c4countdown

Matt Bayfield

This sounds fun, I'd like to get involved anyway possible. It would be great practice to be a contestant at this, although since I have no real intentions to eventually go on the show, there are probably 8 more deserving and entertaining people to put in as contestants over me. Jack, Dinos and I wou...

Matt Bayfield

Whilst on one of my pencil-fishing missions, I played this CSW Letters Attack where I was able to achieve an unusual feat of securing two pencils for two darrenic maximums in the same game. Not so unusual in itself, you might think, until I point out that one of those darrenic maximums was the plura...

Matt Bayfield

*applause for the name of the prize*

I am already frantically practising finding the longest word in ridiculous selections like OOCWOCMOP in preparation for 6 games of letters being drawn from the Countdown board game...

Matt Bayfield

I think I've worked this out:

(a) the home team's largest stand was 81 (and the away team's largest stand was 63)
(b) the match was tied, both teams finishing on 99 all out

I can provide my working on request!

Matt Bayfield

The amusement value of getting some bemused engraver to etch something resembling "COLON MASTER" on a glass crystal has not been lost on me.

Does the winner get to spend 5 seconds in a geodesic dome collecting as many gold credits as possible?

Matt Bayfield

A bit contrived perhaps, but I'm quite proud to have snaffled this bronze pencil...

Matt Bayfield

I don't have ODE, but am I right in thinking that plurals of fabrics (even if indicated as mass noun) are permissible? If so, then I think VISCOSES should be added to the lexicon.

Matt Bayfield

Congrats to Eoin for being the first to break my original target of 108. Mind you, it looks like one or two other scores have been posted tonight which beat your 110! As for your lightning junior challenge, that score of 81 is quite a teaser. It's probably well within the reach of the top players on...

Matt Bayfield

Inspired by the promise of unusual custom formats in Ben’s “Bash Week” thread, how about a thread where we set each other score targets to beat in custom format games? The first person to beat the target (and post here) then gets to play a different custom game of their choice, and their score in th...

Matt Bayfield

Apologies for slightly sidetracking Craig's thread, but if any of you fancy your skills as a cricket pundit, then you might be interested to hear that for the second year in a row, I'm running a "fantasy cricket" competition based on the ICC World Twenty20. This year’s World Twenty20 takes...

Matt Bayfield

Yes please...

Matt Bayfield

My proudest recent bronze pencil came from a game of Hypergoatdown, where I had picked the 11 initial letters: W A L C I B H E D R T I then picked an appropriate final "goatletter" to give me one of only two possible 11-letter words. Those of you who fancy a challenge can try to work out w...

Matt Bayfield

Dutch Hyper Unlimited seems to be broken at the moment. Sponge and I are declaring words which should be valid, but they're all being marked invalid. Some valid words are offered by Dictionary Corner but it appears that only a small subset of the full dictionary is being used. I don't know if this ...

Matt Bayfield

Dutch Hyper Unlimited seems to be broken at the moment. Sponge and I are declaring words which should be valid, but they're all being marked invalid. Some valid words are offered by Dictionary Corner but it appears that only a small subset of the full dictionary is being used. I don't know if this i...

Matt Bayfield

I have a feeling that this is already known... but Omelette doesn't seem to work in Greek. The letters which come up seem to be English letters, which means it's not possible to declare a word, and the game crashes. Low/negligible priority for a fix, as I'm sure I'm the only person ever to have atte...

Matt Bayfield

At the risk of being full of suggestions at the moment, here's another one, inspired by the recent pencil-mining game... On the Statland "Pencils by language and length" page, would it be possible to display the %age of available pencils after each figure in the table? For example, the top...

Matt Bayfield

Making the assumption that Prune is on apterous mainly to allow users to set personal bests etc (let's face it, over 9 rounds he's no competition for even apterous' worst human player), is there any chance that Prune's abilities could be re-jigged so that he never scores at all in Letters or Numbers...

Matt Bayfield

Representing the multilingual apterous massive, I would be delighted if my lists of nine-letter words (both in the "nines from the last 30 days" tab of my user profile, and in my "all-time nines" Superstats page) could be broken down by language/lexicon, and then by variant - in ...

Matt Bayfield

I've just managed the same feat as Josh, in filling the apterous homepage pencils list, although I've taken the rather easier route of doing it with ten German words (including a remarkable four nines).

Matt Bayfield

Thanks Dinos. Second link now edited.

Matt Bayfield

An unusual brag: I currently hold the apterous record for both the longest max word and shortest max word to have been awarded pencil inventory items.

Matt Bayfield

Nice.

Though I suppose the gag was always on the cards given that Susie had been offered an impressive 7...

