c4countdown

To Matt's disappointment, another pretty simple spoiler today.

Mark Murphy has been a rather up and down champion so far, but he does have 5 wins to his name. Can he make it a sixth today and make the odds of appearing in the series final that much better? Susie and Michael Vaughan are still in dictionary corner, and Nick Hewer still won't order a medium-rare steak. Maybe I'll ask him about veal today.

Join James Robinson, best known for guessing Rye bread on Pointless, for a recap later.

EULOGIST is a nice 8 in round 6

PARANOIC as an equaller in Round 13. Sri looks like a very good player - some excellent spots

The champion really died today after being level at about half distance. I thought he was quite inconsistent anyway, sometimes getting a few good ones and then missing a load of obvious ones, but in the last half of the game we only saw his poorer side. I think he normally would have been closer than that, but Sri was better than him anyway.

This is game 13, not 12.

Nice to see Mark finally zhiqked. Sri was an awesome player (even though he missed that obvious nine in R3).

I was impressed with Sri as he certainly seems capable of winning a few more games and probably even becoming an octochamp. I would've needed SIGNATURE to outscore him as I missed RETRAINED. Definitely one to watch out for.

Mark seems like a cool guy, he handled a convincing defeat (and rather bizarre mockery from Nick) with good humour. Sri definitely deserved to win though, will be hard to imagine him losing if he keeps that standard up.

VERY high scoring game today, I had 115 there even though I blanked out in R3, R11 and R15. Credit to the contestants for picking so well - every round had 4 vowels, so it was a really nice, enjoyable, and open game. Real shame the maths was so easy though, if there was some tricky 4 large then it would have been one of the best games ever, heh, but yeah, the winner looks good - he had RETRAINED after like three seconds, and INVITEE and PAGODAS are very good for someone who doesn't play online. Shame he missed SIGNATURE - I guess it throws a lot of people because of the unused ING and IEST, but I was kinda hoping for the final N.

CAPITANO is there in round 13 - took me 35-40 sec to see it though.

Maybe Mark had had enough of being patronised by Nick Hewer. Any ambition i had to apply for the show has wilted since he arrived.

NOOOOO! Trying to catch up on 4oD and suddenly there are 3 adverts to get through first. Adblock Plus had always blocked them until now.

Edit: And another 3 at half-time :'(

Adam Gillard wrote:NOOOOO! Trying to catch up on 4oD and suddenly there are 3 adverts to get through first. Adblock Plus had always blocked them until now.

Edit: And another 3 at half-time :'(

And no good work-around at the moment. Seems like they've put in some way of checking if you're loading something from them - if the answer comes back "no", they assume you're using ABP and block you until you disable ABP. Gits.

Innis Carson wrote:Mark seems like a cool guy, he handled a convincing defeat (and rather bizarre mockery from Nick) with good humour. Sri definitely deserved to win though, will be hard to imagine him losing if he keeps that standard up.

I agree, Innis. Mark was definitely outclassed, but a good loser. I had thought him rather smug-looking in previous games whenever he was scoring well, but he was so cheerful in defeat that he's forgiven!

Sri definitely shows promise for achieving octochampdom, but, as always, it depends on the opposition he faces.

I'm inclined also, to partly agree about Nick's mockery. I still think on the whole that he's a breath of fresh air as the new host (as I've said before), but the downside of him making genuine comments, rather than just pre-prepared soundbytes, means that his drole humour can sometimes appear a bit nasty even if it's not meant to be.

Joyce Phillips wrote:Maybe Mark had had enough of being patronised by Nick Hewer. Any ambition i had to apply for the show has wilted since he arrived.

I do see your point, Joyce. I suppose it is possible that Nick and Mark had conversations in the green room about the approach, and Mark was OK with it. However, even if that was the case, I doubt that you're the only viewer to wonder how they'd feel being treated like that if they were a contestant. Rather academic for me personally, as I'm not considering applying for a few years yet anyway, and Nick has said he only wants to do a couple of years, but I would be wary.

Time will tell if he intends to treat everyone like this, but I would hope he has the sense to be more sensitive when necessary, or the contestant applications could well nosedive.