by Joshua Foer
I quickly neatened up the stack of cards into a square pile, shoved them back across the table to the judge, and removed my earmuffs and ear plugs. I had it nailed. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind.
After waiting a moment for one of the television cameras to circle around for a better angle, the judge began flipping the cards over one by one, while, for dramatic effect, I did the same with the deck I’d memorized.
Two of hearts.
Two of hearts.
Two of diamonds.
Two of diamonds.
Three of hearts.
Three of hearts ...
Card by card, each one matched. When we got to the end of the decks, I threw the last card down on the table, and looked up with a wide, stupid grin that I tried and failed to squelch. I was the new U.S. record holder in speed cards. The throng that had gathered around my desk applauded loudly. One person hooted. Ben Pridmore pumped his fist. A twelve-year-old boy stepped forward, handed me a pen, and asked for my autograph.
For reasons that were never made clear, it had been decided that the three top finishers in the first three events of the morning would be given a bye, and wouldn’t have to compete in the final preliminary event of the morning, the poem. Despite my low score in numbers, my record performance with the cards was enough to leave me in second place overall, behind Maurice and ahead of “Ice Man” Chester. We were all going straight to the quarterfinals. The three of us left the competition hall with Ben Pridmore and walked over to the Con Edison cafeteria, where we sat at the same table eating a cordial, and mostly silent, lunch. When we returned, the three of us were joined on the stage by Ram, the forty-seven-year-old fifty-state marathoner Paul Mellor, and seventeen-year-old Erin Luley, who had set a new United States record—her second of the day—in the poetry event, while we were out of the room.
Now that there were only six of us left, the competition shifted to its second phase, designed to amp up the drama for the benefit of the television cameras. Nifty 3-D graphics were now projected onto a screen in the front of the room, and theatrical lighting poured down on the stage, where there were six tall director’s chairs for us to sit on, each with a lapel microphone resting on it.
The first event of the afternoon was random words. In a typical random words event at a typical national championship, the competitors would have fifteen minutes to memorize as many words as possible from a list of four hundred, then a short break, and then thirty minutes to write as many as they could remember in order on a sheet of paper. It’s not exactly a spectator sport. For the U.S. championship, it was decided that everything would happen on stage, with the hope that this might lend the event some of the hand-wringing, agonizing screams, and other kabuki antics that make the spelling bee such compelling theater. The six of us were to go in a circle, one by one, each calling out the next word on the list we’d memorized. The first two mental athletes to miss a word would be knocked out.
The list was a collection of concrete nouns and verbs like “reptile” and “drown,” which are the easiest to visualize, mixed in with a few harder-to-imagine abstract words like “pity” and “grace.” Whereas your objective in a normal random words event would be to memorize as much as possible, and perhaps be a little reckless about it for the sake of packing your memory palace to capacity, Ed and I had reckoned that the rules of the U.S. championships meant that a wiser strategy was to memorize fewer words—I went for a mere 120—but make sure they were 100 percent right. We figured most of the people on the stage could probably remember more words than me, but also that somebody was going to freak out and try for more than he or she could handle. I would not be that guy.
After our fifteen minutes of memorizing, we went person by person across the stage announcing the next word from the list: “sarcasm” ... “icon” ... “awning” . . . “lasso” . . . “torment” . . . When we got to the twenty-seventh word, Erin, who had just that morning memorized more poetry than any American mental athlete ever before, floundered. The word was “numb”—the other five of us all knew it—but for some reason she couldn’t see it. She collapsed back into her chair, shaking her head. Nine words later, Paul Mellor mistook “operation” for “operate”—a classic rookie error. Most of us—and especially the producer from HDNet, which was televising the scintillating proceedings—had been braced for a bruising battle of attrition past at least the hundredth word. It was hard to figure how the event could have ended so early. Even someone who has just learned the principle of the memory palace is usually able to memorize at least thirty or forty words on a first attempt. I suspected that both Erin and Paul had misjudged the rest of the field and overreached. Which meant Ram, Chester, Maurice, and I had slid into the final four on the unforced errors of others. Which meant I was one tea party away from the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship.
