NHK's English-language sports show included a segment on
karuta recently. They use high-speed cameras and sound recording to measure how quickly a championship player can react to the reader's voice. For this task they employed the man who had been the Meijin for most of the 2000's. It certainly appears that he reacts to the inhalation and exhalation sounds of the reader before even a syllable of the poem is heard.
This video will probably be taken down soon, but for now you can watch this at
YouTube.
Edit: That video is indeed gone, but you can watch this one instead. It's a bit more elementary than the one I posted before, but it does also mention
Chihayafuru.
Japan crowned a new Queen in 2015, but only because the prior Queen chose to step down after holding the top spot for
ten years. She first won at age 15 in 2005.