Don’t worry about asking questions, it’s encouraged!
Thank you again for elaborating!
That sounds extremely useful! I look forward to creating 0-99 in the near future! Although I guess this takes some time to not only create, but to memorise?
I also have Martin Freeman, though not in the form of The Hobbit. I have him in his character Tim from the Office 
Took me about 2 whole afternoons to create it, and about 30 minutes to memorise it (used a journey). After the memorisation, some of the images were a bit fuzzy and I wasn’t able to recall which image was which number instantaneously, but the more you use it, the more creases get ironed out.
You can just use rote memorization on the last card. It’s common practice for those of us who use PAO because we have one card left over after the 17 images are done. I just look at the last card briefly and then set the deck down.
Hype: I really appreciate your advice and your responding to the many questions that I asked. I’m strongly inclined to continue learning with a limited number of cards cards so my practice time is used efficiently - recalling cards on sight fairly quickly - moving through loci quickly - getting to the end of the stack quickly enough that I won’t need review along the way. (If I had to learn 100 french words in 10 days, I wouldn’t practice all 100 each day.)
That said, there are clearly benefits to doing the whole deck as you recommend,. What I will probably do is work quickly toward filling out the deck by adding a few cards at a time as I get even cursorily familiar with the new added cards (instead of using my time to decide when to add new cards).
But this time, I’ll do them all. After having just read your post, I decided to name the last 28 cards. Now I’m going to go through the deck - this post will be edited when I finish. Exciting. Thanks again.
Edit: 1st attempt - 25 cards in 10:19. Spent almost 4 minutes looking at the 25th card, the 3 of clubs…eventually just looked it up, so am now starting over.
Edit: “Attempt 1.b” Finished deck in 15:30. Spent a hell of a lot of that time trying to remember what about 5 specific cards were supposed to mean. In three different places, I just imagined a 5 of hearts card, a nine of hearts card, and a 2 of diamonds card in the loci because I stared at them for so long that I just had to admit I wasn’t going to figure it out.
Memorizing the full deck was a hell of a lot of fun - the deck will have to stay full from now on.
New edit coming very soon.
My next attempt was over 6 minutes faster - 9:26.
However, I confounded the 9 of spades/clubs…so close!
Edit: On my next try, I reconstructed the deck without error. The time was 9:37!
The only reason it’s taking so long is that having just labelled half the deck, I keep staring at cards for a really long time not knowing what they stand for (like all beginners). What I mean is that I am not wasting much time reviewing because the characters and actions seem very sticky. Earlier in this thread, Nelson mentioned scrapping one of his suits in favor of more memorable people and actions, bringing his time from ‘good’ almost all the way to record-breaking. Must be very important.
Another reason it is going quickly for this first day is that I figured out a system that allows me to place certain configurations of card groups in about 3-5 seconds, though the typical 3-card configurations take me closer to 40 seconds on average to place. These special configurations occur 16.67% of the time, and I imagine that by the time I can do a deck in 3 minutes, they will place themselves instantly and automatically. By expanding that system, and putting in a lot of work, one could theoretically do away with PAO altogether, a little bit like what Ben did.
Hi DoubleHelix,
Well done on your progess! 
I think that we are probably on a similar level at the moment, with my best time for a full deck being 8:28 (Down from 8:58, just this morning).
Could you possibly elaborate further on “I figured out a system that allows me to place certain configurations of card groups in about 3-5 seconds”?
Thanks, Huggy.
Nice work shaving off half a minute!
I think I’m going to hone the specifics of this method in private for competition’s sake. I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned it on a forum among some of the world’s greatest, because I do believe that any person with any method could save time with it.
But you could make your own system in your own way, and I’m sure mine is not the best. What happens
is that I switch methods at any point where 2 cards of the three are the same value (same number). In short, I handle these situations without using my PAO characters or their actions, which is particularly fast because I don’t have to remember what any of the three cards “mean.”
Time to do my morning deck!
Edit: 9:26 with errors.
Then tried two more times, starting over both times because more than a minute had passed before I could form the first image. It’s frustrating, I just don’t know the cards. So I’ll be getting to know them today before attempting to memorize any more.
Edit: Spent a couple hours getting to know the 21 hardest cards. Bet I’ll break 8:30 this next try…
You guys aren’t going to believe this.
Tried two more times:
7:09 → errors
6:28 - perfect!
It felt much faster than that, though. Now I can really see just how impressive some of you are.