A tall brunette in a summer dress walked onto the stage and introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Diana Marie Anderson. I was born on December 22, 1967, in Ithaca, New York, 14850. My work number, but please don’t call me there, is 929-244-6735, extension 14. I have a pet and her name is Karma and she’s a yellow lab. I have some hobbies: watching movies, cycling, and knitting. My favorite car is a 1927 Model T Ford. It’s black. When I eat, I have pizza and jelly beans and peppermint-stick ice cream.”
While she spoke, Ram, Chester, Maurice, and I had our eyes closed, furiously painting images in our memory palaces. Diana’s birthday, 12/22/67, became a one-ton weight (12) crushing a nun (22) as she drank a fruit shake (67), which I placed in a freestanding claw-toothed bathtub in the bathroom of my Victorian palace. For her birthplace and zip code, I walked over to the linen closet and imagined a monster truck tire (14) rolling over the ledge of one of Ithaca’s famous gorges, and landing on a couple of fellas (850). Four more tea party guests appeared on stage, and read off equally exhaustive biographies.
The contest was called “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” which meant that the first two contestants to forget three pieces of information would be eliminated. After giving us a few minutes for the curve of forgetting to work its magic, the five tea party guests came back onstage and started quizzing us about themselves. First, we were asked for the name of a young woman with blond hair and a baseball cap, the fourth of the five guests. Chester, sitting at the end of the row, knew it: “Susan Lana Jones.” Maurice was then quizzed on her date of birth, which he didn’t know, and which made me wonder if he hadn’t been bluffing about his good night’s sleep. One strike for Maurice. Fortunately, I did know her birthday. I pulled it out of the stark marble sink of my modernist palace. It was December 10, 1975. Ram knew her place of residence: North Miami Beach, Florida, 33180, but Chester couldn’t remember her phone number. One strike for Chester. And neither could Maurice. Two strikes for Maurice. The camera zoomed in on me, waiting for me to call out the ten digits, plus extension. “I didn’t even try to remember her phone number,” I said, looking straight into the lens. My strategy had been to focus on everything else, and just hope that those long numbers would be someone else’s problem. One strike for Josh.
The game continued like this, until it got back to Maurice, who couldn’t come up with even a single one of the woman’s three hobbies. In fact, he might as well have been taking a nap while they’d been reading off their bios. He had three strikes. He was out.
The other three of us remained on stage volleying biographical details back and forth for several more rounds. Eventually it came back to Chester to recite the work phone number of one of the tea party guests, including the area code and three digit extension.
Chester grimaced and looked down. “Why do I always get the phone numbers? Are you kidding me?”
“That’s just the way it worked out,” said Tony Dottino, who was standing behind a podium at stage left, acting as game show host.
“Come on, nobody knows the phone numbers.”
“You’re a numbers guru, Chester.”
If I’d been sitting in Chester’s chair, I would
n’t have known it either. It was dumb luck that Chester had ended up in that seat and not me, dumb luck that he got his third strike before me, and dumb luck that I was now on my way to the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship.
A ten-minute pause was announced before the final event, “Double Deck’r Bust,” in which Ram and I would each have five minutes to memorize the same two decks of playing cards. Maurice grabbed me as I walked off the stage and put his arm around my shoulder. “You are the winner,” he said in clipped English. “Ram cannot do two decks. It is certain.” I thanked him curtly, and tried to make my way through the crowd to get out of the room. Ben greeted me at the bottom of the stairs with an outstretched palm waiting for a low five.
“Cards are Ram’s worst event,” he said excitedly. “You’ve got it in the bag now!”
“Come on, man, what are you trying to do, jinx this?”
“All you’ve got to do is half of what you did this morning.”
“Please don’t say that. You’re bringing down some serious evil eye over here.”
He apologized and left to find Ram to offer him his best wishes.
