He started to realize that he could tell he had seen a particular shade of grass in South Africa and particular types of soil in Nigeria, though he couldn’t name either. “They laid the foundation of learning the poles, giving me the resources to learn everything,” he said.Īfter enough games though, Rainbolt started playing off instinct and “vibes.” “When you play the game so much, you get such an intuition and such a vibe of what certain regions of the world look like that things become very much second nature and a sixth sense,” he said. The resources were developed by the “pioneers of the GeoGuessr community,” which he speaks of the way modern NBA players speak of Magic Johnson. He also has memorized the probability of each company popping up in a given GeoGuessr round, though he says it’s not that helpful at the moment.

From early on, he played the game alongside various reference sheets that helped him differentiate, for example, telephone poles or the distinct characters in different languages.

While he isn’t the kind of person who naturally memorizes flashcards-”that sounds super boring to me,” he said-he’s realized he could benefit from the occasional bit of rote memorization as he’s gotten deeper into the game, like when he wanted to learn every street sign in Germany. By learning to identify a few distinct features-say, a telephone pole and a license plate-Rainbolt was able to quickly start whittling down the list of potential answers and guessing with increased confidence and speed.

View my house from the sky