Chester Santos, a 31 year old software engineer from San Francisco won the title of having the best memory in the United States when he recalled an entire deck of playing cards in just 2 min and 27 sec.
This feat he accomplished at the USA Memory Championships in NY that saw many other “mental athletes” battle for mental supremacy through seven rounds of competition in a Manhattan auditorium. Championship challenges included memorizing a long and previously unpublished poem, recalling the names of 99 people whose photos had been shown 15 minutes earlier and retaining a list of numbers 20 digits wide and 25 rows long.
"I'm in a good mood," Santos told Reuters after his win, in which he correctly recalled the 10 of diamonds to qualify for the World Memory Championships scheduled to take place later this year in Bahrain. He attributed his win to spending a few hours each night after work practicing his memory. Santos, who won the contest for the first time after five tries, said he matched a person, action and object with each of the 52 cards to help jog his memory.
"These people are not freaks, they are not nerds, they are people that have trained their brain," said event founder Tony Dottino.
