Ep 430: Mark Potter, Susan Morrison (April 20, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


This is Mark's third night, and Richard drops some hints about his Scrabble ability.  Mark explains that he grew up in a large family and playing board games was one of their major recreational activities; Scrabble in particular was a family favourite.  Then a couple of decades back Mark noticed that there was a Scrabble championship as part of the Moomba festival.  He entered it, and ended up coming second in his group.  He was pretty thrilled with that, and it is a fine result for his first tournament.

Challenging Mark tonight is Susan Morrison, a wedding celebrant.  Richard asks what the highlights of such an occupation are.  Susan says that she has only been doing it for the last few years, but it is always a lot of fun.  She makes particular mention of surprise weddings, where the guests may be unaware that a wedding is about to take place.  (The soon-to-be-married couple know, of course!)


Both contestants had some good finds in the letters and some gains for each, but Mark had the better of it.  The numbers proved the real difference, however, as Susan's last two attempts were invalid; had her declarations been correct then that would have been a relative gain of 27 points to her, which is obviously huge.  Mark also outpointed her on the first numbers round, and by the time they reached the conundrum he was 30 points ahead.  It proved to be difficult and neither solved it, so Mark retained that margin in a 51 to 21 victory.

I had mostly good results tonight, but should have done better in round four.  Round three broke my streak of best numbers results, but aside from those two rounds I picked up all that I could.  I managed to see the right solution to the conundrum fairly early, and although I could have done better I've certainly avoided the poor Friday games of the last couple of weeks.