A new system takes a while to set up - so I wonder, how much do you feel you owe your speed to using an upgraded system? Had you merely spent all of that time practicing PAO, or whatever system you first used, do you think you could be as fast as you are now with equal time spent?
Welcome to the forums
I’m not sure if I got the question right it’s true the first years I only practiced with a 1Card-1image system. I reached times between 35-40s with that. So I already had a good basic speed.
After switching to the new system it tooks me a while to beat my PB, maybe some month. But I was very familiar with the images cause I use almost the same like in my 1000 images system for numbers.
Johannes,
I think about Boris being so fast with his simple system, and I wonder if he had practiced with a 2-card system for the past decade, if he would be even faster than he is today. Of course I’m not asking you to speculate about Boris - just wondering your position on the debate of all systems being potentially equal if given an Equal amount of time practicing them (over some years).
I don’t even have 000-999 images yet, so I have been hesitant about setting up a 2 card system because it will set me back for a while. Now that I see it can be done with half of the images, I’ll get started next month after the
Competition.
Edit: I just noticed you won this year, congratulations! Must be fun to personally know the only people in the world who can give you a run for your money. I think ten years from now that list won’t be so short …
Ok - changed five cards total and they’re really slowing me down! So to learn them better, I’ve slowed down, and decided to start doing two decks at a time since Im going slowler anyway. I’m measuring success based on how many loci I can recall completely and with perfect certainty. So far my ‘best’ was 2:36, only perfectly recalling 23 loci. When i did it in 3 minutes, purposely going slower, I remembered the exact same amount. Obviously need more work on making stickier images.
Maybe if you would have an infinite time for training all the systems would be equal at the end, but this is really hard to say. If it tooks you 10 years to get a time of 25s with a single card system, how long would it take to get 12,5s with a 2card system? This is really theoretical because of the huge difference between those systems. I think that with a one card system, after a lot of training, you just know the image for each card. You don’t have to translate using some kind of code anymore…but is this really possible with a 2 card system? It’s much harder to “see” the image for a two card system immediately without using the code, since there are so much combinations. But the biggest difficulty is that those combinations look not different enough! For a one card system your brain says: Black-Spade-8 …ok there is the image…for 2cards it is Black-Spade-8-Red-Diamont-King and that makes it much more difficult to separate one combination from another…they just look to similar.
Maybe this is also just a matter of time…but it is really hard to guess how long would that take.
I had thought about that. It really took some time to get the 52 cards to be automatic - some still aren’t for me - but if I am not mistaken, barring the many obscure words that comprise the last 1%, ~99% of Mandarin vocabulary is represented in over 3000 individual, unique characters, and Americans know some 2500+ words on average…so, if the same goes for the Chinese, that’s a hell of a lot of people who fluently command ~2702 abstract symbols. I suppose mastering a 2-card system, as far as immediate recognition, would be about as difficult as learning the vast majority of Chinese vocabulary. But I wouldn’t know.
Anyone here ever heard of a 2card PAO? There are ways to create that many actions, e.g., left vs. right handed, etc. Unfortunately it looks like one would have to use all 2702 in order to pull it off. Even a 999-999-999 PAO system is ambitious…
I am still struggling to find the last 10 associations for my 0-99 PAO system (Dominic)!!!
How on earth do you go about assigning 2702 images to numbers?? 
And further still, how do you memorise them? hardcore revision or daily use? as I assume that you cannot use them all that often!
Are your “last ten” all in a group? If so, just choose a different letter, or have you tried breaking the rules in some other way, so you don’t get stuck with subpar images? i promise after just a small amount of practice you’ll remember them just as well…Digits are so much fun, I hope your get to start soon.
Well, I’ve been memorizing poetry and I think Im pretty good at it! With practice, this will be my strongest category I bet. And just got back from the bookstore w a 1987 yearbook that belonged to “Tracy” :). Slow and steady wins the race - if I had ony worked on names and faces for 15 mins a day these past 2 months… 
might not progress much in the two and a half weeks I have left, and I suck.
Covered welding sunglasses in tape, colored black with sharpie. Heated a knife on the stove and melted slits after marking the exact spots (pulling up and down. While hot to widen the vertical dimension, then used more tape to narrow. The horizontal. They leave a perfect “binocularesque” hole. Use mild white noise (free app) through noise cancelling earbuds beneath hunting earmuffs. Could sit by the highway.
