Ep 75: Dom Saric, Damian Foong (October 19, 2012; originally aired November 12, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Tonight is the crucial fourth night for Dom Saric.  Can he win and get a likely finals spot?  We'll find out soon, but first Richard points out that English was not Dom's first language.  Dom agrees, adding that he was born in Croatia, and so his first language was Croatian.  When he first went to primary school here in Australia he attended English as a second language classes for two years; somehow he ended up loving the language and even took four units of English for the HSC.

Tonight's challenger is Damian Foong, a public servant with a degree in biomedical science and a diploma in languages.  Damian spent three years living and working in rural Japan; that was as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, an initiative of the Japanese government.  While in Japan he worked as an assistant language teacher in government schools in Ibaraki prefecture.  He adds that even though it was quite close to Tokyo he had rice paddies all around his apartment -- it was very, very rural.  The nearest train station was two cities away!  Damian looks at it all positively, saying that he got the benefits of living in the countryside in terms of developing a greater understanding of Japanese culture and language than he may have done in the city.


Damian had the frequent first-game problem of a phantom letter in the first round, and then Dom won the next two rounds to build a good-sized lead.  Another good word from Dom in the fifth round extended the lead further, but Damian managed to peg back that lost ground in the next numbers round.  Damian needed to solve the last numbers round to have a chance but he was not able to make anything of it; Dom solved the conundrum to make the margin even more impressive, finishing with a 45 to 16 victory.

I was doing fairly well up until the last numbers round; I had dropped one maximum, it turns out, but David had also missed it.  But a miscalculation in that round left me scrambling and I was not able to get to the target within time -- a rather disappointing miss.  My conundrum speed was a bit slower than I wanted but got the job done, pushing the score up to the seventy mark again.