The 2014 tournament
The ABA Journal, the magazine of the American Bar Association, reported on 20 May 2014 that a lawyer had won a memory tournament, and asked what the secrets of his success were. The event was the Extreme Memory Tournament, and the prize was $20,000.
The format is not the traditional memory championship of long, slow disciplines. The Extreme Memory Tournament is fast and head-to-head, run across five categories: names, cards, images, numbers and words. Competitors face each other directly, which makes it a spectator event in a sport that is otherwise silent rooms and stopwatches.
Twenty-one seconds
The figure attached to Reinhard is 21.19 seconds for a shuffled deck: fifty-two cards, in order, fixed in memory in the time it takes to read this sentence twice.
Times like that are achieved with a trained system rather than raw recall. Competitive memorisers convert cards, digits and names into images placed along a remembered route, then walk the route back. The skill being tested is speed of encoding, not the capacity of memory itself, which is why times keep falling as methods improve.
Winning it again in 2016
Reinhard won the Extreme Memory Tournament a second time in 2016, defeating E. Purevjav of Mongolia in the final. The UB Post, reporting from Ulaanbaatar on 30 June 2016, described him as the world's fifth-ranked memory athlete and a world champion from Germany, in an article otherwise devoted to Mongolian success at the same event.
That framing is worth keeping. Mongolia has produced a generation of elite memorisers, and a German lawyer taking the title in that company, twice, is the measure of where Reinhard sat in the sport.
A second career, not a first
The reason the ABA Journal covered him at all is that he is a working lawyer. Memory sport has no professional circuit and very little prize money outside a handful of events; competitors are doctors, students, engineers and, in this case, a lawyer.
The $20,000 from the 2014 tournament is the largest single sum documented here, and it is an outlier in the sport rather than a salary. What the discipline offers is a ranking, a record list and the occasional headline.
What is documented and what is not
Documented: the 2014 Extreme Memory Tournament win and its $20,000 prize; a card-memorisation record of 21.19 seconds; a second tournament win in 2016 over E. Purevjav of Mongolia; a world fifth ranking as described by The UB Post; and his profession as a lawyer in Germany.
Not documented here: his date of birth, his firm, his current ranking, whether the 21.19-second record still stands, and results after 2016. A German-language Wikipedia article on him exists according to the research notes for this page, but it is not among the sources used, and nothing here is drawn from it.
Watch: Simon Reinhard on camera
| Person | Country | Milestone | Age / Stat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simon Reinhard | Germany | Winning the Extreme Memory Tournament in 2014 and 2016 | Age 35 |
| Scott Hagwood | United States | Winning the USA Memory Championship four years running | — |
| Oyun-Erdene Tsengelbayar | Mongolia | Spoken-numbers gold at Memoriad 2024 | — |
| Tatiana Cooley-Marquardt | United States | Winning the USA Memory Championship three times | — |
| Wesley Twiggs | United States | Winning the 2025 USA Memory Championship | — |
What is documented — and what is not
✓ Documented
- Won the Extreme Memory Tournament and its $20,000 prize in 2014 (ABA Journal)
- Held the card-memorisation record at 21.19 seconds
- Won the tournament again in 2016, beating E. Purevjav in the final (The UB Post)
- Described by The UB Post as the world's fifth-ranked memory athlete
? Unverified, disputed or wrong
- Date of birth is not published in these sources
- Whether the 21.19-second card record still stands is not recorded
- No competitive results after 2016 appear in this file
Questions people ask about Simon Reinhard
Who is Simon Reinhard?
A German lawyer and competitive memoriser who won the Extreme Memory Tournament in 2014 and again in 2016.
How fast can he memorise a deck of cards?
He held the record at 21.19 seconds for a full shuffled deck.
How much did he win?
The 2014 Extreme Memory Tournament carried a $20,000 prize.
What disciplines does the tournament cover?
Five: names, cards, images, numbers and words, contested head to head.
How old is Simon Reinhard?
His date of birth is not published in these sources; the record used for this page gives his birth year as about 1979.
Is Simon Reinhard on Wikipedia?
A German-language article is noted in the research for this page, but it is not among the sources used here and nothing on this page is drawn from it.
Does he still compete?
No result after 2016 appears in the sources used here.
Quick quiz: how well do you know Simon’s story?
What is Simon Reinhard's day job?
How fast did he memorise a deck of cards?
Whom did he beat in the 2016 final?
Sources
- Lawyer wins memory tournament; what are the secrets of success? — ABA Journal, 2014-05-20
- Mongolia conquers Extreme Memory Tournament 2016 — The UB Post, 2016-06-30
Checked by the Geniuses.club editorial team. Ages are given as of September 2026.
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