Unbreakable (or almost) Countdown records

[Philip A]

A non-exhaustive of records which may never be broken, for various reasons (e.g. rule changes or simply too good);

- In 2006, Conor Travers made headlines by becoming the youngest ever series winner at the age of 14. In 2011, the age limit was increased to 16. This prevented a couple of players, notably Oliver Garner and Eoin Monaghan, from entering the 30th Birthday Championship to record in 2012 and air in 2013 (though Monaghan did later appear on University Challenge). The youngest ever contestant was 8 years old;

- Dylan Taylor, who competed in the first series to entirely use the current format featuring 4 numbers rounds, remarkably scored points in every numbers game he faced across his 15 appearances. He played 15 matches and therefore 60 numbers games, and scored points in all 60 them, meaning he lost none – he scored no fewer than 7 points in fact. Moreover, he scored maximum available points in 56 of them and was one away from the target in the other 4;

- In the 30th Birthday Championship in 2013, Conor Travers achieved 3 maximum scoring games in a row. He also maxed 14 rounds thereafter, and matched that with 14 maxed rounds in a special episode in 2020. It could have been 5 max games. He was also perfect on numbers games from the start of the 30BC up until final when Rachel beat both players in the first numbers game. It should be noted however that there were only 3 numbers games back then – a 4th numbers game would be added two weeks after the championship, replacing an 11th letters game;

- In 1991, Series 21 had the most games to end in a draw, with 4. When a game ended with the scores level, both players would return for another game the next day. One of these draws included an octochamp with 2 draws, therefore appearing on an unbreakable record of 10 consecutive shows. From Series 22 onwards, all tied matches would be decided by tie-break conundrums.

- Series 1 in 1982 ran for only 27 episodes, making it the shortest regular series (barring Champion of Champions). It had just 26 heats and a Grand Final (no quarter- or semi-). The next series had 16 finalists, which in fact was every contestant bar 2. Series 3 settled on 8 finalists which we have now (though the final 9 round series just had 4 finalists).

A reminder this list is not exhaustive.

[Fred Mumford]

As at the conclusion of Series 7 and Series 8, there was no such thing as an unbeaten contestant in the show's history to that point.

[Philip A]

Yeah because Darryl Francis lost in Series 1 and was allowed to return in Series 6 when he went all the way (first returnee to become series champion).

[Gavin Chipper]

Also Helen Grayson retired unbeaten in series 1 but came back to lose in series 6, after retiring unbeaten for a second time after winning 7 games instead of 8 (and was still number 1 seed on points ahead of octochamp Francis).

[Gavin Chipper]

Elliott Mellor missing just 27 points in his entire octorun will be very hard to break.

Interestingly, in Conor Travers's last 7 games, starting with the beginning of his 30BC run and finishing with the special v Jack Worsley, he missed 29 points. His max count in those games was 12, 14, 15, 15, 15, 14, 14. This is better than Elliott's count (who never maxed a game), but he still lost two more points and with one fewer game.

[Philip A]

Very true. I think 1,000+ points in 8 straight games is still practically possible, but a fraction harder without all those OED words imported from 2015-2024.

Tom Carey’s combined time of 17.75 seconds across 8 conundrums is also a very tough one to break. We very rarely see conundrums solved before the clock lights up now.

[Philip A]

- I believe Zarte is the only person ever to score a century with 6 rounds to spare (before the second commercial break). The cull would not have affected the record, and the max would only be 1 point lower now (with ‘pardonee’ being the only deletion offered). In other words, Zarte has the fastest century. Conor also scored a century in the 30BC final before the second break, but it came with 5 rounds to spare because of the different format;

- Only Julian Fell has declared 4 valid 9-letter words in the letters games; had he got the conundrum, which was missed by both players, the record would still stand today at 156.

[Gavin Chipper]

11 points for the conundrum in those days?

[Philip A]

11 points for the conundrum in those days?

Uuh I can’t get anything right these days.

[Gavin Chipper]

83 is the record score for a 9-round game (and is unlikely to be broken now that they don't use the format any more), but if we could visit a few dozen parallel universes, we might find that among those universes, 83 is the lowest record score for a 9-rounder. In other words, I'd say it was statistically fairly unlikely that from 1982 to 2001 no-one would score higher than 83. Pretty much a freak occurrence in fact.

Edit - The relevance to this thread is that it's an unbeatable record across the parallel universes.

[Gavin Chipper]

Perhaps not as freak as the 83, but Conor being the youngest champion at 14 is higher than it could have been given that Allan Saldanha (10), Andrew Perry (11) and Tim Morrissey (12) were all number one seeds. So maybe not an unbreakable record across the parallel universes in the same way as 83, but still maybe an outlier. Though one could argue that having all those number one seeds so young was itself a fluke, and the fact that none of them won their series was just one fluke counteracting another.

Edit - Also Tim Morrissey won the CoC about two years after his debut, so was presumably about 14. Do we know if he was older or younger than Conor at the time of recording?