Ep 435: Simon Walton, Neil Croft (April 27, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


On Simon's third night we find out that he also teaches for Open Access College.  As he explains, this is a distance education school in South Australia.  The teaching happens both over the phone and online; he notes the difficulties in trying to explain some of the spatial mathematics over the phone, which is one reason for the increased use of online materials.

Tonight's challenger is Neil Croft, an I.T. manager and sports enthusiast.  Neil is particularly interested in the Melbourne Cup; he does not bet on it, but has (as he puts it) a predilection for learning the winners of the race.  For some reason a few years back he attempted to learn them, and has persisted in that.  Richard puts him to the test starting at 1960; Neil rattles off eight of them before they bring it to a stop.


Simon continued his impressive word lengths with sevens and eights the order of the day; one of them turned out to be invalid (the drawbacks of having a Scrabble vocabulary) but the rest were good.  Neil matched him with a seven at first but was limited to six-letter words in the remaining rounds; however, Neil picked up some handy points on the numbers and was just two points behind going into the conundrum.  Had Neil solved the final numbers round he would have been a point ahead at the conundrum, in fact.  Simon managed to solve the conundrum first, a little over ten seconds in, to escape with his third victory by a margin of 49 to 37.

I did not feel that I was hitting any high notes today, and investigations afterwards showed that I had only managed one maximum on the letters.  I was never going to find those other four maximums, as it turns out, but I should have managed to go one better that I did in the fourth round.  I managed to do as well as was possible in the numbers, and solved the conundrum relatively quickly, so I really only made the one mistake this game.  It ended up being a comfortable win again, to round off the best week of playing I have had.