But I climbed the pyramid fast, promoted five weeks straight. I'd study in the morning and use a second window — 4:30 to 5pm, right before I picked up my kids — to play a few duels. I never played weekends. With kids, that wasn't an option.
I had a good system. After every duel, I'd examine my guesses and check Plonkit.net — a community-built site with country-specific guides — to see if I'd missed a clue.
Here's one miss. I guessed Czechia. The correct answer was Denmark. Scroll through and see if you can spot the four clues that gave it away — the same ones I missed in real time.
B-type guardrails. Denmark is one of just eight European countries using this design — the GeoGuessr community nicknamed it "B-type."
The bollard. White post, yellow reflector, orange stripe. This exact combination exists nowhere else on Earth.
Little white squares. The outer lane line is often made of small dashes rather than a solid stripe. It varies by region and isn't exclusive to Denmark — but it's a solid supporting clue.
Yellow plates, but only on trucks. The UK, Netherlands, and Luxembourg put yellow plates on private cars. Denmark flips it: private cars get white, commercial vehicles get yellow.
I built a Keynote where I'd paste in screenshots of my misses, each one next to a note to myself. Here's the section for Denmark — the first slide is that exact Czech-Denmark miss.
Five slides to get fluent on one country. Denmark was one of dozens.
The Keynote this lives in runs to 1,325 slides. I couldn't zoom out far enough in Keynote itself to capture it in one shot, so here it is stitched together — keep scrolling and watch the five Denmark slides you just saw shrink to a speck.
The five slides you just scrolled through, highlighted here — slides 29 through 33.
I did this for every country in Europe — down to ones as small as Iceland, three slides' worth.
And Bulgaria. And every other country in between.
1,325 slides. Europe was one region. I organized the rest of the world the same way.
Asia alone ran longer than most other regions combined.
Some countries were so distinct, region by region, that they earned their own dedicated section — Indonesia included.
If you like geography and organizing useless information, you get good fast. And somewhere in there, I started loving the learning itself. I could tell Lithuanian utility poles from Latvian ones. A French bollard from a German one. A Paraná palm — native to Brazil's Santa Catarina — from a Belém palm, a thousand miles north.
That's about when my wife looked at me and asked, "So is GeoGuessr your personality now?"
Yes, it was.
When you have young kids, you need something — a hobby, a thing — that, unlike parenting, you can master. GeoGuessr gave me that: memorize European electrical poles, climb the pyramid, repeat.
That was the whole formula. And on September 23rd, 2024, I got promoted to Master I, the second-highest division. It had taken fourteen weeks to get there.
Reaching the top division, Champion, felt impossible initially. But I was in too deep to want anything else. It would feel like the most rewarding thing I'd done in years, even though nobody but my wife would know what it meant.
In my push to reach Champion I noticed something about how memory works.
You don't retain information through repeated exposure. You retain it by being tested on it right as you're about to forget it. My routine had become a naturally occurring version of spaced repetition, a term I only learned later.