Can’t say the goggles help, but the noise deprivation makes adding sound easy, which really does help recall. Having trouble with IMg upload, but will share later. Made a 51 card deck from three decks repeating 17 problem children, and will work with just this for a while.
Edit: The cards are different this morning. My times are about to fall.
Edit: today, I’ve been stopping the clock at 0:50 on average with little variance. So far, I’ve been missing 2 or 3 loci each time - the images that are there are complete but the missing ones have been completely absent from memory. So this isn’t necessarily improvement but it is an intimation.
Hey guys,
I’m back from holiday and ready to dive under that minute. I haven’t had a lot of practise as of late and I see that DH is becoming a serious rival. I have clocked under the minute only twice and got about 8 errors each time so that’s not too bad.
There’s something I noticed, though. If I go that fast, there’s no need to chance journeys. I can stick with the same one for about 5 or 6 times recalling. After that, I often have a very very fast one (that’s often the one that I will recall a couple of times in my head) so then I have to change to the next one.
I’ve been busy building a giant journey (more then 1000 loci) so that I can memorise Medea (Greek tragedy) and so far I have 330 lines down (I need to reach 825 before friday because of a Greek exam).
So, I’m going back to the cards and I’ve been working on memorising poetry as well.
DH: What app? What’s the name of the app and is there one for the iPod 4g.
Hannes: The strange part about this forum (and about the whole memory world) is that you can just talk to the world champion. I have a question: would you go as far as to say that you have the best memory in the world or just the fastest?
Also, do you use memory techniques only for championships? or also in daily life situations (learning languages counts as daily life though).
I would love to see him say he has the best memory in the world, haha!! The “Big Boys” are all so humble.
Well Wessels, the app is called relax melodies, and though I haven’t been putting second decks together, I’m very comfortable saying I’ve “broken 1:00” several times, since only one or two loci were missing from the review stage a dozen or more times. I am more concerned with “perfect review” (which i never get at full speed) now that I am officially signed up for USMC, (but I usually hit the clock about 0:50 and miss 2 or 3 loci in review) because I know I’ll have to recite decks verbally, if Im fortunate enough to make it to the top 3. In competition, I’ll be taking the events nice and slow at first to ensure a place in the top 8 ( 90 second deck, 120 digits in 5 mins). Nelson’s competing so I have no reason to shoot for the record and crash and burn. then Ill turning on the full thrust, where I will surely be making errors and hopefully get lucky, being called on at the right times. Using poetry from the Internet, I score in the “150-200” range, and my names and faces are just awful…just awful. Those are the four qualifying events. So my next 2 weeks are dedicated to N&F, then I’ll start putting second decks together so I can continue competing against you fairly - which has been a blast, by the way!!
Edit/ for example, I just did a 15 minute N&F, and recalled 18!
Good Luck with your massive journey. I currently use 2 paths of 52, 4 paths of 34, and 1 path of 17.
Actually I forgot my gloves somewhere a few days ago :D… For the moment I would say I’m one of the best competitors in memory sports, cause it is always really close at the top and you always need a little bit luck…but I’m far from saying I have the best memory. Actually my memory is not better then the average. I just trained the techniques very hard and I’m very good in using them in those special disciplines, but also in daily life. I think my basis to be good using the techniques for learning is my practical experience in the field of memory sports. And I feel that’s the way of improving the daily memory skills: using the sport to train the techniques.
Hi Huggy,
The 2702 figure is the number of card combinations when memorising 2 cards at the same time i.e. using the BEN system. You would only need to use 000-999 for numbers - so a thousand images for numbers.
Hi Jimbo,
Thanks for your response.
Even so, 1000 images sounds like a huge amount to memorise! I will have to look into this Ben system as I still cannot find corresponding initials for my last 12 numbers via the Dominic system.
New Times -
Perfect recall - 1:22 (Old 1:43)
With errors - 1:11 (Old 1:29)
Wow. It’s nice to see you still practising. Your scores have destroyed my PB now! Well done. 
Hey Hype,
Thank you. Yes, still practicing, although thinking about changing one or two characters that are less effective with the aim of beating the 1 min barrier.
