Ep 442: Rob Fischer, Paul Bishard (May 8, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


It's the almost-obligatory fourth-night question about strategy for Rob.  It really does make me wonder whether people provide the requested six interesting points of information about themselves; we seem to run out of talking points fairly quickly.  On the other hand, maybe I'm just bitter because I did not last long enough to get to my Dalek impression.  Anyway, back to Rob; apparently he looks for affixes on the letter rounds, and tweakage on the numbers.  That's not really a surprise.

Challenging Rob tonight is wine manager Paul Bishard.  Paul is principally responsible for arranging all the wines in a particular store, as well as driving the core wine sales through the outlet.  He has been working with wine for seventeen years; he remarks that it has been quite fun and -- without a pun intended -- fruitful.


It proved to be a very close game tonight, and I'd have to say that Rob did not show those flashes of excellence that we have seen on previous nights.  Paul got off to an early lead with a great word, and extended it in the first numbers round as Rob's weakness there was exposed.  Rob hung in there, though, relentlessly clawing back the lost ground in the letters rounds where Paul was often just a letter short of where he needed to be.  The final two numbers rounds proved to be far too easy and that was Paul's advantage gone -- I can certainly sympathise there.  Rob took a slender one-point lead into the conundrum, but solved it first in any case to get the win, 56 to 45.

I was in much better form tonight, with only one round thwarting my optimal game aspirations.  A couple of risky plays came off -- including the full monty -- and I wrapped it up with a quick solution to the conundrum and an emphatic win.