Spoilers for Friday 13th January 2023 - CoC XVI QF 2

[Ronan M Higginson]

Elliott Mellor vs Dan Byrom. One not to miss.

[Philip A]

Epic contest.

[Philip A]

Gutting, actually. Really, really gutting. Feel so sorry for Elliott. Always a champion in my eyes. The competition is unreal in the tournament and it’s so open at this stage.

Congratulations to Dan; hardly put a foot wrong.

[Johnny Canuck]

This competition is reminding me of those worldwide Mario Kart races where you go from second place to tenth place if a green shell wings you.

[Gavin Chipper]

Great game. Very well played by both and the player I considered to be favourite goes out.

[Philip A]

EERILY in R10

[Rhys Benjamin]

R10 I think Dan made a mistake picking 5 vowels with that being Elliott's strength and there also being a Y in the selection. Damian once said in ZoomDown chat I needed shooting for 5 vowels + Y.

Well done Dan, bad luck Elliott. Almost certainly takes the crown away from Allan Saldanha/Charlie/Jono as "best player never to win a series", so that's a silver lining somewhat.

I suppose the next time there's a Supreme Championship that will make for a good redemption arc, so that's something we'll wait for in a few years' time, won't we?

[Marc Meakin]

R10 I think Dan made a mistake picking 5 vowels with that being Elliott's strength and there also being a Y in the selection. Damian once said in ZoomDown chat I needed shooting for 5 vowels + Y.

Well done Dan, bad luck Elliott. Almost certainly takes the crown away from Allan Saldanha/Charlie/Jono as "best player never to win a series", so that's a silver lining somewhat.

I suppose the next time there's a Supreme Championship that will make for a good redemption arc, so that's something we'll wait for in a few years' time, won't we?

Maybe part of Countdowns 50th celebrations

[Rhys Benjamin]

R10 I think Dan made a mistake picking 5 vowels with that being Elliott's strength and there also being a Y in the selection. Damian once said in ZoomDown chat I needed shooting for 5 vowels + Y.

Well done Dan, bad luck Elliott. Almost certainly takes the crown away from Allan Saldanha/Charlie/Jono as "best player never to win a series", so that's a silver lining somewhat.

I suppose the next time there's a Supreme Championship that will make for a good redemption arc, so that's something we'll wait for in a few years' time, won't we?

Maybe part of Countdowns 50th celebrations

Around every 32 series or so they have had a Supreme Championship - Series 33 & 67.5, so I have said Series 100 would be a good marker for this. If they stick to two series per year that'll be 2030.

[Dan Byrom]

R10 I think Dan made a mistake picking 5 vowels with that being Elliott's strength and there also being a Y in the selection.

Funny you should say this. In preparation for the game, Adam had suggested to me to avoid 5 large because Elliott is good at it.
However, in that moment, I thought it would be nice to fish for AILERON which would have been an obvious max and allow me to relax and settle down for 30secs, and even if the A didn't come, there would definitely be no 9s so I couldn't go behind, and I'm not so bad at 5 vowels myself.

Of course, when the A didn't come, my mind panicked. My brain started using the time berating myself for doing what I wasn't supposed to do in picking 5 vowels instead of solving the anagrams. RELINE is a spot I must have seen dozens of times and feels an embarrassing miss but fortunately wasn't a difference-maker in the end.

[Graeme Cole]

Two first-class players and a game which could easily have gone either way. Dan effectively treated it like a 14-round game with his last numbers pick, which turned out to be the right call.

My opinion: a non-obscure conundrum, even if it's solved on a buzzer race, is preferable to an obscure word that goes unsolved.

Also my opinion: ramping up the conundrum difficulty is better achieved by introducing 10, 11 and 12 letter words than by setting super-rare 9-letter words.

[Johnny Canuck]

As a current Ascender, I honestly feel like they leapfrogged over a few available difficulty levels in selecting this set of conundrums - I think 8 of the 10 so far have been Unobtainiums. Even among those in Ascension, I am seeing many Corundum and Diamond (9/10 and 10/10) ranked words that I'm sure would not be automatic buzzer races. You could use Ascension ones like SURCINGLE which have many decoys. Although I would also agree with Graeme that going up to 10 letters and using only moderately obscure words would be a better bet for viewers.

[Marc Meakin]

Two first-class players and a game which could easily have gone either way. Dan effectively treated it like a 14-round game with his last numbers pick, which turned out to be the right call.

My opinion: a non-obscure conundrum, even if it's solved on a buzzer race, is preferable to an obscure word that goes unsolved.

Also my opinion: ramping up the conundrum difficulty is better achieved by introducing 10, 11 and 12 letter words than by setting super-rare 9-letter words.

