's a combination of number-crunching that I do anyway in my job - with added colour."

Pridmore uses a system where he assigns different mental pictures to each combination of two cards. For instance, the ace of diamonds followed by the eight of diamonds is represented by Daffy Duck (Pridmore uses cartoon characters from Looney Tunes cartoons and the Simpsons, as well as random objects) whereas the ace of diamonds followed by the King of Hearts is represented by a ladder. There are 2,704 possible combinations. These characters and objects then rapidly interact with each other as they embark on a journey. To recall the information, Pridmore reruns the story; as each character appears, he retrieves the two-card sequences.

So, while most of us grapple with the best ways to recall simple information, these champions have perfected a technique which simply makes the process much more efficient. Apparently any of us could do the same.

The World Memory Championship was founded in London in 1991 to promote memory as a 'Mind Sport', creating a set of ten memory disciplines which are now accepted as the worldwide standard for international competition. The disciplines in the World Memory Championship are gruelling and are designed to measure pure memory skill, rather than any one individual's knowledge on a particular subject. The tests include spoken numbers, playing cards, dates, abstract images, binary digits, random words and names and faces and can include competitor's memorizing more than 50 sets of playing cards.