Advice wanted

[John Bosley]

I've just posted an application for potential contestant. It has taken many years to get round to this, but if I should get a reply is there any advice about does and dont's. Cheers.

[Charlie Reams]

I suppose my best advice is to decide what you want to get out of it.

If you want to win a few and maybe get to the finals, you should practise a lot, especially the numbers which are a good deal harder under studio conditions. Learn split multiplication!

On the other hand, if you just want to have your 38 minutes of fame, relax and enjoy the day. You get fantastically looked after from audition through to recording, so make the most of it.

In either case, if you get on to the show, (try to) look like you're enjoying it, engage with Jeff when he talks to you, and be gracious no matter the result (although I'm sure you would be anyway). And don't bother with word study, the hit rate is far too low.

[John Bosley]

Thanks for that, Charlie.

[Ian Dent]

What does word study mean?

[Charlie Reams]

What does word study mean?

Learning stems, high probability 7s, etc. You need to put in a lot of hours before you have any chance of payback.

[David O'Donnell]

Personally, I found stems useful and think there are some short cuts to comprising a logical high probability list.

Firstly I thought about the letters that have the highest probability of being selected:

P R E D A T I O N S

Then I started making 6 letter stems from these letters by turning my greatest weakness, laziness, into a potential strength. The weakness was scanning for common endings like -er, -ier, -iest, -ies, -ite, -ate, -tion etc.. If you are thinking of constructing your own list then you should choose the patterns to which you tend to be drawn.

So the six letter stems could be of the form danier donier dinier panier ponier pinier etc. and I kept repeating the pattern with various combinations of letters and various endings to which I would be immediately drawn.

For seven letter stems I just added a letter, well duh, and repeated the pattern and so on with the 8 letter stems with particular importance placed on iest endings like parniest/porniest/darniest/dorniest etc..

Then I added a few slightly less probable letters like B, C, G, H, M etc. and repeated the pattern. I think the benefit is that you can see seven letters like CARNIES and immediately know that ARSENIC is there and what letters can be added to it to make an eight letter word.

A word of caution: have plenty of stems, if you plan to use them, that do not contain an E and/or an S; when you spot, say, a nice seven don't get lazy and think you can't add anything to it since you know its stems: start looking at the other letters and see if there is a pure 8 you can spot or even a 9; also, experiment with stems where a letter is repeated.

Charlie is quite right, there can be many times where the stems will be useless so you need to complement this kind of study with heavy duty practice on apterous (assuming you want to make the finals). For me, though, having something in the way of crib notes when I want on the show was relaxing, it's good to look at a group of letters and spot a seven straight away giving you thirty seconds to find something a bit more creative.

Outside of stemming scanning for common prefixes and suffixes is vital even slightly less common ones. I mean ... only an idiot wouldn't quickly scan a -icide suffix if it were in the selection.

Edit: For the audition you might want to practise using one of the Countdown puzzle books. They have the types of word puzzle that are similar to the audition in that there is generally an easy 6, fairly straightforward 7, tough 8 and ECLAMPSIA for nine.

[John Bosley]

Thanks a bunch for that advice David. I wish I had never applied.

[David O'Donnell]

Thanks a bunch for that advice David. I wish I had never applied.

As Charlie says it isn't essential to learn stems, for some it can actually be off-putting. As long as you are putting in the practice on apterous you'll be grand, John. Didn't mean to scare you and definitely didn't mean to put you off. I think when it comes down to it my view of the usefulness of stems put me in the minority around here.

[David Williams]

Advice for normal people.

First thing is to get through the audition. Remember the selections are not random as they are on the show. There are eight and nine letter words in there. (Don't think I'm giving any secrets away. You can audition more than once, so any second-timer must know this.)

Best return of additional points per hour of study for the average contestant has to be practising numbers. Every day someone loses a lot of points by failing to think of split multiplication.

[Clive Brooker]

I think auditionees who have some idea what they are doing are almost certain to pass the audition these days. In the past there have been excellent players like Simon Cooper and Martin Gardner who have struggled to get on the show at all. During the Mearns/Cooper final RW spoke of 3000 auditionees for 200 places. I may be wrong, but I don't believe ratio can be anywhere near that now.

So I would advise against using the audition for experience (not suggesting that this applies to you, John). Once you agree to an audition it is very likely that you'll be recording in a few weeks, so be sure that you're comfortable with that.

[Gavin Chipper]

Just to carry on from Charlie and David, a lot of people say not to bother with learning stems and word lists and that just playing is the best way (especially since Apterous means that games are easily available). But presumably while you might not sit down and do stemming, I imagine people do try and commit stems to memory if they come up in a game. Like if GRAB is your best word, and you are beaten by GARBA, you might try and remember that GRAB+A=GARBA. So that is stemming of sorts. I'd be interested to know how much people who "just play" analyse their misses.

[D Eadie]

I'd be interested to know how much people who "just play" analyse their misses.

I imagine most 'players' would prefer to analyse other people's missus.