On 22–23 October, 11 participants from 5 countries came together in the beautiful and historic city of Toledo, Spain, for a weekend of intense competition at the IAM Spanish Open. The first event, 15-minute Words, was a close-run thing, with Simon Reinhard scoring 216 and Anne Reulke 210. In 30-minute Binary, another German competitor, Melanie Höllein, memorised an excellent 2761 digits. In 15-minute Names, Simon was the clear winner, achieving a near-WR score of 175. Simon and Melanie were close in both 30-minute and 5-minute Numbers, but Simon’s scores of 1336 and 344 were enough to win both. Søren Damtoft set a new Senior World Record in 30-minute Numbers with 600 digits. And Simon was on top again in 30-minute Cards, with 768 cards (14 decks and 40 cards). The IAM will unveil a new discipline soon, but in the meantime, 5-minute Binary is acting as a temporary replacement for Abstract Images, and Melanie was able to show her skills once again with a fantastic 813 digits. Simon was the winner in Dates (70), while Anne took the crown in Spoken (72 digits). In the final event (Speed Cards), Melanie and Anne took positions 1 and 2, with times of 51.24s and 53.44s respectively. The final top 3 were Simon, Melanie and Anne—making Simon the Open champion with 6141 points—while the Spanish champion once again, with 2739 points, was Ángel Fernández Muñoz, with an astonishing 9 personal bests and 7 Spanish records! Full results are available on the IAM statistics site.

The other competitors taking part were Norbert Reulke, Tobias Achleitner, Francisco Carlos Páez Caro, Giuseppe Moriello, Hanane Souissi and José Maria Bea. Congratulations to the winners and to all participants! Our sincere thanks go to the arbiting team of Nathalie Lecordier, Nick Papadopoulos, Sergio, Carlos, Nannette and Mrs. Reulke, as well as Johannes Mallow, who tweeted the results live and posted updates and photos on Facebook so that everyone in the memory sports world could follow events in Toledo as they happened! Last but not least, huge thanks must go to organiser Javier Moreno, who worked extremely hard to make this competition a success!