Chinese Translation : 中文翻译
French Translation : Traduction française
Mongolian Translation : Монгол орчуулга
Arabic Translation : الترجمة العربية
Hi all,
We hope all you memory athletes out there are well!
Here is more information about the upcoming event of the memory sports year, the 3rd IAM World Memory Championships, taking place in the beautiful city of Zhuhai, China, 29 November to 1 December:
1. PAPER OR DIGITAL? YOU CAN CHOOSE!
We are offering athletes the opportunity to do nine of the ten WMC disciplines digitally (Speed Cards will be with real cards), here is our software for training, check it out:
iamwmc.com/competition/training.html
We have already done the German Open and the French Open this year digitally with this software and the feedback from athletes, arbiters and organizers was very positive and constructive.
You can do the whole WMC on paper, as usual, if you wish. If digital is not for you yet, no problem at all. It is mandatory to bring your own laptop if you want to participate digitally.
2. RECORD PRIZE MONEY
The total prize money will be:
500,000 RMB.
This equals about 63,000 Euro or 70,000 USD
It will be the highest prize money of any traditional memory event since several years, if you count only real money and not also … non-cash prizes 😄.
3. SCHEDULE
We will publish the finalized schedule by 1 November. Expect a normal WMC schedule, with the usual order of disciplines, over three days (29 November to 1 December), similar to the last two years. The two Jiuduan disciplines (which are both not very long) will take place after the last WMC discipline of day one and day two. Letters will last about 30-45 minutes and Classical Texts about the same.
4. VENUE
As stated in a previous announcement, the venue will be:
Zhuhai TV Station, 4th floor
500 Yinhua Rd
Xiangzhou district
Zhuhai City
Google Maps link: https://goo.gl/maps/ksagokL96nAHgoQE7
5. WECHAT GROUP FOR QUESTIONS
We have made a chat group on Wechat (basically the Chinese whatsapp) for all registered athletes and for everybody else who has questions to us and/or the organizers.
If you want to join, message us and we will add you if you have wechat. Or you can scan this group QR code and join right away:
6. TITLES? YESSS!
Ah, and there will be … titles! You will be able to earn your own set of Master titles – if you are good enough. Something to keep and cherish forever.
We will publish more details latest by 15th November. Also: all feedback is welcome, write us at info@iam-memory.org!
7. TOURNAMENT STRUCTURE: A CLASSICAL WMC WITH A BIT OF (PURELY OPTIONAL!) EXTRA
7.1 Introduction
The headline says it all. It is classical WMC as you know it, with some extra options that will not affect your WMC experience at all if you do not want to but that can offer some interesting additional opportunities if you want to use them.
This extra option is the “Jiuduan” tournament that has already taken place successfully in 2017 and 2018 (what exactly is “Jiuduan”, you ask? More below). They will also be the organizers on site for the WMC.To clarify: The event is NOT only a Jiuduan event, for sure. It is also NOT required to even take part in the Jiuduan. The IAM WMC will be the full focus for you. So if the chance of winning prize money at the IAM WMC and the Jiuduan is not your thing, then skip the next passages 😄 For all others, read on.
7.2 The Disciplines
- The structure is very simple actually. In order to take part in both events you take part in the World Memory Championship (ten discipline, 3 days, as you know and love it) and you would just need to do two additional short disciplines at the end of day one and two to also be part of the Jiuduan. That’s all. And if you do not want to do this, no problem. There will be the normal WMC, ten disciplines, all as known. If you do not care about anything else, just take part in these ten and you will be fine, with a nice and cool WMC experience.
- But the really interesting thing is this: The Jiuduan competition traditionally consists of six disciplines, four of which are identical to our WMC disciplines (Speed Numbers, Hour Cards, 15 Min Words, Speed Cards).
That means that of course you will not need to do these four disciplines twice. We saved you time by doing it like this: By taking part in the WMC, you will already have also completed four of the Jiuduan disciplines, your result in these four disciplines will count for both tournaments.
So, we said six Jiuduan disciplines, right? And four are already done by simply doing the WMC? So only two more missing? You are exactly right. In order to complete your six Jiuduan disciplines, you would just need to do two more short disciplines:
- Letter memorizing (36 Latin random letters, chosen from the standardized 26 letter English alphabet, on time, with a Speed Cards timer, two tries): At the end of WMC day 1, after the last WMC discipline.
- Classical Text Recall: At the end of WMC day 2, after the last WMC discipline.
Again: As you can see, the schedule will be identical to a normal WMC and the 2 extra Jiuduan disciplines are just an extra added voluntary option for you and will not impact your WMC tournament in any way if you do not want to. If you only care about doing your good ol’ WMC, then you simply leave on day 1 and day 2 after the last WMC discipline and all will be like it always is 😄.
