Ep 49: Liam Bastick, Dean Schwab (September 13, 2012; originally aired October 7, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Disclaimer: While I have not seen this episode before, I did play through the blue book (episodes 1 to 50) around ten months ago when I was scheduled to be a contestant on the show.  Additionally, I did a quick flick through it a few months back to collect words for my posts about word validity.


It's Liam Bastick's first night as champion, and Richard comments that music is a large part of Liam's life.  Liam reveals that he owns twenty thousand CDs, which certainly seems like a lot to me.  Liam used to work for the BBC and acquired a good deal of promotional material as a result, which explains part of that.  His partner has suggested to him that he should sell the CDs and buy the house outright; I'm not sure how much second-hand CDs sell for these days, but that may be a rosy view of their worth.

Challenging Liam is Dean Schwab, a football umpire and insolvency specialist with a degree in accounting; Dean is hoping to becoming a chartered accountant by the end of the year.  He is also a keen coin collector, having done so for most of his life (his grandfather got him started).  His pride of collection is a penny from 1904.  (Australia did not have its own currency until 1910, and pennies not until 1911, so it is presumably a British penny.  Such a coin in mint condition might be worth as much as $150, or so a cursory search suggests to me.)


Dean fell victim to a phantom letter in the first letters round, and did not seem able to recover from that.  Liam steadily forged ahead in both facets of the game; Dean managed to get some ground back in the fourth round with a good word that he could easily have made better, but that was it for him.  Liam rounded out a good night by solving the conundrum fairly quickly for a comprehensive 60 to 7 victory.

I... yeesh, this hurts.  I had a reasonable game, really, but I was about five seconds too slow to make it into a fantastic one.  The opportunity was there to outdo both David and Lily in the same game, and not only that but to come out genuinely ahead in a head-to-head against them.  I missed the longer word, though, and an unlikely-to-be-repeated chance went begging.  I could still have salvaged a higher solo total by solving the conundrum, but it was too difficult for me, and what could have been great became merely good.