Ep 21: Kashi Ross, Erez Gordon (August 6, 2012; originally aired August 30, 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.


There are two new contestants tonight due to Andrew Fisher's successful retirement on Friday.  Taking the champion's position is Kashi Ross, a teacher who has recently been playing competitive Scrabble around Australia.  Kashi has also played over twenty-three thousand online games of Scrabble over the last five years.  As Richard points out, that is an average of over twelve games a day which sounds like an enormous time investment.  Kashi clarifies that the vast majority of the games she plays are fast ones where each side has only three minutes to play, so it is only a bit over an hour per day.

In the challenger's position is Erez Gordon, a hospitality consultant who won The Age Good Food Guide's Service Excellence Award a few years ago.  (That was in 2002, in recognition of his performance as Maitre d'Hotel of Jacques Reymond.)  Erez loves good food and wine, and travelling the globe to find it.  Richard asks if the food options determine where Erez travels, and Erez agrees that they play a major role but often it is simply about places where you have not been before.  He notes that when he went to the Bahamas he was disappointed to find that they had no regional cuisine at all; the locale more than made up for it, though.


Kashi got off to an early lead in the first round, although neither contestant used the retsina mix to best advantage.  She extended that lead in the first numbers round, and the contestants were essentially matched for the rest of the main rounds.  Neither managed to score in the last two rounds, with the conundrum feeling somewhat difficult, and Kashi won 48 to 31.

I had a reasonable game, but missed three of the best letters results.  The first was a bit careless, but the other two were words I was always going to struggle to see.  Against that, I very nearly tied with the David and Lily combination when David had a mental bobble of his own, being two letters off best on one round.  It just goes to show how it can happen to anyone!