October's Daily Duel

[Julie T]

If two people or more are tied, is there any logic to the order the names appear in the list?

Nope.

Thanks, Joseph - exactly what I meant!
And thanks for the answer, Charlie.

[Dinos Sfyris]

Going by yesterday's duel, very well done to Dan Vanniasingham and James Hurrell for getting the conundrum ENCHILADA.

Yes well done - a hard one. I had HACIENDA for a nice 8 but didn't know the nine. Turns out only S and L can be added to HACIENDA to make nines so easy to learn!

*Smacks himself on the forehead after taking nearly a minute to figure out HACIENDA + S*

[Dan Vanniasingham]

Going by yesterday's duel, very well done to Dan Vanniasingham and James Hurrell for getting the conundrum ENCHILADA.

Cheers Joseph. That has to be one of the least deserved Duel victories, given that I maxed none of the letters rounds, but my conundrum practice the previous day paid off. Letters practice next methinks...

[Joseph Bolas]

Going by yesterday's duel, very well done to Dan Vanniasingham and James Hurrell for getting the conundrum ENCHILADA.

Cheers Joseph. That has to be one of the least deserved Duel victories, given that I maxed none of the letters rounds, but my conundrum practice the previous day paid off. Letters practice next methinks...

You may not have maxed in all the rounds, but actually you were the only person who got points in every round of the duel, so that's still something to be victorious of

[Damian E]

I almost feel like weeping.

[Charlie Reams]

Last day of October today and it's pretty much down to Paul vs Kirk for the monthly top stop; Kirk needs to finish 6 places ahead of Paul to grab the crown. Can he do it? Stay tuned to find out!

Congrats to Steven Briers for a sweet performance on today's Blind Duel btw, dropping only 4 points in 16 rounds.

[Julie T]

Congrats to Steven Briers for a sweet performance on today's Blind Duel btw, dropping only 4 points in 16 rounds.

Now, this isn't sour grapes, since I'm usually close to the bottom in the duel points table anyway.
But, I am a little suspicious of people who get close to the max score in a blind duel. Or do many of you have photographic memories, so can keep all the letters in your head?
I'm wondering if some people write the letters down. It isn't specified on the duel that you shouldn't, and it's a mistake that I made on my first blind game.
Maybe it should be specified, although that wouldn't stop people cheating, but they'd at least know that they were cheating.

Now that I play blind games properly, I often use letters that I thought were there, which judging by some zero rounds lower down the table, so do others.
Although generally I accept that most of you have superior Countdown skills than I have, I'm rather suspicious of those with no zero letters rounds scores in a blind game.

Sorry to sound so accusing - I didn't know how else to word this. I hope someone replies with a perfectly valid explanation!

[Damian E]

Can i give you my take on it Julie. This is only my take, not sure what everyone else does.

I've played a few blind games now, and as the game browser will show, i've entered words that didn't have the correct letters, because i've got the attention span of a stick insect and have often looked away for a second and missed some letters.

Having said that, in the latest blind duel, i found it very helpful to make smaller words from the letters. Let me give you an example.......

In the blind duel Rd 6, the letters came out as E T U R I L F T H.

I try to make a word asap and remember it, in this case it was TRUE from the first four. Its far easier remembering a word than remembering a random string of letters. Once TRUE is stored, its a case of looking at the other 5 and either remembering them in order, or in this case, i made FILTH from them, so the selection became TRUE FILTH. Easy to remember and play with in your head.

Also, if the letters are not as nice as the selection above, there is a case for trying to make up a sentence, but this is slightly harder. If you look at the duel Rd 13, I S O P E K D T L , i would think something like I Sat On Peters Expensive Kitten During Tomorrows Lunch. Its a nonsense sentence of course, but it helps you remember the letters in the selection. Don't know if this is what the others guys do, maybe i'm just weird, but that's how i managed to cope with the blind game WITHOUT writing anything down.

[Charlie Reams]

Can i give you my take on it Julie. This is only my take, not sure what everyone else does.

That's pretty much what I do. You have to be quite fast at forming words or pseudowords as the letters come up, and duplicate letters are particularly problematic (I noticed I wasn't the only person who went for EXEUNTS in Round 1), but it's the best technique I know of.

[Kirk Bevins]

Can i give you my take on it Julie. This is only my take, not sure what everyone else does.

That's pretty much what I do. You have to be quite fast at forming words or pseudowords as the letters come up, and duplicate letters are particularly problematic (I noticed I wasn't the only person who went for EXEUNTS in Round 1), but it's the best technique I know of.

I look at the letters as they come out and write them on an imaginary piece of paper in my head and as you get more advanced at Countdown, STRNAEI turns into RETAINS with no effort and so it's quite easy to get longish words from the selection.
You will notice some players doing this with conundrums too - they look away (Jono is one I think) and stare into midair and the letters jumble around in their head. The same principle happens with other anagram problems - e.g. my mate said they spent ages on an anagram question in the pub quiz and so I asked them what it was and within seconds gave them the answer mentally. The anagram was GROW ANGLE GRASS and the answer is a football team. Have a go. You shouldn't need to pick off the letters one by one, you should be able to "see" the answer. With this method, I couldn't tell you if there was an extra S or an R missing but you get the general gist of the selection.

[Julie T]

Thanks, everyone!
Maybe I'm just not as good at retaining and visualising, although I did get 'GLASGOW RANGERS' quickly, Kirk!

[Gavin Chipper]

Also in the winner onlt scores duel where a million people tied for top, how come they got 28 points when there were 25 entrants? Normally they would get 25 wouldn't they? I still think you should use my scoring system.

Good question. I guess the scoring system needs some work.

I see now - three bonus points for the maximum.

[Gavin Chipper]

Going back to this, I think going up from one point in ones doesn't work that well. Finishing 1st out of 20 is obviously better than 8th out of 27. Using the logic from the "Heights" thread in the off-topic forum, 1st out of 20 makes you a "1 in 21" player, whereas 8th out of 27 makes you a "8 in 28" player. The scores could reflect this.

My pseudo-logical rambling method would be to add one to the number of players and your score would be that number over your finishing position. 9th out of 26 would mean 27/9=3 points. There would be weird fractions but a computer can keep track of them easily enough.

As for draws, instead of simply giving everyone the higher score, I would split the points between them. 1st and 2nd out of 19 would normally (under my system) get 20 and 10 points so we could give them 15 each. Or we could say they finished 1.5th and give them 13.333.

Also could only count 20 or so scores in a month as people are likely to miss some, and it would reward good play rather than consistency.

I still don't like the scoring system in the daily duels so I thought I'd bump this.

[Ian Dent]

Just read this thread thinking it was for this year. Was so confused.