Totally agree about the conundrums, maybe have Cecil choose between 9 - 12 letter words with the proviso it's a word we've heard of

[Gavin Chipper]

But is it Countdown?

[Adam Dexter]

Funny you should say this. In preparation for the game, Adam had suggested to me to avoid 5 large because Elliott is good at it.

Dan is that rare breed that can beat Elliott but doesn't know the difference between letters and numbers rounds

[Philip A]

Nothing wrong with these conundrums nor its selection/system in my view. Every conundrum that has appeared in this CoC so far appears in the less voluminous Google dictionary powered by Oxford Languages (also yielding graphs showing usage of the word over the years, and sometimes relevant pictures) and their definitions are comprehensible, so their usage can be easily understood. They’re not as obscure as you think. I’ve only solved 3 conundrums so far but this is a great test of vocabulary and not just word power. These words appear in a lot of dictionaries as well, and most yield millions of Google searches (only 21,000 for DANDIACAL though, interestingly). Oxford Dictionaries Premium has more words and spellings which are even rarer like RUINAAYTE (3 results!). I think us Apterites are so focused on words by probability of them being drawn and being a maximum, since they give us an advantage in the letters rounds. Most conundrums here are fairly low(-ish) probability – yet they are words that are easy to understand and to use as soon as we learn them. It’s a shame Ascencion isn’t complete enough to cover conundrums at this standard. But I have a bet some of these conundrums appeal to the viewing audience more than the likes of us.

Damian Eadie selects the conundrums. What he is trying to achieve with these conundrums here is to make the viewers go WOW and not WTF, which befits a CoC – the crème de la crème of Countdown. I don’t think the former would be achieved by a buzzer race (a lot of those were seen in the 2016 CoC).

Adding more letters to the conundrums, while a good alternative idea to ramp up difficulty, would be copying Lingo, so that’s also a no from me.

If I was setting CoC conundrums, I’d widen the difficulty a little bit (moderately hard to extremely hard) and randomly shuffle them. No system is foolproof, such is the way of all kinds of puzzles, but it would create a bit of a surprise and do away with the predictable hint that they would get gradually harder, or all equally hard.

[Rhys Benjamin]

My opinion: a non-obscure conundrum, even if it's solved on a buzzer race, is preferable to an obscure word that goes unsolved.

I still think 2018 Graeme’s view on conundrums is one of the best posts this forum has ever seen.

Having searched for a few of these online here are a couple of conundrums I’d have set/reused for this tournament:

MUDHUTLOO
DIANARIOT
MULTICONS
CRAMPIEST

How many of these are an instant buzzer race?

[Gavin Chipper]

CRAMPIEST seems fairly high probability and would probably be got very quickly. Some people learn these things as falseagrams as well.

[Adam S Latchford]

My opinion: a non-obscure conundrum, even if it's solved on a buzzer race, is preferable to an obscure word that goes unsolved.

I still think 2018 Graeme’s view on conundrums is one of the best posts this forum has ever seen.

Having searched for a few of these online here are a couple of conundrums I’d have set/reused for this tournament:

MUDHUTLOO
DIANARIOT
MULTICONS
CRAMPIEST

How many of these are an instant buzzer race?

I'm not the greatest con player in the world and got all 4 of these just by looking at them so all 4 are instant buzzer races.

Crampiest particularly bad since people learn falsey's.It's akin to using OUTCLEANS. If you really wants spermatic as the con, find another scramble so that somebody could fall into the falsey trap rather than just give the falsey.

[JackHurst]

What a game. Solid performance from Dan there today. Commiserations to Elliott.

The 2 QF conundrums are a step up in difficulty from the 8 R16 conundrums so far. As Graeme said, Dan did the right thing to approach it like a 14r game.

Never really understood Elliott's obsession with 5 vowels. It tends to flatten the rounds and gives you less opportunity to take points off opponents who are weaker letters players (Not saying Dan is weak, but just relatively weaker than Elliott)


Sounds like Elliott may have spotted METASOMA but didn't risk it, but the editing of this was a bit confusing....

[Sam Cappleman-Lynes]

Sounds like Elliott may have spotted METASOMA but didn't risk it, but the editing of this was a bit confusing....

Elliott was asked whether he was holding back from a longer word after the declarations in that round and he did indeed have METASOMA - but it didn't make the edit

[Philip A]

When two players are at the top of their game, tactics become futile - there’s so little you can do other than play the best you can. After all it’s finding the best answers that count. That said, I notice there were no 6-consonant selections, which could have made the letters game more taxing.

[JackHurst]

When two players are at the top of their game, tactics become futile - there’s so little you can do other than play the best you can.

Yeah it an interesting argument. However you could also argue if two top players are playing you know it will be close so it could be tactics that makes the difference. This game was a prime example of that.

