Monday 13 July 2015

Charity Letters and Numbers event

This is mostly a placeholder for participants to comment on their experience at the recent charity letters and numbers event.  Alternatively, if anyone wants to email me a post I'm happy to put up a guest post on their behalf.

I gather that Anand was deemed the victor.  Congratulations, Anand!

5 comments:

Anand said...

Hi Geoff and Mike:

It was certainly a very enjoyable event with some high-quality games all around. The final turned out to be an all-Scrabbler affair between Trevor Halsall and myself and despite a poor start with two disallowed words, I was luckily able to pull it back with BASILECT (to Trevor's ELASTIC) and take the win 59-54 on the crucial conundrum AFORESAID. The highlight game was a thriller between Tamara and Anthony in the quarterfinals. Tamara started with an unanswered nine (PRACTICED), but Anthony came back to take an eight-point lead before the conundrum, PIONEERED, which Tamara solved in 29.5 secs. I will put up some highlights of other games when I can collate the piles of paper that I have now! Just for the record, the scores were:
QFs:
#1 Sam Gaffney d. #8 Rob York (wildcard) - 51-36
#7 Anand Bharadwaj d. #2 Naween Fernando - 63-56
#6 Trevor Halsall d. #3 Jeremy Schiftan - 45-30
#4 Tamara McMahon d. #5 Anthony Kendall - 40-38

SFs:
#6 Trevor Halsall d. #1 Sam Gaffney - 64-43
#7 Anand Bharadwaj d. #4 Tamara McMahon - 51-30

GF:
#7 Anand Bharadwaj d. #6 Trevor Halsall - 59-54

Thanks Geoff for your help with the software.

Cheers,
Anand

Mike Backhouse said...

Hi Anand

Thanks for the update. It sounds like it was great and exciting play. I look forward to your foreshadowed other highlights. And congratulations to you (who I'd not heard of before this event). You did really well to win against all that talent. I'd love to see you play a few games on this site.

Did David Astle mention anything about the show coming back at some stage in the future? Did anyone video it? I'm sure SBS would have no problem with a charity event being on youtube.

Sam G said...

I think Trevor Halsall is going to send through details of each round, so I'll hold off from any spoilers until then (beyond Anand's post).

Geoff Bailey said...

I think the personal impressions are always worth having. I hope you all had a wonderful time there!

Sam G said...

I'll just give a quick round-up of my two games, to try to avoid too many round reveals in case they get posted here for people to play.

Rob & I shared points on four letter rounds, I got a good 8 in the other. There was a nine I had been exposed to before that was eventually found by an audience member - not a common word, but reasonably high probability.

In the numbers, I got 10 on Rob on my heavyweight mix {435,8,9}, then 7 with a one-away, and then he clawed 10 back in the last numbers, when I got stuck one away on a dead end.

Neither of us got the conundrum, a couple of audience members did. I thought it was relatively hard.

I didn't get much of a chance to beat Trevor. We'd have to check, but it's possible that only one aggressive word declaration from him prevented a perfect game. The numbers were straightforward and went 30-30. He solved the conundrum in the first few seconds; I thought it was a tough one again, and I'm not sure I would have gotten it within the full 30 seconds.

We each made a misjudgement in the letter rounds: Trevor tried the invalid CORONEAL (giving me 7 for CORNEAL); later, I rejected the valid CURATION (which he declared). I haven't been kicking myself too much (having lost by 21 points), but it is my biggest round regret from the day.

Another round saw my PLAIDS against Trevor's APHIDS. I did get frustrated by two diabolical mixes where my four-letter words were defeated by Trevor's well-found fives. I had been practising on friendlier mixes, so my sevens/eights/nines were respectable, but I was no match for a Scrabble expert on fives.

The non-L&N players, Trevor and Anand, were both very impressive on the day, certainly worthy grand finalists. Anand suffered from a couple of overly aggressive declarations, but nailed two conundrums.

A few of us noted how much harder it was as a contestant in the number rounds compared to watching from the audience. Anthony, Anand and myself all missed gettable targets when playing, but nailed most of them when mere observers. Letter and conundrum performance didn't seem to suffer as much.