Sheep and Goats

I once had it said to me that anyone can have one good specialist round in Mastermind but it’s having two good specialist rounds in a row that sorts the men out from the boys, or the sheep from the goats, or whatever happens to be your analogy of choice.

I’m not totally sure I agree. For one thing not just anyone can have one good specialist round. There’s a number of factors which can work against you. There might be a mismatch between your understanding of the parameters of the subject and the question setter’s. You may have inadvertently chosen a subject that is just too wide. You might be under the weather on the day or overwhelmed by the atmosphere and the experience of actually being in THE chair. For whatever reason you might have been underprepared as well – family or work circumstances, hubris or just plain laziness.

I stress now that I haven’t carried out any kind of statistical analysis on this but it’s my impression that having a ‘mare is less likely on your second subject than your first. Just taking the current series, if we take the arbitrary score of 7 as an underperformance on Specialist, the of the 16 specialist rounds we’ve seen in the semi finals of this series so far, only four of them fell into this category. This may well be because you’ve already shown that you can prepare one specialist subject well to get you into the semis in the first place.

For what it’s worth I always found it helpful to view any subject I felt I could take on as being equally good. Once you start saying things like – I used up my best subject on the first round – you are actually giving yourself excuses for not preparing the next subject as well as you can. And as in real life, preparation is the best guarantee of success you ca possibly give yourself.