Raf Goodens gets to try out the champion's seat tonight. Richard informs us that Raf moved to Australia from Belgium two and a half years ago, and says that Raf is quite an exception to the rest of his family. Raf says that he is the son of a pig farmer, and many of the rest of his family are pig farmers also. He adds that numbers have always appealed to him more.
Challenging Raf is Luke Brattoni, who currently works with primary school children. However, last year he completed a media degree, and hopes to work in TV, film, or internet entertainment. Richard segues a bit awkwardly from that to note that Luke is involved in rapping. Luke takes the opportunity to demonstrate, with something he prepared a little earlier:
Throw me a letter or number, I'll make my competitor wonder how a veteran was bettered by a kid admittedly dumber, causing a vendetta of umbrage, bitter and sombre, once I flip the alphabet and get the nine-letter conundrum.We'll see whether he manages to live up to that challenge.
Luke stumbled to start with, chancing a spelling that turned out not to be valid. But he recovered in the next round to take a marginal lead, then extended it in the first numbers game. It was mostly level-pegging after that, but Raf managed a key fightback in one of the middle letters rounds to close the gap to just four points. So it continued until the conundrum, and true to his word, Luke solved it first to seal the win, 53 to 39.
I'm still not playing near my best, and had a bad miss in the first numbers round. Fortunately I managed to scrape together enough of an advantage in the letters to be safe going into the conundrum, and it was sorely needed as I got just pipped to it. A wobbly end to the week, but I'll hope next week will be better once I've had some sleep.