Incidentally, [brag] this was my best armchair game for a long time. 13 maxes... I was just out-of-time on HEAVENS and didn't think MINGIEST would be good.[/brag]

Matt Bayfield

I spotted ATACTIC in round 8. Sometimes it's useful to be a geeky chemist...

Matt Bayfield

I've just had LANKER disallowed (and have checked it's not in the apterous dictionary). A mistake?

LANKEST is allowable.

Matt Bayfield

Fraid it wasn't a big enough story to make the We Love Darts website, although it is still the lead story on http://www.universitydarts.co.uk.

You were namechecked in the match reports section (page 84) of the printed version of We Love Darts.

Matt Bayfield

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/sport/4709130.Liam_Jenkins_and_Kirk_Bevins_qualify_for_York_Open_Darts_competition/ Ha - reading that has just made me realise what a 'darts' name Bevins is! But Tony would be a better first name. There's another namecheck for Kirk's darts achievements, in the latest issu...

Matt Bayfield

It's been entertaining to watch, and the standard is indeed impressive. Even speaking as a former Hyper Unlimited 15 record holder, I know I'm nowhere near the standard of Joe & Lloyd.

Matt Bayfield

From our conversation at COLIN about this tournoi, that sounds like your best result yet. Well done Jeff... very impressive!

Matt Bayfield

Here's the beginnings of an idea I've had for a variant designed to help players increase their vocabulary and knowledge of obscure/unusual words. I'm not sure how well it would make for good gameplay, and I can see potential flaws, but I'll leave that for others to discuss here if they wish. If Cha...

Matt Bayfield

Brilliant - I throughly approve of this statshot! I'll have to see if I can pick up a few cheap points in Russian, Italian and Spanish and see how long I can stay in the top 3!

Well done to Mr AI on top spot...

Matt Bayfield

In tribute to Eoin Morgan earlier this week becoming the first cricketer to score a One Day International century for two different countries, I think I've just become the first person on apterous to score a Standard 15 century in four different languages: English ( 122 ) German ( 109 ) Dutch ( 101 ...

Matt Bayfield

The now perennial tournament fixture between Nick and I went thus: Nick Wainwright 111 - 72 Matt Bayfield Matt Bayfield 84 - 88 Nick Wainwright In game 2, whilst I was part-way through completing my Conundrum answer RESELLING, the Conundrum window disappeared from my screen (a combination of Windows...

Matt Bayfield

At the risk of showing general Scrabble ignorance:

I contemplated LOOKER C9 for 20 points, leaving EIQ, although it's asking for trouble if Quackle has S on its rack.
I also contemplated exchanging EIKOQ, although that's probably because I'm used to playing OSPD2 Scrabble where QI was inadmissible.

Matt Bayfield

Not sure whether this counts as a bug, but a couple of things I've noticed whilst playing in German: (1) in Goatdown, only A - Z buttons appear on screen for your 9th letter, meaning that you can't select the umlauted vowels Ä, Ö or Ü (although if you have some sort of German keyboard, or have conve...

Matt Bayfield

I claim the record for holding an apterous record for the shortest time. At 1:29 a.m. today, I broke the record for Touchdown Jnr Letters Attack by scoring 133 in this 18-max game . At 1:30 a.m. today, Chris Davies set a new record of 135 with a 19-max game . I officially held the format record for ...

Matt Bayfield

I've squeaked through my qualifying rubber against Peter: Peter Lee 87 - 92 Matt Bayfield Peter Lee 81 - 104 Matt Bayfield Game 2 followed the same pattern as game 1. In both games, I took the lead in round 1. Peter and I then pretty much matched each other in rounds 2 through 12, before I just mana...

Matt Bayfield

Not a serious bug/problem/issue (so apologies for making your heart sink, Charlie, by posting it in this thread) but just to let you know... ...apterous seems to think that for statistical purposes (but not during gameplay), 8-letter words with an umlauted vowel, are 9 letters long. This manifests ...

Matt Bayfield

Time for a clue, I think.

The unscramble of HARD FATT TONGUE is the name of a series, the editions of which have sold a total of over 120 million units, according to wikipedia.

Matt Bayfield

Ok, fair enough Charlie, thanks for clarifying. Must admit I'm surprised... the German conundrums are much, much, harder than they used to be a while ago. I haven't had a simple conundrum in about 3 weeks! The German conundrums are completelely unabridged, because obviously I don't have the knowled...

Matt Bayfield

Have finally watched the show... thought you were unfortunate not to win, Dinos, after a truly awesome performance in Mental Agility (which I thought was much more impressive than your assault course victory). Sadly, as with many quiz shows nowadays, the format is designed so that there can be unpre...

Matt Bayfield

Not a serious bug/problem/issue (so apologies for making your heart sink, Charlie, by posting it in this thread) but just to let you know... ...apterous seems to think that for statistical purposes (but not during gameplay), 8-letter words with an umlauted vowel, are 9 letters long. This manifests i...

