Ep 422: Mathew Thomas, Steve Malcolm (April 10, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


Mathew returns after thwarting Ben's attempt to become a retiring champion last night.  Mathew grew up in New Zealand, and occasionally he does a hāngi at the local primary school.  This involves cooking the food in the ground using hot rocks; there is a big fire that goes along with that, but it does not last too long.  He usually does this in winter so that he does not get in any trouble with the fire brigade.

Tonight's challenger is I.T. manager Steve Malcolm.  He has travelled in Africa recently, and in particular ended up working in Zimbabwe for Outward Bound.  As he explains, Outward Bound is about using outdoor activities such as abseiling, rock climbing, and raft building to try and teach people life skills like teamwork and independence.

Steve also visited South Africa, where he rode an ostrich.  He describes it as "a bit like sitting on a big crazy chicken".  That pretty much conforms to expectations.


It was a close game; both managed to win a letters round, but Steve gained an early lead due to the first numbers round.  A later invalid word from him gave Mathew a good chance at recovery, but Mathew returned the favour with a transcription error on his last numbers round.  Either way it was coming down to the conundrum, but that error was the difference between Mathew being ahead or behind going into it.  Steve buzzed in after eight seconds... but his answer was invalid.  Mathew had the rest of the time to try and solve it but was unable to, and that let Steve scrape home, 34 to 25.

Once again I had two poor rounds today, which could be very costly.  The first was failing to spot a seven-letter word, which in retrospect was perhaps not as bad as it felt at the time; the second, however, was a complete meltdown on the second numbers round resulting in nothing to declare at all.  Another letters round I almost made a mess of and was very lucky that my risky recovery attempt paid off.  Against that, I had optimal results in all the other main rounds, including another risky word in the final letters round, and a four second conundrum solve.  A comfortable win despite some rocky play.

Ep 421: Ben Fisher, Mathew Thomas (April 9, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


Win or lose, this is Ben's last night for a while.  Richard notes that Ben has solved the last four conundrums, and has done a lot of tweakage in his numbers rounds.  Ben says that when he first started watching the show he could never get the numbers, but Lily's tutelage has managed to teach him tweaking.  Lily is pleased by that, as you would expect.

Tonight's challenger is Mathew Thomas, a taxi driver and teacher.  The teaching that he does is English as a second language; he calls it "survival English", enough to allow the students to catch trams, fill in forms... to do the everyday things that native English speakers here might take for granted.


Ben gets off to a poor start, with an invalid word in the first round.  He somehow ends up with nothing to declare in the first numbers round, and when Mathew finds a good word to outscore him in the next round, Ben is 18 points adrift.  That possibly pushes him into trying for too much, and his next round is also invalid; he gets some back in the next two rounds but still needs to outpoint Mathew in the final numbers round to have a chance.  He makes an error in the accounting, though, and Mathew is safe going into the conundrum.  It proves to be too tough for both contestants, and Mathew takes the win, 32 to 21.

I had a decent game, but could not find the high notes.  Rounds two and three were the disappointing ones where I should definitely have done better.  Once more I was slow on the conundrum, but at least it was closer this time -- just over forty seconds, as it turns out.  It was all enough for a comfortable win, but still plenty of room for improvement.