Ep 91: Brett Chaiyawat, Rikki Irwin (November 12, 2012; originally aired December 6, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Brett Chaiyawat gets his turn in the champion's seat, and might become the first contestant to cross the series boundary if he can last the distance.  At one point in his life Brett noticed that he was watching movies quite regularly, so he decided to try and figure out how many movies he had actually seen.  He puts the total at eleven hundred movies, and he keeps a record of them that he updates when he sees a new one.

Tonight's challenger is Rikki Irwin, an American student who is studying mechanical engineering.  Rikki is particularly interested in robots and the logic of programming, and she'd like to combine those two areas by working in the field of smart prosthetics -- things like bionic arms and cochlear implants; she thinks it is a really cool field to work in.


Brett got the early lead with a couple of decent words that Rikki did not quite match.  The rest of the main rounds featured matched declarations, except that two of Rikki's answers were invalid; that allowed Brett to extend his lead considerably.  Neither ended up solving the tough conundrum, and Brett won comfortably by 59 to 29.

I played well, getting a maximum game in the main rounds.  That was good, but the conundrum proved extremely difficult for me and so the maximum game slipped through my fingers again.  Still, it was a welcome bit of form after some of last week's results.