Clive Brooker wrote:Using the Countdown Tools difficulty rating system for numbers games, what is the most difficult numbers game ever solved on the show?
I'm not going to be able to do this one because I don't know how the Countdown Tools difficulty rating works.
The database doesn't store the arithmeticians' declarations so I'll come back to the Rachel v Carol thing another day.
Chris Philpot wrote:What is the closest that a letters selection, in the order displayed on the board at the start of the 30 seconds, has come to matching a conundrum scramble from elsewhere in Countdown history?
No letters selection has ever exactly matched a conundrum scramble. None have come very close, either. Of all letters rounds whose selections are anagrams of a conundrum, three of them needed only four letters to be moved to match a conundrum scramble. They are:
round 12 of episode 3125 with the conundrum TREADONTO in
episode 5513;
round 9 of episode 3909 with the first conundrum INTERCODE in the
series 10 final; and
round 8 of episode 5450 with the conundrum TENTODINE in
episode 5391.
Incidentally, no letters selection on the show has ever come up more than once in the same order.
JackHurst wrote:Which contestants have had the most appearances in the challengers chair?
As Jack W says, the convention of putting the champion on the viewer's left and the challenger on the viewer's right hasn't always existed. It seems to have started a short way into
series 37 in 1997, which is much later than I'd have guessed.
David Trace has the highest number of appearances in the right-hand chair at 15 - all his heats, finals and CoC matches were in that chair.
Damian Eadie also has 15 (edit - 16) appearances in that chair, if you count
this special (which the database doesn't because it can't cope with two players in one seat).
Edit: the other day I fixed a load of mistakes on the wiki, mostly to do with scoring, that I found using this database. One of the anomalies I found was that in
Suzanne Miles's CoC game with Damian Eadie, the episode page had the two players the opposite way round from on the
series page. The
CDB recap for this game showed Damian on the left, so I changed the series page accordingly. However, having referred all the way back to Mike Brown's handwritten notes, it seems Damian was on the right in this game after all, and the episode page was wrong. I've refixed the wiki, which hopefully is now correct. This gives him a record 16 games in the right hand chair if you count the two-a-side special.
Clive Freedman has the most appearances in the left-hand chair - all 19 of his broadcast games were in that chair. The only one that wasn't was a
Masters game that was never shown.
JackHurst wrote:Which players have been in the most episodes?
Conor Travers, Allan Saldanha and Tim Morrissey all played in 21 episodes. Masters episodes, although they were split over five days, count as one episode.
JackHurst wrote:Which players have spent the most time on screen? (for simplicity say an episode is directly proportional in length to the number of rounds in that episode)
If we can count Richard Whiteley and Carol Vorderman as players (they did play in
one episode) that easily gives them the most on-screen time. King Dick is said to have more broadcast hours than anyone else on British television apart from the girl on the
BBC test card. If we don't count them, Mark Nyman and Damian Eadie, in that order, are highest thanks to their many DC appearances.
If we only count rounds where the person was playing, then the top ten players by number of rounds played are as follows...
Code: Select all
1. Conor Travers 312
2. Chris Wills 282
3. Mark Tournoff 255
3. Jack Hurst 255
5. David O'Donnell 241
5. Kirk Bevins 241
5. Jonathan Rawlinson 241
8. Charlie Reams 240
8. Tom Hargreaves 240
10. Paul Gallen 225
10. Jon O'Neill 225
10. Nick Wainwright 225
Arguably, tiebreaks shouldn't be counted. That would put David O'Donnell, Kirk Bevins and Jonathan Rawlinson on 240.