Matt Bayfield

Ok, fair enough Charlie, thanks for clarifying. Must admit I'm surprised... the German conundrums are much, much, harder than they used to be a while ago. I haven't had a simple conundrum in about 3 weeks!

Matt Bayfield

Any chance that the feature which selects Conundrums by player rating can be switched off of the foreign language variants - at least until there is a sufficiently large pool of players for everyone's ratings not to be vastly inflated? For instance, as there are only about 5 regular players in the G...

Matt Bayfield

I fancy a crack at becoming this year's Rory McLeod, please.

(For those who weren't watching the action on the green baize at Wembley last month, that means I'd like to enter the qualifying tourney.)

Matt Bayfield

STUFFED CHILD WONDER will be HUDDERSFIELD TOWN F.C., then...

Next one: HARD FATT TONGUE

Matt Bayfield

Very impressive Bob! I'll see if I can make sense of that when I'm next at home (I'm currently at work, and images are blocked).

Matt Bayfield

I don't think it'll be often that I get a chance to put one over on a Countdown champion, so this is probably my best game from COLIN 2010. It was the first game of the day for both Mark and I (COLIN1007). Note: in the recap below, I may have got the Conundrum scramble and some of the letters game s...

Matt Bayfield

Thanks for that Michael - of course, that's correct. It's been a while since I've done A-Level Maths (I won't be too specific about the number of years), so occasionally I write something unintentionally misleading by using a technical term wrongly.

Matt Bayfield

Ian: I think my explanation was badly worded, rather than wrong. When I wrote "remainder of the competition", I meant quarter-finals onwards, not semi-finals onwards. Obviously, if there's a London derby in the quarter-finals, then the probability of a London derby in the quarter-finals, s...

Matt Bayfield

And I agree with Bob and Howard. Well done, chaps. ANSWER TO PUZZLE EIGHT I solved this puzzle by considering a knockout-style draw sheet from the quarter-finals onwards. In the quarter-finals there are 8 spaces, which I numbered 1 through 8, such that the team in space 1 plays the team in space 2, ...

Matt Bayfield

Re: the warm-up game Ah, you're right, Jack & Jon. The variant in which Jack scored an impressive numbers solution was Speed Hypertouch [15 seconds], not (as I previously stated) Speed Hyperblind. Still darned impressive, considering 5 of the numbers were 1s and 2s and the target high: 75 25 1 ...

Matt Bayfield

Thank you to Dinos for his latest golf puzzle - finally I got one right! And for those still hungry for hot sports/math action, here's a little teaser which I dreamed up over the weekend. I was trying to come up with a more general solution, for more rounds in the knockout competition, and more team...

Matt Bayfield

Having said that Matt, you would probably be my choice for "Player of the Event", or an award of similar value. Considering that you beat Jon Corby and finished with 4 wins out of 6, I think Ben judged your rating spot on! Your apterous rating doesn't do you justice, and myself, and many ...

Matt Bayfield

I'll echo the thanks to Ben and all who helped make COLIN2010 a success - I thoroughly enjoyed it. On an individual level, I was staggeringly pleased with my performance, although I'm sure that winning my early games ensured that I ended up playing an even tougher selection of 6 players than I had e...

Matt Bayfield

As a first guess:

Scores on holes 1 through 9 are: 5 1 2 66 17 1 37 12 3, total for the round = 144.

It may be possible to do better.

Matt Bayfield

It's spelled Edison on Pele's wikipedia page, although I can't be arsed to argue whether that's the official spelling or not. Being the sporting statto and wordsmith that I am, I managed without a solver to figure out the scramble was Pele's full name (not many footballers have got names of 25 lette...

Matt Bayfield

Ah, in that case that'll be the famous erectile dysfunction sufferer Edison Arantes do Nascimento. I'd never have solved that without the clue; there were just too many letters to unscramble.

I'll think up a new scramble, and post it here later...

Matt Bayfield

I'll add my voice to that request - it could be especially important if apterous grows to have lots of people playing non-English games, particularly native speakers of other languages, who might not want to play in English at all! I'd say "dictionaries"/"lexicons" rather than &q...

Matt Bayfield

It's listed as big-head and big-headed and big-headedness. So to answer your question, yes I do know. Cheers Kirk. I don't have an ODE to hand, but I'm often curious to know these things... On the subject of BICEP creeping into dictionaries, I wonder how long it'll be before daft constructs like BU...

Matt Bayfield

At the risk of making myself look a fool, as I can't review the game right now to confirm all the letters were in the selection (because apterous, but not c4c, is blocked on this computer), I was surprised to have BIGHEADS disallowed. Anyone know whether it's hyphenated, two words, not listed at all...

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