About this competition: http://www.extremememorytournament.com/the-tournament
About the qualification: http://www.extremememorytournament.com/qualifiers/The Competition will be a 2-day event on June 24th - 26th, 2016
held at the Dart Neuroscience Convention Center in San Diego, CA
sponsored by Dart Neuroscience and Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL)
offering money prizes from a pool of $75,000
Also, a statistic to notice that both previous winners of this competition were Germans: Simon in 2014 and Johannes 2015. Also, Boris who reached the Final in '15. Congratulations!The qualification period runs for 5 weeks starting January 11th, 2016, focusing on a different event each week as shown below. Competitors can perform a maximum of 5 qualification attempts in the event of the week, and must submit their best attempt along with an accompanying video (a sample valid video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S9lGDgfkCA).
Each qualification attempt will be reviewed by the XMT organizers. The XMT organizers reserve the right to reject any qualification attempts that they deem not to be valid. Qualification attempts that are judged as valid will receive a number of qualification points based on comparison with the current world record. At the end of the 5-week qualification period, the 16 competitors with the highest total qualification points will be invited to compete at XMT 2016.
The knock-out rounds after the groups, seem hard. I watched some of the XMT'15 finals in Youtube last year, and it seemed like a nice competition format and memory sport.
The '1 minute only' format, reminds of the 'Bullet' format in Chess or maybe Calendar calculation (1 minute). Not always enough time. But exciting, with all the time pressure.
From the 2015 best scores http://xmtlive.com/#/bestscores, as an outsider I find some scores outstanding:
Images: Tumur's 30 images in 14.4 seconds (!),
Numbers: Johannes' 80 (decimal) numbers in 21 seconds (!)
Cards: Simon's: All 52 correct in 23.3 seconds
Words: Boris' 47 words in 1 minute, (and Simon's 49 words in 2014)
Names: Simon's 28 names in 1 minute
With all due respect to all other scores and records, I find especially the first 2 records (14.4" in images and 21" in numbers) to be superhuman genius performances, at least to me. So, I consider it will be hard to break those 2 scores. But let's see.
Also, according to this Recordholders site, Ramon Campayo, speed memory recordman from Spain, has done 30 decimal digits in 4 seconds. And Johannes 80 in 21 seconds in XMT'15. So, it would be interesting to put a unique hybrid competition/duel at an average of 10 or 12 seconds and see who could win and memorize more decimals in that timeframe: Ramon or Johannes? This nice speed memory application can practice up to 50 decimal(or binary) in 1-9 seconds. Also, Ramon has a nice program called 'Speed-Memory Simulator 2'. I like such programs because they increase the reading speed of numbers. So, they are useful for calculation as well (by remembering more carrying digits, in short-term)
Anyway, this XMT sport should also be highlighter on some Sport channel in TV. Nelson and the other guys (Alex etc.) seem to do a good work in organizing this.
So, Good luck to everyone trying qualifications and participating in XMT 2016. If there's a livestream this year as well (in June 2016), I'll try to watch some XMT'16 in Youtube.