7.3 Why participate in these extra disciplines?
While completely optional, we have compiled some reasons why you might still consider investing the bit of extra time on the first two days into doing these two disciplines:
1. They are not long. Both will be over rather quickly. 36 Letters is a fast-memory discipline with two trials. Classical letters is filling out gap texts with a clear time limit.
2. They are great fun, we feel! 36 Letters is basically like Speed Cards: You turn around the page, start your speed stacks timer, rush through the letters (best time was around 20s last year), press stop, and recall starts. Marking is similar to Speed Cards, much more points for a fully correct set of letters and an average time than for a fast time with errors.
3. It opens up new prize money options for you (see below)! By taking part in the WMC, you will already have the scoring for four of the six Jiuduan disciplines anyway (the count for WMC and Jiuduan, see above). So, by completing the six disciplines with Letters and Classical texts, your chance for a chunk of the Jiuduan part of the prize money increases significantly.
4. Ah, and: If you have paid the WMC participation fee, you will also automatically have the right to take part in the Jiuduan competition. So, no extra costs for you, just extra chances.
7.4 Further Information on Jiuduan disciplines
If we could get you interested a bit, here is more about the Classical Text discipline. Classic Texts is special because you learn the texts in advance, in the weeks before the competition, at home, and then get tested by getting a number of sentences from the texts, with a gap in them, and you need to fill the gap. There are nine levels of texts with (usually) increasing length. The texts are the true classics like the Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Heart Sutra, The 1000 Words Poem, Confucius’ Analects etc… (and some English school text, do not ask us why 😄 ).
We have uploaded the file with all Classical texts to the Downloads section of our homepage:
Texts will be offered by the Jiuduan organizer either in Chinese or in English.
NOTE: You will see that some ranks contain more than one text. You only need to learn one text per level, not all. You can choose which you like best. Further, you can decide upto how many levels you want to attempt and do not need to learn till the last level.
If you want to know more about Jiuduan and its rules and about the disciplines of the last two years, check out their homepage:
There you will find much further info about their event and can also contact them for questions and feedback. 😄
8. PRIZE MONEY STRUCTURE
As said above, the total prize money will be 500,000 RMB.
- 125,000 RMB will be distributed among the people who only take part in the WMC and who have the best results in the disciplines and the best total scores.
- 125,000 RMB will be distributed among the people who take part in the four WMC disciplines which are identical with Jiuduan (Speed Numbers, Words, Hour Cards and Speed cards) plus “36 Letters” and “Classical Texts” and who have the best results in these disciplines and the best total scores (that means, if you are among the best in one of the four disciplines that are shared by WMC and Jiuduan, you will get money twice for that discipline!).
Total scores at Jiuduan work similarly as at WMC with a points structure and 1,000 point standards, although by design they have a bit diverging 1,000 point standards from ours, take note of that! See their homepage below for more details). You might call this 125,000 a joint prize money pot. - 250.000 RMB will be distributed among all athletes who manage to earn a Jiuduan Dan Level. A Jiuduan Dan level is like a rank and the Dans is where the name “Jiuduan” comes from. “Jiuduan”, or 九段in Chinese, literally means “9 Dans”. In short, each of the six Jiuduan disciplines not only has a 1,000 points standard attached, see above, but also has nine ranks, with 1 the lowest and 9 the highest. Level 9 at words is 180 words, for example (see all dan levels here: www.jiyijiuduan.cn/newsinfo/419522.html).
- The crucial thing to keep in mind here is that your total Dan rank is the minimum of your Dans in the six disciplines, and not the average of your Dans in the six disciplines. So, your worst score basically works like a bottleneck, an upper limit, for your total Dan. That means it would maybe not be the worst strategy trying to have a good, safer score in the disciplines (and thus better chances of a higher total Dan) instead of going for broke, but it is your choice what strategy you follow 😄.
- Note that in order to achieve a certain Dan rank in text, you need to have zero errors in all of the previous Texts levels, too, to earn that rank. For example, to get dan 4 in Classical Texts, it is not enough to only learn a text from level 4, but you also need to pass Level 1 (first 100 digits of Pi, do not ask us why! 😄), then level 2, level 3 all perfectly, answering each of the gap questions without errors. If you make your first mistake at level 3, for example, but have level 1, 2 and 4 correct, you will still only get dan 2 at the Texts. And if, for example, you get level 2 at Texts, your total Dan level for Jiuduan (which determines your part of the 250,000 RMB portion reserved for the Dans), also cannot be higher than 2 in our example. Note:
- At the moment, we are still talking with the Jiuduan organizers about that “bottleneck rule” for the total Dan. It is hard but fair for sure, and it is their tradition. But perhaps we can convince them to only count the five best dans of the six or so, so that one bad event does not exclude your chance of a good total Dan, or something similar. What are your thoughts on this? Please write to us!
9. REGISTRATION
For those who did not see our first posts, registration for the WMC is here:
Best wishes to all of you! 🙂 🙂 🙂
The IAM team