Thirteen-year-old Arjun Kumar’s arms wavered beneath the weight of the world atlas as he posed for a photo.

Despite the size of the book, which was taller than his torso, his memory was bigger.

The Issaquah teen won first-place in the state geography bee last week, and now looks forward to a trip to Washington D.C. for the national competition.

A bright kid, his success didn’t come at the hands of training, tutors or even teachers. He spends more time shooting hoops than memorizing country flags.

For Kumar, it’s pure interest.

As a young boy, he went through memorizing phases. First it was trains, then raptors and WWII naval ships.

“I always like memorizing anything,” he said.

His interest fell on the Lord of the Rings, a series of four fantasy novels.

“I actually went into the geography of Middle Earth,” Kumar said about the books.

After Kumar began drawing maps of the fantasy world, his father Arun decided to help redirect his interest to something less finite and more useful.

Kumar rekindled his interest in geography, a subject he had first taken interest in as a 3-year-old.

“Everyone has their thing, geography is mine,” Kumar said.

While he couldn’t pinpoint a reason for the interest, he likes the political and demographic aspects the best.

“It’s more social science than where is this river,” Arun said. “With geography, there is no boundary.”

Albeit a young genius, a success story from the Issaquah School District’s highly capable MERLIN program, there isn’t pressure for Kumar to be anything but a teen.

“He’s a regular kid,” Arun said. “He just happens to like geography.”

Kumar entered the contest with his classmates at Beaver Lake Middle School. After winning the school competition, he took a test to qualify for state.

“I think we were more confident than he was that he’d win,” Arun said.

Kumar’s only preparation for the bee was to go through National Geographic quizzes, and to read up on subjects on Wikipedia.org.

“Not all of it’s viable,” he said of the website, “but most people won’t vandalize a page about some random river out there.”

He was surprised to find whole categories he hadn’t studied, such as tunnels and Native American countries, but that’s the nature of the broad subject.

The teen worked his way into the final rounds, where students are eliminated after answering two questions wrong.

He got one question wrong, the former capital of Morocco.

The winning question was what country’s GDP was second largest until it was surpassed by China in 2010? The answer was Japan.

When asked where in the world he’d like to see most, he hesitated and answered the Galápagos Islands, the grand prize for winning the national bee May 25.