Ep 89: Phil Moore, Mita Navidad (November 8, 2012; originally aired December 2, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Due to the US election coverage, episode 88 was not aired in the usual order and so there is a gap in my record.  A particularly annoying gap, too, as Richard comments later in the show that it was a game with a nail-biting finale.  Leif Cooper must have lost it, as there are two new faces tonight.

Update: Commenter Victor points out that this is one of the few episodes available on YouTube, so I will be able to cover this after all.  The links are: Part 1, part 2, part 3.  Thanks, Victor!


The returning champion is Phil Moore, an I.T. manager and business technology student.  Richard observes that I.T. is often sedentary work, but that Phil is actually pretty fit.  Phil explains this as being due to him riding around 45 to 50 kilometres per day when he is cycling.

Tonight's challenger is Mita Navidad, a science and maths graduate who went to Germany to complete an internship with the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company.  Mita was working for the structures and engineering department, and she says that the best thing about it was that every day she got to see fighter planes fly past her window on their test flights.  It was, of course, very noisy when that happened and not much work got done.  She found it exciting to be working at the cutting edge of science.


The contestants started out fairly evenly, finding the same word in the first round.  In the second round Mita made the first-time player error of using a letter twice, but she got those points back in the following numbers round.  The second third of the game was all Phil, though, as he found the two best words and solved the numbers game to have a lead of over twenty points.  The final third saw them matched again, giving the game to Phil.  Neither could solve the conundrum, and the final scoreline was 44 to 20 in his favour.

I blanked a bit on the first round, missing some longer options that I knew must be there.   I probably was never going to match David's result in the thirty seconds, though.  For the rest of it I played optimally all the way up to the conundrum, but that took me over two minutes to solve.  A rather tough conundrum tonight, I'd say.  That kept my score out of the seventies, but a mid-sixties score was still pretty welcome.