Wish me luck on the 5:00 mark tomorrow ( = later today)
Edit: Next attempt was successful at 6:23. This time, I used PAO loosely, fitting whatever I could most comfortably fit in a single locus. Some loci had 5 cards, and one had only 1.
Many congrats, DoubleHelix. With practice I’m sure your times will continue plummeting!
I just managed a 2:50 which I’m delighted with. Recall is so much easier and quicker when the memorisation time gets faster.
That makes sense, and it’s very encouraging. It takes me so long to recognize the cards that I try not to sit there and imagine the images much. As a result, I have to let my mind flicker back to the last one or 2 loci every time to keep from losing it. It’ll feel really good to set an image and just leave it there!
How long did it take you before breaking 3 minutes? I’ve made great progress these past few days but I can feel a plateau coming on.
Glad to hear it! I’ve been practising fairly regularly for the past month and I would estimate that my recognition of cards has improved 2-400%. This means that I’m pausing less, and able to move swiftly on to visualising my PAO image at the given loci.
I’d compare this to reading a book - when you lose your place often, and have to keep tracking back, you become a horribly inefficient reader, often losing a train of thought. However, when you move swifly and fluently through the lines of text, the meaning of the words can ‘flow’ into your brain in a more natural manner.
It took me a month of solid practice, but I’ve been able to memorise a deck for a year or so. When I first learned how to do it, I was taking around 8-10 minutes. With about a month of practice, I think I was close to 5.
Then I recently refocused on memory skills and set myself a goal of 3 minutes by Xmas. Keeping a log of my times had a huge impact on my motivation to practice. As they say, “What gets measured gets managed”. Here’s a link to a google doc version of the spreadsheet which I used to keep track of my progress versus my goal.
My tips re: plateaus are:
–Practice 2 decks in one session.
This time around, I had 2 18-stop journeys ready to go. My routine of practice is memorising 1 deck in 1 journey, then within a few minutes, doing a new deck using the second journey. The difference between the first and second decks was typically 30-40 seconds (better second time around). I attribute this to being more relaxed for the second attempt, since I already had a time ‘in the bank’ and could relax and just go for it. I also believe that the first attempt helped me to warm up, and made recognition of the cards much easier and faster.
–Take a break if you have to.
I recommend switching between taking a break or increasing intensity if you feel stale. If I felt like it was a chore, I’d stop and leave it alone for a while.
Best of luck with your practice, and congratulations on being able to do something fantastic!
This is good advice. Thanks.
And we’ll done DoubleHelix, keep it up!
6:08, but with 3 errors (49/52)…time gradually coming down!
Could anyone share what they do in order to ‘link’ images together with cards? This sounds extremely helpful but I don’t know how to do it.
Thanks
Going to be using only the red cards til I’m very, very comfortable with them. Really hate staring at a single card for more than ten seconds…Just set my new record of 1:30 for those 26, full deck record is unchanged.
Dang Huggy, that’s a lot faster.
My first system, I just memorised the associations by rote.
For my PAO, I used a palace to memorise 00-99, gave my cards ranges within there, and just dipped into the palace if an image didn’t jump out to me.
Hype - I see, actually I did that with my cards, making 13 spots from head to toe and putting 4 of each card # on them. For that last question, I think that some people “link” the pao’s from loci 1 to loci 2 to loci 3 while memorizing a deck, if that makes sense. One person mentioned something about having the characters talk to each other, but that doesn’t seem to help in my case. Any other ideas?
New deck time: 5:22
Update:
New record time: 4:42.5!
As I get lower times, I am consistently more and more amazed by those who are much faster. It felt like I glided straight through the deck that time!
Edit: I spent a lot of time remaking my 
& 
suits today. It dawned on me that I was using a lot of cognitive energy and time trying to create ways to make the images go together on the fly (how does one drive a puddle of spilled milk?), so now they all work together very well. Will keep ya posted; sorry for the hijack.
Hi DH,
I do know what you mean!!
There are times when I have trouble linking certain PAOs! I think that we sometimes get quicker times as a result of the cards being kind to us and making the links easier!
For example, I intergrated two pets into my system thinking it would make life easier with the way my cards run and to some extent it has, but occasionally I will come across something like, 10 Diamonds, (My mothers dog), 7 Clubs (Bench pressing) 3 Diamonds (Pint of Lager), which obviously becomes somewhat harder to envisage/recall. I may have to adjust this slightly in the future.
No improvement on 6:08 as yet, but I did get 6:28 with no errors…