Ep 88: Leif Cooper, Phil Moore (originally aired December 1, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


I've changed my mind despite previous comments, so here's the details for episode 88 earlier than forecast.  For anyone who has not yet seen it due to it being skipped for the US election coverage, here are the links again: Part 1; part 2; part 3.  Thanks again to commentor Victor for finding this.  Also, in case it was missed, here is the episode 90 post.


Leif returns for the important fourth-night showdown, although this season has had many six-game contestants and even four wins may not be enough.  Richard wheels out the technique question, noting that Leif always starts with a consonant in the letters rounds.  Leif agrees, and expands on this although it honestly does not make a lot of sense to me: He likes the vowels split up rather than clumped, and there are more consonants than vowels, so he chooses the consonant first.  That is kind of backwards, really; if he started off with a vowel then he could spread the vowels out further.  But perhaps he also dislikes clumps of consonants.

Tonight's challenger is Phil Moore, an I.T. manager who has lived on three different continents.  His father was an aircraft engineer so the family travelled a lot when Phil was young (presumably the job involved his father working in rather different locations).  He was born in France, then moved to the United Kingdom, then Africa (first South Africa, then Zimbabwe), then back to the United Kingdom, and finally settled in Australia at last.  It's left him with an interest in travel, but it's not so easy now as he has two young children.


Phil took the lead in the first round with a word which turns up a lot in this game but can be hard to spot.  Leif struck back in the second round, finding the unique best answer.  Three shared rounds followed (neither contestant having any luck with the numbers round), then Leif extended his lead in the next numbers round.  Phil was able to get back some of that ground in the final letters round, and then both solved the last rather easy numbers round.  Leif was ahead but not safe going into the conundrum, and his usual technique of writing down the letters worked against him, as Phil solved it while Leif was still doing so.  Phil won the game, 45 to 37.

I had a rather mixed game, starting off with a good find but then missing many better options.  In fact, I did not get another maximum until the last numbers round; the other two numbers rounds included rather bad mental slips from me and I ended up two away in each case.  The better words were rather findable in most cases, too, so overall this was not a good result.  I did  manage to beat Phil to the conundrum solution, but only just.  It was a somewhat disappointing game, to be honest, but I had managed to do enough for the win.

Ep 87: Leif Cooper, Rod Goulding (November 6, 2012; originally aired November 30, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Leif Cooper is back for his third night, and has displayed some consistently excellent letters form throughout.  Can he keep it up?  The answer shortly, but first we find out that he plays hockey for the Mentone Hockey Club, and has done so for eighteen years.  Richard asks if Leif is seriously competitive, but Leif demurs a little; he says that he is competitive, but does not play in a very competitive grade.

Tonight's challenger is Rob Goulding, described as an electrical engineer who owns a satellite installation business.  That is what is said, anyway, but I'm choosing to assume that he installs satellite dishes / antennae and associated infrastructure rather than satellites themselves.  If I'm wrong about that then I am seriously impressed by his line of work.  But we don't get to find out about that, as Richard informs us that Rod loves sport.  Rod played basketball and rugby union at school, and also did some cross-country running.  He enjoys watching any kind of sport, and in particular is a Hawks supporter in the AFL and favours the Newcastle Knights in the NRL.


Both contestants started out well with a couple of good words; really good finds in round two, in fact.  Leif hit form with the numbers tonight, and continued to show excellent form in the letters.  In contrast, Rod failed to live up to the promise of those first two rounds and consistently slipped behind in the remaining letters rounds.  Leif was assured of the win going into the conundrum, but neither ended up solving it; Leif still finished with a commanding 61 to 24 victory.

I started off with a good game, hitting maxes for the first two-thirds of the match.  Perhaps the frustration of not being able to pull clear of Leif got to me, as my last two main rounds were not as good as they could have been.  There were better options to be had that I found after time, although I'd still not have found David's word in the last letters round so the maximal game was never an option.  I needed the conundrum in order to be safe, and was happy to solve it relatively quickly to nudge into the seventies again.

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.

Ep 85: Robert Jackson, Leif Cooper (November 2, 2012; originally aired November 26, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Robert Jackson gets his turn in the champion's seat tonight, and Richard asks further about his music.  Robert says that at the moment he is playing guitar for a band called The Legless Lizards.  They tend to play music with an environmental bent -- he calls it a sort of Indian-influenced jazz -- and they try to highlight the plight of the legless lizard, which is a threatened species around Melbourne.

Tonight's challenger is Leif Cooper, a senior chemist who has completed a bachelor of science and a masters in forensic science; in the next few years he hopes to complete a PhD in environmental forensics.  Richard asks what kind of work a senior chemist does, and Leif explains that a lot of his focus is on environmental forensics.  In particular, oil spills are a problem both in Australia and around the world, and how the oil interacts with the environment makes up a lot of his work.


Leif signalled his abilities early with a couple of excellent eight-letter words, and ending up scoring unanswered points in every letters round.  As you might imagine, that was too much of an obstacle for Robert to overcome; Robert did win some points back in the numbers (although not all of them), but it was not enough.  The conundrum proved difficult; Robert's guess was invalid, but Leif was not able to solve it either.  Still, Leif took the win, 42 to 17.

I had an excellent game, except for the conundrum.  I'm a bit disappointed over that; I saw the right beginning but then went away from it, and the conundrum went unsolved.  I'd have had a maximum game if not for that, alas.  Still, I had some decent answers in the main rounds, and overall it was a game to be happy about.