Note: This page was updated August 22nd with new details for the MSO Championship.
It’s been a quiet few months in the world of mental calculation in most of the world, but it’s time for a few new updates!
Mind Sports Olympiad
It is now confirmed that the Mind Sports Olympiad will once again host the Mental Calculations World Championship at the event this August!
Qualification Round: Sunday 15 August (online test)
90+ participants completed in the qualification round, and 30+ are qualified for the semi-final. More details from the MSO.
*Updated* Live Semi Final: Sunday 22nd August: Results and Video Sampler are now available.
The semi-final will follow the same format as last year’s MSO and JMC-OC. Each question will be presented on the screen, and participants have 20 seconds to type the answer correctly.
The questions for each semi-final will be the same categories, difficulty and scores as these in the MSO 2021 Sample Questions.
The MSO team is also introducing additional measures to ensure a fair competition.
Live Final
The top 4 competitors will be invited to the grand final, with a new, surprise format to be announced later.
General Resources
If you’re interested in competing, you can do the following:
- Read more details about the schedule from the MSO official website.
- Warm up for competing by training your calculation skills!
- Subscribe to updates from the MSO (on their website) and/or World Mental Calculation (see below)
Good luck to everyone around the world competing!
Physical Mental Calculation Competitions
At the moment, there are no dates set for the next mental calculation events, but we hope that the following will take place:
- Mind Sports Olympiad: (general information)
- Mental Calculation World Cup: to be confirmed (general information)
- Memoriad: to be confirmed (general information)
- Junior Mental Calculation World Championship: provisionally May 2022 (general information) (details on official website)
I hope to see some of you at these events in 2022, if it is possible to travel and host them.
Spring Calculation Challenge
3 months ago, I announced a mini challenge for dividing by large numbers.
Congratulations to the fastest three confirmed calculators!
- Kaloyan Geshev: [3-digit divisors] beat the accuracy of the calculator in just under 60 seconds!
- Amrit Jana: [3-digit divisors] 8.2 points in under 30 seconds!
- Rahul Robin: [5-digit divisors] 10.9 and 7.3 points in under 60 seconds!
To learn the method for solving calculations like these, and to try to beat the scores of the three mental calculators above, here are the resources and the training tool.
Bulgaria’s Got Talent
Kaloyan Geshev, at just 10 years old, has recently won the final of Bulgaria’s Got Talent, writing a series of 5-digit numbers as the sum of squares in an average of less than 26 seconds per question!
To give an example of this:
28734 = 169² + 12² + 5² + 2²
Try to solve the following as a sum of at most 4 square numbers:
67413
Many congratulations to Kaloyan on his performance and victory, and for showing mental calculation in a positive way to the audience of Bulgaria!
You can watch his performance in the final here: