c4countdown

Graeme Cole

Can we use this thread to make suggestions to co-event players as well as organisers? I'm deciding yes. I'm sure it's been mentioned a few times before, but here it is again... if you're running late and are likely to arrive after the published start time, send some sort of message to the organiser ...

Graeme Cole

It says it's due to contestant availability so not pre-planned. That would be the answer. He's not available on Thursday. The original plan was to play QF1 and QF4 tonight and the other 2 on Thursday which would work perfectly. This setup is just a mess and ruins a largely successful series. Or alt...

Graeme Cole

Mark Deeks wrote: ↑Mon Aug 25, 2025 12:03 pm Kai Laddiman and his moustache will be on Only Connect tonight.

Who's their third player? Or are they on opposing teams?

Graeme Cole

Shortest ever Only Connect team name on the same day as the oldest ever Countdown contestant.

Graeme Cole

That buzz was very borderline in the 30 seconds. From the music, you'd think the time was over. The bong had started but was still in its fading out phase and the lights were fully lit. It's difficult to time exactly, but the conundrum starts just after it turns to 32:19 on the C4 catch-up and the ...

Graeme Cole

That’s it. A target of 100 should be totally, utterly and categorically banned. I quit. Target of 100 should automatically empty a tank of gunge over both contestants. Then regenerate the target and carry on as if nothing has happened. If anyone starts asking awkward questions (TV executives, journ...

Graeme Cole

"Sectoring" is not a valid word in ODP. At present, ESCORTING is now the only nine-letter word that can be made from TENCORGIS, though it was rearrangeable to "costering" prior to last July's overhaul. SECTORING is a word though. https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entr...

Graeme Cole

Title contender if George octos. Overcame round 1 nerves to win with a century. That conundrum was horrible in my opinion. What's horrible about it? There may be a couple of plausible-but-wrong anagrams, but it's a normal, everyday -ING word. Perfectly fair, I think. If it was one of those crapshoo...

Graeme Cole

https://youtu.be/8Ct9fJrU-8U?si=_6iO-d44O3Admh1b This video from Dr Tom Crawford is useful and educational for anyone who wants to up their numbers games. Crawford kept missing the target during his 3 weeks on Countdown. Rachel has a far better strike rate, assuming that's actually her doing it (i ...

Graeme Cole

What is the longest run of consecutive episodes to finish with a conundrum solved by either contestant? I'm excluding Countdown Masters games from this, because those games were played over five days even though the database assumes all rounds were played on the first day, and including them would ...

Graeme Cole

Very nearly a nine letter Q-word in the selections today. Has this ever happened? What are the lowest probability words to come up? I'm not sure exactly how many times such a word has been available from the selection (the dictionary changes over time), but I can check how many times they've been d...

Graeme Cole

During my telly run, I declared two words twice - adjoiner (no longer valid :( ) and watering. 3 part question - a) what's the most times someone has declared the same one word in their telly run "telly run" is difficult to define, but whether you define it as either "a player's run ...

Graeme Cole

This week Pam Hill made a reappearance, she is the fourth of my opponents in my octorun to return (in regular heat games). Am I the only octochamp to have four opponents from my run reappear? Unless another octochamp has had a fourth opponent return some time in series 91, yes. Also which other oct...

Graeme Cole

A rare lapse in discipline see Graeme making a rod for his own back by answering questions unrelated to the Countdown Database. More general question... I've recapped a few games in the past. Noticed the wiki was getting a bit behind so recapped today's game as I was watching. At the end there's an...

Graeme Cole

Has there ever been more than two impossible numbers games in one show? If by "impossible" you mean "impossible to reach the target exactly", then yes. There were three impossible numbers rounds in episodes 5856 and 8048 . If you mean "impossible to score any points" o...

Graeme Cole

Words sorted by the number of times they have been validly offered up to the end of series 69... 1. RATION 126 2. TRAINED 125 3. TRAILED 107 4. RATIONS 102 5. ROASTED 96 6. POINTED 92 7. PAINTED 90 8. LOITERS 78 9. PANTIES 77 10. COATED 76 11. COASTED 68 12. DONATES 67 13. GLOATED 66 13. SOLDIER 66...

Graeme Cole

Sorry if it's been asked before bit are there more 9 letter words that are plurals (ending in S) than those that don't. Caveats for this one are that the word list I'm using is from July 2024 so not quite up to date, and there isn't an easy way to tell whether a word is a plural. I've gone with &qu...

Graeme Cole

Surprised nobody has asked this yet, but on the show which contestant has submitted the most words that were both added as part of the great influx of 2015 and subsequently recently removed? Can anyone beat four in https://wiki.apterous.org/Episode_8024 - RITUALITY, HENWARE, MIAGITE and OSETROVA? I...

Graeme Cole

Surprised nobody has asked this yet, but on the show which contestant has submitted the most words that were both added as part of the great influx of 2015 and subsequently recently removed? I don't have a complete and correct list of only those words that were removed in the great cull of 2024, bu...

Graeme Cole

Possibly an unanswerable question, but.... has anyone ever 'pencilled' a new word on Countdown (i.e. made the first declaration of that word, as a max winner) before it was pencilled on Apterous. After apterous had bedded in, of course I don't have the ability to search for any other occurrences, b...

Graeme Cole

With the X currently awol and stories of the J having taken an extended holiday "back in 2002 or something", what are the longest gaps between individual letters appearing? Here we have the usual caveat that the records on the wiki aren't complete, and selections from some very early game...

Graeme Cole

Carol Vorderman appeared as a guest on HIGNFY on Friday, with former contestant Little Alex Horne as host. Is this the first time a former contestant has hosted a TV show with a former/current Countdown team member as a participant? (excluding Catsdown) No, it isn't; Carol Vorderman appeared in a s...

Graeme Cole

For each of the last 3 completed series (or more if the data is easy to obtain), how many points were scored in letters games by the picker compared to the non-picker? Am trying to establish the advantage (if any) that there is between picking and not picking in letters games on TV. Would also be i...

Graeme Cole

There was reference to the fact that yesterday's game featured two players born in the 21st century. My quarter-final game was the 1st finals game to feature two players born after the millennium. I'd also wager that it is the game with the smallest age difference between two players (5 days), but ...

Graeme Cole

Has any player ever scored more than Alex Robertson (115/92% of max) while winning only one match? My boy https://wiki.apterous.org/Jamie_Ilett-Jones Anyone heard from him recently? He's not been to events in a while Jamie is the only 1-time winner to have scored more than 115 in a game, if you onl...

Graeme Cole

Hello again everyone! Just when you thought I'd forgotten about this thread. Hello Graeme, I wanted to ask 1. Who are the perfect number round players, getting maximum points for each number round they've been in? There are likely many who did so in 1 episode but then lost with the letters, so any w...

Graeme Cole

told my virus checker to ignore the errors, extracted the zip, clicked the executable, told windows defender it was fine, flashed up a window and nothing. Tried again, window flashed up and disappeared. The atropine-1.3.1-windows-exe.zip file should contain two things: an executable file named atro...

Graeme Cole

Fiona T wrote: ↑Sat Mar 08, 2025 4:25 pm executable not working for me, but quite possibly user error !

Could you elaborate? How far did you get? Do you get any error message?

Graeme Cole

Atropine 1.3.1 is now available. As before, there is a Windows executable version and a traditional distribution that requires Python to be installed. There are only a few minor changes compared to 1.3.0: The HTML and Text reports from the "Export results" page now have a "Podium&quo...

Graeme Cole

Well, it's worth noting that in all seven years, the highest ranked player in the open has scored more points than anyone in the finals. That obviously doesn't prove anything by itself - it's harder to score in as many rounds when you're against consistently high-level opposition. I do, however, th...

Graeme Cole

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 7:18 pm
Philip A wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 6:50 pm How nice of him to show up at Co:Oxford!

Crawford V Imafidon in an exhibition match one day?
Did he play?

No, he put the letters and numbers on the board in the final. Also came to the pub afterwards.

Graeme Cole

Philip A wrote: ↑Mon Feb 24, 2025 2:57 pm Seems a nice person, good debut. That was filmed after Stephen Fry got his knighthood so is this the first time that a Doctor and a Sir have appeared in the same episode?

Sir Trevor McDonald and Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon.

Graeme Cole

This always used to be a problem. I thought there had been some Atropine update so it automatically came out in the dump. Who won is probably the main thing. Atropine has always included the final in the exported text/html/whatever results, for as long as I can remember. However, entering the final...

Graeme Cole

Be good to include the final in the results :) This always used to be a problem. I thought there had been some Atropine update so it automatically came out in the dump. Who won is probably the main thing. Atropine has always included the final in the exported text/html/whatever results, for as long...

Graeme Cole

To clarify a couple of things - when I was the highest scoring player on 0 wins after round one and played two people on 1 win, were they random players? Yes. I suppose thinking about it, it's not that bad. I think I was just unlucky with who I got, and could presumably just as easily ended up with...

Graeme Cole

During a CO-event final, it's very helpful (particularly if it's Lincoln/Edinburgh style with no screen) to have the scores announced after every round. And that means with the players' names included. It doesn't matter that there's a designated player 1 and 2 and that's the order you're reading th...

Graeme Cole

Edit - One other thing - I seem to remember hearing that under this system, if there are the "wrong" number of players on a certain number of wins, the highest scoring on the next number of wins will be "promoted". E.g. There are three to a table and two unbeaten players. The tw...

Graeme Cole

Is this a thing though? It was discussed but I'm sure I've been at events that were then done the old way. Is it there as an option? Is it the default option? It is there as an option, but it is not the default option. If you use Atropine's "Swiss Army Blunderbuss" fixture generator and d...

Graeme Cole

The new version of Atropine, 1.3.0, is now available at the usual place . Instructions are provided, but not much has changed except that Windows users now have an Atropine build that doesn't need Python. Windows users are encouraged to try this build first. You can always revert to the traditional ...

Graeme Cole

Self-checkouts aren't a bad thing. they're better. I can monitor to make sure all the discounts work, I don't get rushed along, and I don't have to put on any kind of conversational performance. The drink-drive limit should be nil. Technicalities about the interpretation of "nil" aside, b...