From the sideline, Kenny Rice continued his play-by-play analysis: “We are nearing the deciding moment here in the U.S. National Memory Championship. Ram Kolli won this event last year. Can the twenty-five-year old from Virginia pull off the repeat, or will it be the newcomer Joshua Foer, an Internet journalist who has covered the event before? Now he’s here trying to win it. This last event, ‘Double Deck’r Bust,’ is a mind-against-mind battle.”
I knew, despite the bad karma, that Ben and Maurice were right. Ram could barely memorize a single deck of cards in five minutes, much less two. Under the sweat-inducing lights, eye to eye with the lens of a television camera, I knew that all I had to do was not choke, and that silver hand with the golden nail polish would be mine.
The first thing I did after sitting down and putting in my ear plugs was shove the second deck aside. Since I only needed to memorize one more card than Ram, I decided I would get to know the first deck as thoroughly as I possibly could. I spent the five minutes looking at those fifty-two cards over and over again, breaking only to take a quick peek at Ram, who was sitting at the table next to me. He was holding up a single card and studying it like some sort of rare insect. Oh my god, that guy doesn’t have a chance, I thought.
After five minutes of memorizing, there was a coin toss to determine who would go first during recall. Ram called tails. It was heads. It was up to me to choose whether to start, or let Ram.
“This is important,” I whispered, loud enough to be picked up by my lapel microphone. I closed my eyes and walked as fast as I could through the deck, checking to see if there were any gaps in my memory palace, places where for some reason an image hadn’t stuck, as had happened earlier that morning. If there were, I wanted Ram to be accountable for those cards, not me. Finally, after a long pause, I opened my eyes. “I’ll start.”
I thought about it a second longer. “No, no, no. Wait. Ram can start.” It might have seemed like one last little bit of psychological gamesmanship, but in fact I’d realized I couldn’t remember the forty-third card in the deck. I wanted to make sure that that one would be Ram’s responsibility.
Dottino: “Okay, Ram, it’s to you for the first card.”
Ram twiddled his fingers for a second. “Two of diamonds.”
Then me: “Queen of hearts.”
“Nine of clubs.”
“King of hearts.”
Ram looked up at the ceiling and leaned back in his chair.
I could see he was shaking his head. No freaking way, I thought. He looked back down. “King of diamonds?”
Now I was shaking my head. I knew he was out. On the fifth card! I looked over at Ram in shock. He’d blown it. He’d overreached. Maurice, sitting in the front row, smacked his forehead.
“We have a new United States memory champion!”
I didn’t stand up. I’m not even sure I breached a smile. A minute earlier, all I had wanted was to win. But now my first emotion was not happiness or relief or self-congratulation. It was, I was surprised to discover, simply exhaustion. I felt the sleeplessness of the previous night wash over me, and kept my head buried in my hands for a moment. People watching at home probably thought I was overcome with emotion. In fact, I was still stuck inside my memory palace, floating through a world of impossible images that seemed for a brief moment more real than the stage I was sitting on. I looked up and saw the kitschy, two-tiered trophy twinkling at the edge of the stage. Ram reached over to shake my hand and whispered in my ear, “The fifth card. What was it?”
I dropped my hands, turned to him, and whispered back: “The five of clubs.” Dom DeLuise. Hula-hooping. Of course.
EPILOGUE
Congratulations to Joshua Foer. He’s really going to have a story to write about this time, isn’t he?” announced the play-by-play man Kenny Rice. “He came here really just to see what it would take and he’s going home a champion.”
“Well, not bad for a rookie, Joshua,” said Ron Kruk, the HDNet reporter who had ascended the stage with a microphone in hand for a postgame interview. “You came in and covered this event a couple times. How key was that experience in your becoming so successful and winning the U.S. Memory Championship today?”
“I think it was important but I think the practice I put in leading up to today was probably more important,” I said.
“Well, it paid off for you today, definitely. You’re on your way to the world championships.”
That absurd thought hadn’t even occurred to me.
“You’ve been there and covered that as a journalist. How is that going to help you?”
