Ep 424: Jane Taylor, Andrew Boyden (April 12, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


Jane is back for her second night, hoping to defend her carryover champion status.  Since her retirement she has done a certain amount of travelling; she (and her partner, presumably) took a caravan around Australia for eight months.  They started in Tasmania, and travelled anticlockwise around Australia, getting all the way up to Cape York and then westward and south once more.

Tonight's challenger is Andrew Boyden, who manages an international supply company.  Back in May last year -- almost a year ago now -- his wife Alicia appeared on Letters and Numbers also.  They compete keenly at home, as you might expect; Andrew says that they are running about fifty-fifty at the moment.

[Update: Andrew wrote a few posts about his experience with the show, although the last one never quite materialised.  Part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4; part 5; and the as-yet empty part 6.]


Jane gets off to a flying start with an unanswered full monty, and has the better of most of the letters rounds.  She oversteps once with an invalid word, but gets a commanding lead from those letters rounds nonetheless.  The numbers go a bit each way (in part due to her invalid declaration, which looks like an oversight), and she is twenty points ahead going into the conundrum.  Andrew buzzes in but his suggestion is invalid, and Jane ends up winning by 54 points to 34.

I had an exceptional game, and it should have been better; I threw away points on the second numbers round that were there for the taking.  The perils of wasting time on the wrong idea!  I only just got the conundrum solved within time, having wasted much of it ignoring the right fragment, but I did get there.  If not for that numbers slip-up, I would have tied David and Lily.  Still, it's always a good game when one gets a full monty!