[Fiona T]

The numbers game was interesting. For someone like me who is terrible (but improving slowly!) at 6s, my instinct is always to try to turn it into 1L so I spotted it pretty much instantly. A couple of others in the hospitality room said they only saw it when I announced it was "easy". Approaching it with factorisation and that other 6sey stuff was going to get nowhere - sounds like both Elliott and Dan took that route, with Dan finally trying a different tack late into the 30s which gave him the win.

Great stuff Dan! Gutted for Elliott, but over the moon for Dan - lovely lad and so humble with it!

[Philip A]

When two players are at the top of their game, tactics become futile - there’s so little you can do other than play the best you can.

Yeah it an interesting argument. However you could also argue if two top players are playing you know it will be close so it could be tactics that makes the difference. This game was a prime example of that.

I think also in the long run it gets harder and harder to outwit your opponents with words you know that they don’t. If at least one of them had known DANDIACAL, that would have been very pitoval. Given their form, it could easily have gone to a tie-break conundrum as well.

[Andres Sanchez]

My opinion: a non-obscure conundrum, even if it's solved on a buzzer race, is preferable to an obscure word that goes unsolved.

I still think 2018 Graeme’s view on conundrums is one of the best posts this forum has ever seen.

Having searched for a few of these online here are a couple of conundrums I’d have set/reused for this tournament:

MUDHUTLOO
DIANARIOT
MULTICONS
CRAMPIEST

How many of these are an instant buzzer race?

I'm not the greatest con player in the world and got all 4 of these just by looking at them so all 4 are instant buzzer races.

Crampiest particularly bad since people learn falsey's.It's akin to using OUTCLEANS. If you really wants spermatic as the con, find another scramble so that somebody could fall into the falsey trap rather than just give the falsey.

I'm with Adam on the cons. I don't really have any issue with them, but I can see why people react the way that they do. It's a really high standard, so the conundrums should absolutely reflect that

[Johnny Canuck]

DIANARIOT

For what it’s worth, solving that one from the audience was the very first thing Elliott did on Countdown.

[Ryan Lam]

Busy back-to-back weekends for me as I've got unfinished work in the office to settle (That's the life of an Engineer for you, people do chase you for work while you're not in office, sigh...) so this is coming late. Nice, Dan is wearing his trademark spectacles and his Hawaiian style shirts are back, a classic as you can call it! Elliott on the other hand chooses to dress smartly for the occasion. Let's find out if the Friday the 13th curse will strike either contestant here...

Letters: Great opening round as Dan has MEERKAT, then it was tied all the way from R2 to R8 with both of them spotting the exact same word!

Elliott was asked whether he was holding back from a longer word after the declarations in that round and he did indeed have METASOMA - but it didn't make the edit

In preparation for the game, Adam had suggested to me to avoid 5 large because Elliott is good at it. However, in that moment, I thought it would be nice to fish for AILERON which would have been an obvious max and allow me to relax and settle down for 30secs, and even if the A didn't come, there would definitely be no 9s so I couldn't go behind, and I'm not so bad at 5 vowels myself. Of course, when the A didn't come, my mind panicked. My brain started using the time berating myself for doing what I wasn't supposed to do in picking 5 vowels instead of solving the anagrams. RELINE is a spot I must have seen dozens of times and feels an embarrassing miss but fortunately wasn't a difference-maker in the end.

It was later revealed in the Daily Chat that Elliott actually had METASOMA in R8, unlucky all round as that was the maximum there! After the second teaser in R10, see what happens when you go for that combination Dan? Elliott beats him as onlier is invalid! Great playing from both contestants for the most part, with a last commendable spot of SUBEDARI by Dan in R12!

Numbers: Elliott tries 6 Small in R3, and if you see quickly, this was a sneaky 1 Large puzzle with 5 Numbers in disguise. Dan gets the target perfectly to take the lead as it didn't work out for the former! Dan chooses to play safe with 2 Large next and too easy, move on. With Dan still ten points ahead by R8, Elliott tries that same combination again but it didn't faze the former as both get the target spot-on! Finally, Dan goes safe with 1 Large in R14...argh, too easy again, but the good news? Double century game, and the first for this Championship! Well done to both for making it happen after ten episodes!

Conundrum: Two quarter-finals, two crucial conundrums. Can Elliott unscramble this fiendish conundrum to take the day? I hear a buzzer, it's from him and no, he doesn't have the answer which means Dan automatically wins from that point!! Dan tries andalacid but base on his guess, I'm sure all of us pretty knew that's incorrect too and this means, it's a wipeout for the entire week! Not a single conundrum solved here by the contestants who were filmed (other contestants did get some of them backstage, but it doesn't count), damn. I suppose a tactic for the remaining episodes is to be ahead before this section if you want to advance further in the Championship...

