I’M sure, at some point of your life, you may have been in a sabungan (cockfight) either as an active participant or a benchwarmer, hoping against hope to get a balato (goodwill money) from the winners. If that’s the case, you should have noticed a kristo (bookie) with his super memory. A so-called kristo is known by that name because of his outstretched hands when he solicits bets during a fight. What’s startling here is he can memorize all the bets and their bettors, using only hand signals.
Filipino priest Leonardo Mercado calls such talent as “phenomenal” in his book The Filipino Mind (1994). The kristo “remembers all the bettors and their corresponding bets coming from all directions without the benefit of jotting them down,” which is too tedious, if not a time waster.