WMC Day 1 Recap

One down, two to go. All things considered, not a bad day. Unfortunately we won't have any results until tomorrow, so I can't say much for certain, but the three events all went decently well. I'm happy to say that I'm quite impressed with the venue. They've provided comfy desks for every competitor, plus I managed to snag my preferred spot (front row, about a quarter of the way in from the side). I didn't have any surprisingly great runs today, but thankfully I was able to hit my safe-ish targets in each. 

15m Names: Not exactly sure how many I encoded or recalled, but the initial rhythm felt pretty good and I was able to maintain a decent pace throughout. Unfortunately, there were some issues collecting/distributing papers, which left us with a 15+ minute gap between memorization and recall. That definitely hurt, others probably even more so than me, since I barely had time to jam names into short-term memory at the end anyway. Come recall though, many of those spelling nuances had definitely started to slip. 

30m Binary: After the names fiasco, this one felt like a welcome relief. I encoded 3900, just a hair under what I've been able to do in training. Luckily I had very few gaps in recall, most of which I was able to fill in, so we'll have to see how many encoding mistakes I made. 

60m Numbers: This felt pretty good too. I tried to stay relaxed and not too focused on speed, which I think helped since I was already pretty fried by this point. I ended up encoding 3360, less than I'd hoped for (since I know Marwin probably read all 3600), but all in all I'm satisfied with that. It's about as good as I could've hoped for. I had a fair number of gaps in the recall, but again I was able to patch most of them. I'm betting I made a handful of swapping errors, but we'll just have to wait and see.

On to Day 2!