What is your PB?
Mine was 1:57, but I’ve fallen down to 3-4 minutes since I only use it for party tricks nowadays! I hope to get back into it soon.
Hype,
I am yet to do this in front of friends, but out of curiousity, how did you find that?
In an ideal world I assume you would want to be able to get to the stage of perfect recall every time when doing it as a party trick or it kind of negates the whole point in memorising a ‘deck’?
Obviously you would have gone slower as you wouldn’t have been racing the clock, but I’d imagine you might still get blanks when doing it under pressure?
[QUOTE=Huggy]Hype,
I am yet to do this in front of friends, but out of curiousity, how did you find that?
In an ideal world I assume you would want to be able to get to the stage of perfect recall every time when doing it as a party trick or it kind of negates the whole point in memorising a ‘deck’?
Obviously you would have gone slower as you wouldn’t have been racing the clock, but I’d imagine you might still get blanks when doing it under pressure?[/QUOTE]
I don’t feel too pressured. Since I’m not fast enough to do it quickly, and it’d be pretty boring to make them sit around in silence and wait for me to finish it, I’ll go through the deck of cards while in conversation. This does slow you down, of course, but 5 minutes seems like no time to people when you’re having a good chinwag. Part of a good trick is entertaining the other person, and since the actual memorisation stage is pretty boring, learning to memorise while talking makes for a pretty awesome skill - and it’s pretty likely it’s not going to be the 2 of you; they’ll have other people to talk to at the same time; other people to make jokes about how focussed you look; or to laugh that they’ll give you £20 if you can actually do it because it seems so unreal to them, etc.
There are occasions where I’ll forget a card or 2 - but I have a handy trick for that. I just scan through all my images for cards in my head and if one just jumps out to me, I know that’s the right card. People recognise that it’s not super simple, and it doesn’t take long to scan - just a quick look and a “give me a second.” Besides, people will still be impressed even if you forget one card.
There’s lots of really simple ways you can use it as a trick: you can straight up recall the entire deck of cards, which is very impressive to people; you can ask them to cut the deck at a random point (and get them to show you the bottom card) and you can tell them what the next card is, what the 7th card from now is, what card came before - this is pretty mystifying; the “forwards-and-backwards” and “random access” ability of the method of loci awes people.
You can ask them to take out a random card (or more than one), and you can fan them out and see what’s missing. Alternatively you can ask them to put them back in the deck, fan them out, and see what cards aren’t in the right place.
You can ask them to cut the deck and show you the bottom card; then put the cut on the bottom of the deck. You can ask them to cut like this a few times (if you can handle it) and then recite the cut order. This takes a bit of athletics, but just involves you splitting your journey up into sections, and changing the order of the sections (I prefer to just number them mentally than physically change their spatial orientation - that’s way too hard for me!)
You can pre-memorise a deck if you’re going to be playing card games; make sure you deal, and then you can tell everyone what their hand is. Loads of little tricks you can do!
The important thing is if you fail (like with the multiple cuts trick) to take it graciously - like a champ. People will just have a laugh about it is all.
That is great. Thanks! 
As mentioned, I havn’t done it in front of anyone as yet. Although I did plan to once I felt comfortable that I could do it flawlessly every time without error…if such a time ever comes! 
I too scan through the cards quite quickly when I get blanks, although they are much harder to retrieve when memorising for time.
I am now at the point where 2 minutes (which seemed ultra rapid a month ago) is a comfortable speed for me, so memorising whilst chatting with friends would hopefully provide further time to solidify images. That said, I often find that taking more time can often makes images less sticky - If that makes sense?..go figure!
Either way, as long as too much alcohol isn’t consumed, I assume I wouldn’t have too many problems!!
Hi Everyone,
I’m pretty new here but really enjoying developing my memory techniques. Man those times are amazing, I’m at about 7 and a half minutes, I recently moved from P to PO and found it a big help. I’m doing it through memrise.com but maybe I should just use real cards.
Anyone have any tips, my goal is to eventually get it down to sub 2 minutes. I only have 2 journeys at the moment (well one Journey of 60 loci which I can split in two).
I also have a 100 word peg system set up which is very well practised. Does anyone use a peg system instead of a Journey?
always enjoy reading the posts here,
regards,
Sea.