You simply cannot help feel anything but sorry for Elliott especially if he had risked METASOMA he would have won. It's like his Grand Final all over again where a discarded risky but valid word cost him the game, and he looked so glum on-screen afterwards. However, Elliott, if you're reading this, in my eyes, you will always be the pioneer of the 1000-point club and you will always be a GOAT here. You paved the way and inspired others to join the club, and you definitely showed the community that it can be done four years ago. You got to came back, got "revenge" against Dinos but sadly it's the end of the road for you. While you may have lost this match and perhaps didn't get as much media attention as Tom Stevenson recently did at the time, you can look back and see how far you've come all those years ago and Countdown is definitely worth watching because of people like you. In fact, just look at how many people have paid their compliments in this thread alone! Congratulations on your ZoomDown achievements as well, and may you continue to never stop playing the game for years to come!

Phew, two weeks done and dusted and two Semi-Final spots confirmed, 50 more weeks to go in the Year, but one last week of our Championship before we see who is the best of the best that has survived in the 15 episodes! This is going to be the gigantic match to watch, the "stronger" of the two pairs of Grand Champions, one in terms of his points, the other in terms of his vocabulary. It's Luke going against Ahmed, who shall prevail to face Dan on Thursday? We're into the final stretch, expect a packed virtual audience I guess!

Progress:
Preliminary 1 (02 January 2023): Florence Cappleman-Lynes (Series 84 Runner-Up) vs Leo Smith (Series 82 Semi-Finalist) (100 - 69)
Preliminary 2 (03 January 2023): Dinos Sfyris (Series 80 Grand Champion) vs Elliott Mellor (Series 80 Runner-Up) (88 - 110)
Preliminary 3 (04 January 2023): Ahmed Mohamed (Series 84 Grand Champion) vs Edward Byrne (Series 86 Runner-Up) (121 - 76)
Preliminary 4 (05 January 2023): Stu Harkness (Series 84 Semi-Finalist) vs James Haughton (Series 81 Grand Champion) (97 - 111)
Preliminary 5 (06 January 2023): Tom Stevenson (Series 86 Grand Champion) vs Adam Latchford (Series 83 Grand Champion) (95 - 97)
Preliminary 6 (09 January 2023): Martin May (Series 79 Runner-Up) vs Luke-Johnson Davies (Series 82 Grand Champion) (90 - 117)
Preliminary 7 (10 January 2023): Steve Hyde (Series 85 Semi-Finalist) vs Dan Byrom (Series 85 Grand Champion) (70 - 108)
Preliminary 8 (11 January 2023): Matt O'Connor (Series 85 Runner-Up) vs Sam Cappleman-Lynes (Series 82 Runner-Up) (78 - 101)
Quarter-Finals 1 (12 January 2023): Florence Cappleman-Lynes (Preliminary 1 Winner) vs Sam Cappleman-Lynes (Preliminary 8 Winner) (95 - 93)
Quarter-Finals 2 (13 January 2023): Elliott Mellor (Preliminary 2 Winner) vs Dan Byrom (Preliminary 7 Winner) (102 - 106)
Quarter-Finals 3 (16 January 2023): Ahmed Mohamed (Preliminary 3 Winner) vs Luke Johnson-Davies (Preliminary 6 Winner)
Quarter-Finals 4 (17 January 2023): James Haughton (Preliminary 4 Winner) vs Adam Latchford (Preliminary 5 Winner)
Semi-Finals 1 (18 January 2023): Florence Cappleman-Lynes (Quarter-Finals 1 Winner) vs (Quarter-Finals 4 Winner)
Semi-Finals 2 (19 January 2023): Dan Byrom (Quarter-Finals 2 Winner) vs (Quarter-Finals 3 Winner)
Championship Final (20 January 2023): (Semi-Finals 1 Winner) vs (Semi-Finals 2 Winner)

[Conor]

Very well played Dan. Took the early opening and held your nerve through the match, strong tactical play getting the call in round 14 right.

Really feel for you Elliott: Dan was on form today and the way the letters fell made it tricky to get ahead before the conundrum. I missed the 1st numbers watching at home, and a shame about METASOMA.

Just to add, I've really liked the conundrums so far. A good mix of some I've instantly spotted, some that have taken a bit longer, some I've guessed and some I've missed.

[Toby McDonald]

Fantastic game guys, very well played by both. Congratulations Dan. Great 6S solve in R3, and unlucky with onlier as ONLIEST is valid. Gutted for Elliott, commiserations. Very unlucky to chicken METASOMA. Was really looking forward to the chance of an Elliott-Ahmed semi-final - would've surely been a classic.