By how many seconds do you expect to be worse in real competition?

Memory Sports
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Greetings. To those who have experience in competitive memorizing, by how many seconds do you expect to be worse in a real competitive environment?

For instance, if your training time for cards is consistently at 30 seconds, how many seconds would you expect to achieve in real competition?

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Interesting question.

For me it doesn’t make much of a difference. So when I get 30 seconds in practice consistently, then I will also achieve around 30 seconds in a competition. That holds true for both Memory League matches and classic format competitions.

But that’s just my personal experience. I’m not a top competitor.

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Instead of seconds think of percentage. 85-ish % is what I expect, tho sometimes the adrenaline makes the result go above even 100%.

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Depends what youre aiming for. Against some competitors, Ill aim for a risky score, a normal pace or may takemy foot off the gas.

Training speeds and competition should have no difference.

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Petitio principii: the premise of your question assumes the truth of its conclusion instead of proving it. First of all, please look up Yerkes–Dodson law, where optimal physiological arousal from competition pushes certain athletes into a peak state or flow, allowing them to shatter their personal training records when it matters most.

Secondly, what you are doing is called Defensive Pessimism, coined by psychologists Nancy Cantor and Julie Norem, it describes a mechanism where individuals intentionally set low expectations for an upcoming performance (even if they have a history of doing well) and meticulously play out worst-case scenarios in their minds.

This achieves two protective psychological goals:

  • Anxiety management: It gives them a sense of control. By bracing for the worst, they mentally rehearse how to handle a rocky start or a memory palace mishap.
  • Ego protection: It shields their self-esteem. If they do poorly, it was already expected; if they do exceptionally well (or even just match their training baseline), it feels like a massive victory.

Lastly, please consider this breakdown of psychological mechanics not an ad hominem attack, but rather my way of saying:

Good luck on your first competition… you might just surprise yourself and beat your personal best when under pressure. :+1:

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@bjoern.gumboldt I liked your presentation of that comment!

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I think its a noticeable difference, I think top athletes generally do not reach their PB’s in an official competition.

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Why are you assuming memory competition doesn’t push physiological arousal past the “optimal” zone? Your rebuttal really rests on this fact so I hope you have proof.

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The seconds shouldn’t change, but the recall might. Don’t fall into the trap of going slow because “it matters”. You only know how to do what you do, so do that. I was in competition a long time ago when my speed cards were very consistent at about 21s. They were consistent in the sense that ordinarily there were either 0, 1, or 2 blanks in my memory after memorization. I went to the USAMC, where the final discipline is memorizing two decks in 5 minutes, and then doing round-robin verbal recall.

I thought, “I’m so quick, I can just go through at a leisurely pace, carefully visualizing and linking everything…” But that isn’t what I practiced. And I barely, barely remembered them. What I ought to have done, I suppose, was go through at 20 seconds over and over, since that’s what I actually knew how to do. Food for thought.

I recommend learning to memorize cards in such a way that you don’t need a second deck and can recall them all mentally after memorizing. With some practice, it probably wouldn’t be as slow as you’d think. In competition, I’ve done consistently well when the outcome seemed to be a foregone conclusion. But when that isn’t true, I have scored well below my lowest daily practice score for the past year. Binary, hour numbers, N&F, I’ve bombed them all spectacularly.

Some people like Ben set PRs in competitions, which blows my mind. But if you’re like me, it’s probably best to understand what you can do 95% of the time, and do that.

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Tu quoque: you are accusing me of making a blind assumption, but that conclusion is based on a misreading of my post.

Pointing out petitio principii is a “structural correction,” not a debate stance. My reference to the Yerkes–Dodson law was simply to demonstrate that peak performance is a scientific possibility, which directly invalidates the premise that a performance drop is an absolute certainty.

Procatalepsis: You might claim my use of “Latin” is a defensive stance, but employing exact terminology is a clinical correction of your structural error, not an emotional shield.

I appreciate your reply, but next time, please read mine in its entirety first.

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Actually, the question was “by how many seconds do you expect to be worse in real competition?” Nowhere was it stated that this is a universal law. If someone asks me what my favorite pizza is, I wouldn’t respond to them by saying “Dodson Yeerk says I might only eat sandwiches this month so it’s a flawed assumption,” lol. It’s cool you read a research paper abstract once and can google some Latin but either engage with the actual subject or go home and kiss Robert’s rules of order lmao

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This analogy describes an open-ended question of subjective preference. “What is your favorite pizza?” does not force the respondent to accept an unproven assumption; it leaves the choice entirely to the individual.

However, the thread’s original question was not open-ended. It was: “By how many seconds do you expect to be worse in real competition?” This question contains a loaded premise (a presupposition): it takes for granted that a performance drop will occur and forces the responder to quantify it.

For your analogy to be structurally identical to the thread’s question, it cannot ask for an open preference. It must bake the negative conclusion directly into the premise.

A logically accurate version of the analogy would look like this:

“Given that pizza is an inherently disgusting food, by how many slices do you expect to feel physically ill after eating it tonight?”

Ignoratio Elenchi: That pizza analogy is textbook missing the point. The original thread asks for an expectation of performance drop. An expectation under pressure cannot be decoupled from the psychological realities of pressure (cf. Yerkes-Dodson law).

Ramblings do not a lecture make,
Nor fall’cies a proof;
Minds innocent and quiet take
Delusions for a truth.

If I have logic in my glove,
And in my brain am free,
Onus alone, that soars above,
Enjoys such probandi.

— (not) Ada Lovelace

Lapsus Mentis, Argumentum Omissum (T.N.: Sound and fury, a tale told by…)

Procatalepsis (encore): If you don’t feel particularly Scottish, I can lend you my pen and ink-horn for your Jack Cade defense. I just ask you to hang it about my neck again before you hit Reply, so we can finish Act IV, scene ii unironically.

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I’ve never read a book so I’m not getting a lot of your jokes but they seem very clever; thank you for the effort :slight_smile:

anyhow idk I’d say my 52/52s are about 3-4 seconds slower in competition

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