Ep 420: Ben Fisher, Zaid Abbas (April 6, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


This is Ben's fifth night, and a win here will almost certainly earn him a place in the finals.  Ben went to Glasgow over the Christmas/New Year period to attend the wedding of some of his friends.  They kitted him up in the full kilt and his family's heritage tartan.  Richard lists the components of such dress and Ben agrees that they had him in all that "... and not much more".  Heh.

Tonight's challenger is Zaid Abbas, a software engineer.  Zaid plays "three or four" instruments, but has never had formal musical training.  He learned the keyboard when he was very young, just playing by ear -- he would listen to a song and then emulate it.  From there he kept building up his repertoire, moving on to more complicated songs.  Since then he has picked up the guitar, and drums, and is hoping to expand further.


There were good moments from both contestants tonight; the numbers targets were all high, but the contestants were always close with Zaid having slightly the better of it.  Unfortunately for Zaid, three of his words were invalid and Ben outscored him on the others, and that was just too much ground to give up.  One of those invalid words could easily have been the optimal answer (more on this in round 5), though, as he had found a good word.  Ben also found a great word in the last letters round and was really fast on the conundrum once more, to take a comprehensive 60 to 24 win.

I was off-kilter all night; whatever I did today that affected me, I hope I avoid it in the future.  I blanked badly on the first round, found an excellent word on the second, then went chasing after the wrong thing in the next numbers round and ending up declaring the wrong total.  The next three letters rounds should have produced eights but I missed them all, and I did not solve the conundrum either.  The last two numbers rounds were not enough to keep me out of trouble, and I ended up losing to Ben by a point.  That's right on the one-in-twenty mark that is my quota, but I'm still very disappointed by my performance since I was playing well below my best.