Spoilers for Tuesday 22nd June 2021 (Series 83, Fourth Quarter Final)

[Rhys Benjamin]

LOUIS ROSS
Highest score: 112 vs Linda Piper, game 4
Lowest score: 76 vs Kirsty Watt, game 3
Score: 738
Average: 92.25
Max faced: 1,033
% score: 71.4%
Raw score: 792
Raw average: 99.00
Raw % score: 76.7%
Conundrums: 6/8

CORAL HEATH
Highest score: 106 vs Neil McFarlane, game 8
Lowest score: 74 vs George Thomson, game 3
Score: 717
Average: 89.63
Max faced: 1,041
% score: 68.9%
Raw score: 798
Raw average: 99.75
Raw % score: 76.7%
Conundrums: 5/8

This is a bit of a toss-up for me, but I've predicted Louis.

[Gavin Chipper]

I don't know if either of them are now on Apterous or have been practising, but I thought that Louis was harder to beat than Coral during their runs and I would have expected a bigger gap in their stats actually. But it could all be different now.

[Mark Kudlowski]

1st numbers alt:

(((9 x 2) + 4) x 9) + (5 x 100)

[Marc Meakin]

Alt last numbers (7 + 7) x 5 x 4 = 280 + 9

[Gavin Chipper]

Allowing PICRITES was slightly controversial I think but it didn't make a difference in the end.

[Tom S]

Enjoyable game- definitely the sort of match Paul would pair together for a ZoomDown game. Good spots from both players during the game, too. Interestingly, both the last game Louis won and this one had the same scoreline too- coincidentally, after coming from behind to win it....

[Rhys Benjamin]

I've given it the admin error category given she disallowed vaseline the other day. http://c4countdown.co.uk/viewtopic.php? ... 2b97e1fb7b

[Ryan Lam]

Four more episodes to go before Nick Hewer retires, and as I was mentioning yesterday about Channel 4 promoting his successor Anne Robinson, we got a promo featuring her from most likely the first episode of Series 84 although of course, that will be confirmed next week! Also, this post is later than usual as my arm is still quite sore from getting the first COVID-19 vaccine today so my typing speed is a lot slower than usual.

Letters: Great start from both contestants and Louis pulls ahead with LUNCHER in R4 followed by Coral getting PICRITES in R5 (I know, there's a lot of controversy both here and in the Daily Chat but I will stay out of this mess as the game was ultimately not decided by this word). After Rufus goes "mental" with his poem about Shakespeare's Broken Printer, Coral takes the lead with EMIGRATES in R7 but Louis clambers back with COSTEAN in R10 after the second break. Afterwards, it was tied all the way that it probably left everyone on the edge of their seats.

Numbers: Coral is the one that takes the first gamble in R6 and it pays off when Louis blanks out. Probably sensing her tactic, the latter gambles too in R9 but it was manageable. Then, came the decisive R14 when the gambling game is on to force a Crucial Conundrum. Alas, it backfires heavily on Coral as Louis takes the day with a perfect solution and the game is over. On a sidenote, nice solve from Rachel in R3 when most of us in the Daliy Chat had a simpler solution and you so got us there in R6 when you showed the best possible solution (I thought it was actually possible )

Conundrum: Even though Louis had already won, Coral doesn't give up and gets ABATEMENT which means all four Quarter-Final conundrums have been solved! (I got the answer a few seconds after that) Imagine what would have happened if Louis failed to get the exact target in R14, the former would have caused the first upset since Series 80 two years ago but sadly that did not materialise here.

Given that Adam was supposed to have faced Coral here, based on today's performance, I would say Adam would have won but by around the same margin of around 10-15 points without a Crucial Conundrum. As for the predictions wise here, I predicted Louis would win by around 20 points without a Crucial Conundrum and while I was indeed right about the second part, the first wasn't so accurate with the margin at a razer thin 5 points. Poor Coral, it was literally her final gamble that was her downfall here and it's painful to see that she could have actually won minus the PICRITES controversy. However, not all was lost. After all, being the first female Octochamp in two years is something of a feat that hopefully we can see more of when Anne takes the chair from next week onwards. All the best in your acting career and hopefully we will see more of you on-screen soon!

Enjoyable game- definitely the sort of match Paul would pair together for a ZoomDown game. Good spots from both players during the game, too.

Probably out of all the matches so far this was the most enjoyable one so far and I have to agree. The calibre that both contestants had made me think that: "Hmm, making that mistake of putting Louis here wasn't so bad after all".

