Ep 86: Leif Cooper, Brett Newton (November 5, 2012; originally aired November 29, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Leif Cooper gets his turn in the champion's seat after a very impressive turn on the letters in the previous episode.  Richard asks what got Leif into his line of work; Leif explains that he had always been good at maths and science at school, and found chemistry particularly interesting.  Naturally enough, when he did his bachelor of science he focused on chemistry, and it all followed from that; he got a job at a lab and now here he is, somewhat further down the path.

Tonight's challenger is Brett Newton, who has been a secondary school mathematics teacher for seven years.  Brett recently spent a year teaching in the United Kingdom; he enjoyed that greatly, getting to do a lot of travel including a few castle trips.  The personal highlight was a trip to LEGOLAND for his son's birthday, and the highlight of the whole trip was Christmas at Disneyland in France.


The letter mixes were rather miserly today, but Leif still did pretty well on them, including an excellent word in round four.  A trivial numbers round to start was followed by two very tough ones; Leif made errors on both of those but it was not enough to let Brett catch up.  Leif was comfortably ahead going into the conundrum, and solved it late in the piece to push his score over the half century and finish with a 53 to 19 win.

I was back to rather erratic form, alas.  The tough mixes were hard to get much traction on, and I missed finding two better options within time.  I also struggled with the numbers, although fortunately for my ego so did Lily; they were genuinely difficult.  I did manage to solve the conundrum relatively quickly, avoiding setting a new worst record on the maximum count.  I wobbled home victorious, but certainly Leif has been the best competitor on the letters for some weeks and these games are getting a bit chancy.