Ep 326: Geoff Bailey, Tim Clay (November 28, 2011)

Rounds: Here.

Disclaimer: I was a contestant on this episode.  Obviously there are some parts I will remember strongly and my scoreline cannot remotely be considered a fair representation.  I'll frequently refer to my past self in the third person, to avoid having to clarify all the time whether I mean my current or past performance.


On my second night it is revealed that I represented Australia in the 1988 IMO, in the bicentennial year when Canberra hosted it.  I got involved in that through high school maths classes and an enrichment program that seeks out mathematically-talented students and helps them develop their potential.  At the IMO I ended up with a bronze medal, corresponding to a position of equal 82nd out of 252 students.

Tonight's challenger is Tim Clay, a doctor of oncology at St Vincent's Hospital.  He finds it a very rewarding specialty where you get to help a lot of people; he notes that patients who are meeting with an oncology doctor are often very fearful and need a lot of help and reassurance.  Richard exposits for our benefit that oncology is cancer-related; Tim confirms this, and adds that he has recently been working in chemotherapy.


Tim was, I think, the most outgoing of the contestants on this day of filming.  He certainly brought some entertainment to the process of describing his answers, and I perhaps lifted a little in response.


The contestants start equally (both missing a quite findable nine), and then Geoff pulls away in the next three rounds.  Tim isn't able to make any inroads after that, and despite a decent conundrum solution ends up the loser as Geoff takes it 64 to 51.

This time around I remember the nine, and I'll take it anyway... just as well, as I had a mental lapse in a later letters round and couldn't find anything useful.  So I'd probably have done worse than I did back then, of all things.  Either I'm losing my edge, or I'm having trouble maintaining focus on episodes I've seen before.  Possibly a bit of both... I was particularly finely honed around the start of this blog, and I'm a bit less focussed now.

As usual, details after the jump.