Graeme Cole

Is it the standard method now for Swiss pairs / triples to put people against a random opponent on the same number of wins, rather than their nearest neighbour in the rankings? I think the random version works much better. Is this a thing though? It was discussed but I'm sure I've been at events th...

Graeme Cole

Final reminder about this, to everyone who intends to use Atropine in running a co-event in 2025. I haven't received any more reports of problems with the new test version since Fiona's post above. If I don't hear anything, I'll assume that there are no more problems, and this will be how Atropine w...

Graeme Cole

Jamie Weisenberg wrote: ↑Fri Dec 20, 2024 12:35 pm I could do this with one arm tied behind my back. Congrats to Jack Hurst.

Do you normally solve conundrums with both arms?

Graeme Cole

I rebuilt PyInstaller, then repackaged Atropine without the --onefile option, so it's now an executable file and a directory of stuff rather than just an executable file. According to random internet folklore, this is supposed to make it look a bit less like malware to overzealous virus checkers, an...

Graeme Cole

Thanks for testing it. Looks like some virus checkers take a dislike to executables made by Pyinstaller for some reason. I'll see if there's another way I can build it.

Graeme Cole

This thread is relevant to anyone who uses Atropine (the co-event administration tool, not the medicinal alkaloid ). As previously mentioned here , the next version of Atropine will be distributed as a standalone Windows executable, the main benefit of which is that Windows users will be able to use...

Graeme Cole

Not sure if it's an atropine thing as such, but we've had a couple of tourneys where a very good player has missed the first round for various reasons (I can think of 3 tournaments I've attended in the last year where this has happened)- they then join and play the lowest scoring player and inevita...

Graeme Cole

The main change for Atropine 1.3.0 is an internal technical one, but one which opens the door to a significant improvement. Since Atropine's first release in 2014, all its web pages have been generated by what are called CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts . These start up a new Python process fo...

Graeme Cole

I'm going to publish Atropine 1.3.0 soon, probably before the end of the year but definitely before COLIN. It contains a number of improvements, including the main one which I'll describe in a separate post below. This thread is intended for users of Atropine , the application that administers fixtu...

Graeme Cole

Chapter 1 page 1 of the Book of Disappoint has to be this nonsense . At first glance it's a box of delicious chocolate, but then you realise it's only a jigsaw puzzle. Somehow this got through all the whiteboardy-flipcharty meetings at Cadbury. And despite what is claimed on the picture someone uplo...

Graeme Cole

MK is then largely paid for by the levies which organisers have raised, absorbed from their admission revenues at an agreed rate per attendee, so that you as a participant have another like-for-like event at which to round off the year. I've no criticism of this arrangement, which I think works ver...

Graeme Cole

Well done to David Roe for becoming an octochamp and narrowly missing out on being the number 1 seed (but ending up 3rd). I thought it was interesting what Colin said about the tie-break if he'd got the conundrum. David would have ended up on 819 points, the same as Fiona Wood, but Colin said he'd ...

Graeme Cole

There are too many back seat drivers in this thread. Some of you obviously come on here a lot to comment on what organisers should do. To be fair, that's the whole point of this thread. It's a place where people can post general feedback on co-events, without posting it under the thread of the most...

Graeme Cole

Do you mind if I ask who you are and which specific events you attended? I can't find any record of a David Harrison ever having played at a co-event. No, I attended events under my real name which I’d rather not divulge in the public domain but I can say you and I have met at events in the past, t...

Graeme Cole

IIRC some of the early Readings and possibly Dublins? Had separate paper cons for each table. I attended some of the early FOCAL finals, in these events only the people in the open could pick the letters and numbers meaning it was fair for all finalists, is this still the case? I’ve read some posts...

Graeme Cole

Yesterday there were clumsy conundrum disputes pertaining to premature buzzing and losing conundrums due to spelling errors. I mean if you spell it wrong, it's wrong and you don't get the points. Ideally hosts of Bristol events could avoid using cons that can be easily misspelled, eg METER/METRE su...

Graeme Cole

In Reading (Bristol Style) we tried one conundrum for each half of the room, with one half adjudicating while the other solved. I liked this and think this slight variation may be even better: 1.One conundrum for every fixture number 6 or lower, i.e. not in the first 10 places, conducted as usual w...

Graeme Cole

Bucket of gunge for people who ask for all 9 of their letters up front at Bristol style events. "CV9 please" Double bucket of gunge for the people who pick the first 7 letters like they care that they are picking, and then they just double up with their final pick. "And 2 more conson...

Graeme Cole

Braintree 2022 fit in 7 14-rounders which is only 7 rounds shorter. Surely once a year starting an hour earlier or finishing an hour later wouldn’t be that much of an issue? It is a special occasion after all! Opinions may differ on this, but these are mine . Pushing the start time earlier makes it...

Graeme Cole

Well, Reading effectively played 6 games as the final takes the same amount of time. It doesn't. Waiting for everyone in the room to finish their declarations/numbers method always takes longer than than waiting for two people to do it. Also, in the final you don't have to collect score slips and t...

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