Ep 130: Barry Harridge, John Marsiglio (June 21, 2016; originally aired January 28, 2011)

Rounds: Here.


It's Barry Harridge's third night, and Richard notes that Barry organises Scrabble tournaments, on quite a major scale.  He asks how Barry has managed that; Barry responds that he has been involved with Scrabble for many years, but never been a very good player.  What he does do is invoke the power of computing, having written programs to help look up words and see if they're available, or sort out the details of who should be playing who in the next round, or make results available on the internet.  Richard suggests that Barry might be understating his ability, given the quality of some of the words he has found so far.

Tonight's challenger is John Marsiglio, who has a science background and works for the Environment Protection Agency.  Naturally enough, Richard enquires as to what is involved in that.  John explains that they assess proposals by people who may want to build a new factory, or engage in some similar project, and make sure that those proposals meet the relevant environmental criteria for Victorian policies.


This game started out similarly to Barry's previous games, with him taking the first two letters rounds handily and then having some issues with the numbers.  John was able to steady in the middle third, matching Barry throughout, but was not able to recoup lost ground.  Barry sealed the win in the final letters round; John pegged back the scoreline a little in the final numbers round, but neither solved the conundrum and the final score was 45 to 31 in Barry's favour.

I was just unable to get clear of Barry for most of the game, in part due to a very poor miss in the first numbers round where I ended up with nothing to declare.  It was only in the last numbers round that I managed to outscore him, and that raised the possibility of a tie if he beat me to the conundrum.  Happily I got there quickly enough, but it's definitely been a shaky set of matches for me against Barry so far.