Just like the last Series, no upsets yet again in the Quarter-Finals! Will Louis be like Dave and shake things up again or will Luke perform an easy sweep to secure a place in Nick's final ever episode of Countdown? The end is nearly in sight, don't go anywhere!

Progress:
QF1 (17 June): Luke Boynton (#1) vs Dave Lomax (#8) (99 - 47)
QF2 (18 June): James Burley (#2) vs Tom Vincent (#7) (100 - 66)
QF3 (21 June): Adam Latchford (#3)* vs Declan McGurk (#6) (99 - 40)
QF4 (22 June): Louis Ross (#4)* vs Coral Heath (#5) (88 - 83)
SF1 (23 June): Luke Boynton (QF1 Winner) vs Louis Ross (QF4 Winner)*
SF2 (24 June): James Burley (QF2 Winner) vs Adam Latchford (QF3 Winner)*
GF (25 June): (SF1 Winner) vs (SF2 Winner)

[Philip A]

Susie saying no to VASELINE and yes to PICRITES has made me raise a ticket: https://www.apterous.org/ticket_view.php?ticket=6165

[Toby McDonald]

DELEATUR in R13

R14 Alt.: 7*4*(9-7)*5+9 = 289

[David Williams]

Allowing PICRITES was slightly controversial I think but it didn't make a difference in the end.

I would have agreed it was slightly controversial, were it not that eleven days ago we were told VASELINE would not be allowed, despite the fact that it was lower case in all the examples.
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=14708&p=194141#p194141
Philip A told us "I think Countdown has changed the rules, David. They’ve abandoned the practice of reviewing example sentences now. I had a discussion with the producer following Susie ruling vaseline invalid:
“The example sentences are lifted from the internet, which i didn't know at the time, hence we've decided to ignore them and use the main entry as the boss.”
So I would say it was more than slightly controversial.

[Graeme Cole]

I've given it the admin error category given she disallowed vaseline the other day. http://c4countdown.co.uk/viewtopic.php? ... 2b97e1fb7b

I don't agree this belongs in the admin error category. That category is for clear mistakes where there's no room for argument - for example, a vowel coming from the consonant box, a word being allowed which isn't in the selection, someone getting 5 points for a 5-away numbers, etc. In my opinion, DC judgement calls like this should never be considered "admin errors" unless the production team confirms that a specific ruling was a mistake.

As far as I know there has been no official ruling that the usage examples are never used to decide borderline mass noun cases, only that they wouldn't use them to decide if a capitalised word can be used in lowercase. There may be a reduced significance put on the examples, but if Susie has to decide whether PICRITE is the kind of mass noun you can pluralise, and loads of the usage examples pluralise it, then why should she not take that into account in making the decision?

[David Williams]

Nearly all these things are Countdown trying to make the best of inconsistencies in the dictionary, of course. If you're going to print lots of examples of a word being used in a count noun sense, it should specify that it can be used as a count noun as well as a mass noun. As they increasingly do for all the things like LAGERS that gave rise to the restaurant rule. And equally, if there are lots of examples of a lower case trademark, they should specify that alternative as well.

[Fiona T]

I'm a Louis fan having played him a lot on apto, but I was lamenting Coral's tactical error in R14 - the only way that pick could have benefitted her was if she'd solved it, Louis hadn't, and the conundrum remained unsolved.

We'll never know what a "potentially straightforward" 1L would have thrown up, but I guess she might well have won the game.

(I then realised I made the same error in my QF , although it didn't prove decisive! )

[L'oisleatch McGraw]

Allowing PICRITES was slightly controversial I think but it didn't make a difference in the end.

Isn't there more than a whiff of virtue-signalling bullshit off this, though?
The presenters of the show need to appear impartial.
Rachel and Susie clearly rooting for any female (or <insert minority here>) contestant is crass enough, but to actually misadjudicate a round to favour such a contestant is a bridge too far.

I am tempted to send a letter of complaint.

[Rhys Benjamin]

No one has suggested it was allowed because it was Coral...?

[Gavin Chipper]

I'm a Louis fan having played him a lot on apto, but I was lamenting Coral's tactical error in R14 - the only way that pick could have benefitted her was if she'd solved it, Louis hadn't, and the conundrum remained unsolved.

We'll never know what a "potentially straightforward" 1L would have thrown up, but I guess she might well have won the game.

(I then realised I made the same error in my QF , although it didn't prove decisive! )

I would have done the same. It's not necessarily an error even if it didn't work out in that case. It comes down to how good you think you are relative to your opponent at numbers and conundrums. But I'm awful at conundrums.