I laughed. “I don’t have any chance in the world championships, to be honest. Those people can memorize a deck of cards in, like, thirty seconds. They’re extraterrestrials, basically.”
“I’m sure you’ll do the United States proud. We’re all counting on you. You know, if you win the Super Bowl, you say, ‘I’m going to Disneyland.’ If you win the U.S. Memory Championship, you say ...”
He shoved the microphone in my face. I was supposed to answer that I was going to Kuala Lumpur, I guess. Or maybe I was supposed to say Disneyland. I was confused. And very, very tired. And the cameras were rolling. “Um. I don’t know,” I said. I was at a loss. “I think I’m going home.”
As soon as I got off the podium, I rang Ed from the nearest pay phone. It was mid-morning in Australia, and he was standing in the outfield of a cricket pitch, engaging, he said, in a bit of “experimental philosophy.”
“Ed, it’s Josh—”
“Did you win?” The words rushed out of his mouth as if he’d been waiting all morning for my call.
“I won.”
He let out a roar. “What a spectacular coup! Well done, man, well done! You know what this means, right? You are now the undisputed owner of the brains of America!”
The next morning, out of curiosity, I went to the memory circuit’s online bulletin board to see if the full scores from the competition had been posted yet, and what, if anything, the Europeans had to say about a novice having bested the American field. Ben had already written up a fourteen-page report on the championship. The last section included a few words on the new champion: “I was impressed with his performance, considering how short a time he’s been training, and I think he might just be the person who takes American memory competitions to new heights,” Ben wrote. “He’s learned his techniques from Europeans, he’s been to the competitions over here, and he’s not restricted like the others by the low standards necessary to make it big in America. He’s got a genuine passion for the sport, and I think he could go on to be not just a grand master, but maybe the first American to get into the top echelon of memory competitors. And when he does, no doubt his countrymen will up their game to keep up with him. It only takes one person to inspire others. So I think the future looks bright for memory in America!”
; The U.S. memory champion turns out to be a minor (OK, very minor) celebrity. All of a sudden, Ellen DeGeneres wanted to talk to me, and Good Morning America and the Today show were calling to ask if I’d memorize a deck of cards on the air. ESPN wanted to know if I’d learn the NCAA tournament brackets for one of their morning shows. Everyone wanted to see the monkey perform his tricks.
The biggest shock of my newfound stardom (or loserdom, depending on your perspective, I suppose) was that I was now the official representative of all 300 million citizens of the United States of America to the World Memory Championship. This was not a position I had ever expected to be in. At no point during my training did it ever occur to me that I might someday go head-to-head with the likes of Ed Cooke, Ben Pridmore, and Gunther Karsten, the superstars I had initially set out to write about. In all my hours of training, I hardly ever thought to compare my practice scores to theirs. I was a beer league softball right fielder; they were the New York Yankees.
When I showed up in London at the end of August (the championship was moved at the last minute from Malaysia), I brought along my earmuffs, which I’d painted with Captain America stars and stripes; fourteen decks of playing cards I would try to memorize in the hour cards event; and a Team U.S.A. T-shirt. My principle ambition was simply not to embarrass myself or my country. I also set myself two secondary goals: to finish in the top ten of the thirty-seven-person field and to earn the title of grand master of memory.
As it turned out, both goals were beyond my reach. As the official representative of the greatest superpower on earth, I’m afraid to say I gave the world an entirely mediocre impression of America’s collective memory. Though I learned a respectable nine and a half decks of cards in an hour (half a deck short of the grand master standard), my score in hour numbers was a humiliating 380 digits (620 short of grand master). I did manage a third place showing in names and faces, an accomplishment I chalked up to the fact that the packet of names we’d been given to memorize was a veritable United Nations of ethnic monikers. Since I came from the most multicultural country in the world, few of them were unfamiliar to me. Overall, I finished in thirteenth place out of the thirty-seven competitors, behind just about every German, Austrian, and Brit—but, I’m pleased to say, ahead of the French guy, and the entire Chinese team.