Ep 365: Maurie Williams, Raluca Dorobantu (January 20, 2012)

The chat with Maurie tonight is essentially just a comment about him playing against his son in the previous game.  So far, all we've really heard about him is that he likes fishing; surely that's not the extent of things?

Challenging Maurie is Raluca Dorobantu, described simply as a student.  She speaks several languages: Romanian (her native language), English, French, and she's studying Spanish at the moment.


It's an unusual performance from both contestants, with only five- or six-letter words being found in some reasonably cooperative mixes.  Maurie has just slightly the better of it -- I can't help but wonder how difficult it is for Raluca to play this game in a non-native language, particularly with three others to ignore at the same time -- and neither shows convincing form in the numbers but again Maurie comes out ahead.  That gives him an unbeatable lead going into the conundrum, and with neither solving it the final scoreline is 46 to 27 in his favour.

I had a great letters performance today, including finding a full monty that David missed.  My numbers performance let me down, however, as I ended up quite far from the target in one round and missed an easy minor adjustment in another; in both cases a little more time would have improved matters markedly -- I was just too slow, alas.  Still, the power of a full monty is large, and gave me my third (and largest) win over the David + Lily combination (in solo scoring, that is).

As usual, details after the jump.