[Carl Harrison]

I would also do the same. Conundrums in the series finals are often very difficult and go unsolved (e.g. in the previous series only 3 out of 7 in the finals were solved) - so agree it's often worth taking the gamble to try to get in the lead going into the conundrum, particularly if you've already beaten your opponent on a previous numbers game in the match.

Having said that, the conundrums in the 4 quarter-finals so far have been somewhat easier than previous series finals. I wonder if that's deliberate - if so think it's a good improvement, to have words which are a bit harder than heats games but still genuinely gettable by anyone - some of the ones in recent years have been such obscure words that only well-trained Apterites would know them which I don't think is particularly fair to all.

[Gavin Chipper]

As I just put in the Apterous ticket, the rule about example sentences probably only came about because people were confused by the VASELINE ruling. And this only came about after it was shown. So PICRITES would have already been filmed by then.

The chances are that Susie didn't check the example sentences for VASELINE because it's just a capitalised (and therefore disallowed) word. Mass nouns are different. They are a grey area and Susie probably thought the example sentences would help clarify. She didn't necessarily expect VASELINE in lower case to crop up in an example sentence because it's not what she's ever checked the example sentences for.

Anyway, the rule is presumably in place from now (or from after the VASELINE episode was shown), but they can't go back in time to change episodes that have already been filmed.

[Graeme Cole]

Allowing PICRITES was slightly controversial I think but it didn't make a difference in the end.

Isn't there more than a whiff of virtue-signalling bullshit off this, though?
The presenters of the show need to appear impartial.
Rachel and Susie clearly rooting for any female (or <insert minority here>) contestant is crass enough, but to actually misadjudicate a round to favour such a contestant is a bridge too far.

I am tempted to send a letter of complaint.

Please copy it here. We could do with a good laugh.

[L'oisleatch McGraw]

Please copy it here. We could do with a good laugh.

As it's you Graeme, certainly!

[Gavin Chipper]

Allowing PICRITES was slightly controversial I think but it didn't make a difference in the end.

Isn't there more than a whiff of virtue-signalling bullshit off this, though?
The presenters of the show need to appear impartial.
Rachel and Susie clearly rooting for any female (or <insert minority here>) contestant is crass enough, but to actually misadjudicate a round to favour such a contestant is a bridge too far.

I am tempted to send a letter of complaint.

With all the discussion on here and on Apterous about this, I thought I might say a couple of things.

First of all, I don't think that Susie would deliberately make a wrong judgement to favour the player she preferred to win.

However, everyone has biases, whether conscious or unconscious, and they can affect your judgement without you even knowing about it. So it's possible that in a borderline adjudication case, something along these lines could happen. But that's also asuming that Susie wa rooting for Coral. I know that Rachel quite explicitly shows favouritism on occasion, sometimes to the point of rudeness I'd say, but I haven't noticed it so much for Susie. In that sense, I think there's a lack of evidence of a motivation, and then there's also still the question of whether it really was a bad decision in the first place. As I said earlier in the thread:

As I just put in the Apterous ticket, the rule about example sentences probably only came about because people were confused by the VASELINE ruling. And this only came about after it was shown. So PICRITES would have already been filmed by then.

The chances are that Susie didn't check the example sentences for VASELINE because it's just a capitalised (and therefore disallowed) word. Mass nouns are different. They are a grey area and Susie probably thought the example sentences would help clarify. She didn't necessarily expect VASELINE in lower case to crop up in an example sentence because it's not what she's ever checked the example sentences for.

Anyway, the rule is presumably in place from now (or from after the VASELINE episode was shown), but they can't go back in time to change episodes that have already been filmed.

The "no example sentences" rule probably wasn't in place at the time of the adjudication.

But even if there was some bias in the decision, the evidence for it is so weak that speculating is one thing, but actively sending a letter of complaint (assuming this wasn't just an exaggeration) just won't gain any traction.

But did the same thing occur to me as occurred to Eoin? Sure, but it was just a thought - a bit of harmless speculation that I wasn't even intending to post on here - not a deep-rooted conviction of foul play.

[L'oisleatch McGraw]

No letter of complaint (sry Graeme)...
...and also, my opinion on this is not nearly as strident as that initial comment suggests.

I do however still think that this "Rachel and Susie clearly rooting for any female (or <insert minority here>) contestant" is a thing, and that it would be better for everyone if it wasn't.