Mastermind - Round One - Heat 6

Another week, and another first round characterized by long questions – unnecessarily long in my opinion. Three of the rounds gave every evidence of being very good rounds, yet 13 was the highest score again.

Right then, to business. Anne-Marie Rosoman was the first into the chair, and she offered us Swedish pop combo Abba. Cards on the table here – even if I had time now to take the wiki challenge, which I don’t, I would have had a go at this one without a wiki boost. I didn’t do too badly either. There were enough gentle ones for those of us who were around at the time and have long memories to pick off a half dozen, and 6 is exactly the number that I managed myself. 12 points and no passes, and little doubt in my mind that Anne-Marie was very much in contention going into the GK round.

I’ve been racking my brain to try to think of exactly where I’ve seen Richard Chaney before. He looks very familiar, and I’m sure that I’ve seen him at a quiz event – but I can’t remember which one it is. Whatever the case, I announced from the sofa to no one in particular ‘This guy’s a quizzer, and unless he has a ‘mare on his specialist he’s going to be very difficult for them to beat.’ Answering on Charles M. Schultz Richard certainly didn’t have a ‘mare at all. He managed 12 and 1 pass. Slightly more remarkable to me was the fact that I managed 6 of them, with 4 known answers and 2 good guesses. I won’t say that I thought the game was over then and there, but I did think that this round made Richard a favourite to take the show.

That may have been doing a disservice to the remaining contenders. Bernard Walsh, the third contender of the evening, offered us a sterling performance on the England bowler Harold Larwood, he of the infamous ‘bodyline’ Ashes series. My luck ran out on this round and I only managed 2, which was still enough to give me one of my higher aggregates on specialist. Given the length of the questions Bernard went like the clappers, and his reward was a score of 13 points and no passes, the specialist round of the evening.

Michael Frankl’s subject of Frederick the Great was probably the most traditional of the subjects on offer in last night’s show. Michael obviously knew his stuff – a lot more than me since I was lucky to get 2 – but he wasn’t the quickest of the evening at getting his answers in. A couple of wrong answers didn’t help, and he leveled out at 10 and 3 passes. That’s a perfectly respectable score under these conditions, but I fancied it would leave him trailing in the Gk round.

We would soon find out the truth of my prognosis, since Michael was the first to return to the chair. In terms of correct answers he actually started really well. However he was going for accuracy rather than speed, and in a two and a half minute round it can be very difficult to maintain your focus if you haven’t built up the momentum. Some long pauses meant that a round which actually looked quite a bit better provided him with 11 points. As with his specialist round this is a perfectly respectable performance – 21 is not a score to be the least bit ashamed of. However it is not a winning score in all but the most exceptional of circumstances. Anne Marie’s round provided a fine contrast to Michael’s. She seemed to go for speed rather than accuracy. She only passed on 1, but had a number of unlucky guesses, and didn’t quite manage to get into double figures. So she too finished with 21 points.

I had already predicted that Richard would win on general knowledge, and thankfully my reputation as a prognosticator remained intact at the end of his round. His very good round. With Richard we had the combination of both accuracy and speed that you need to post a genuinely good GK total. In Richard’s case it was 16, and his total of 28 achieved two things. It pretty much guaranteed him a repechage slot, and to my mind set a target which was going to be very difficult for our final contender, Bernard, to reach. He had a go, I give him that. Bernard kept answering, and indeed answered every question. However I dare to say that he isn’t a regular quizzer, because he missed quite a few, well, not exactly ‘sitters’ , but questions which were the sort of thing that a regular quizzer would know without even having to think that much about the answers. He posted 11 to finish with 23, and second place, but no repechage slot.

So well played Richard. A good performance. Good luck in the semis.

The Details

Anne-Marie Rosoman	Abba	12 – 0	9 - 1	21 - 1
Richard Chaney	Life and Work of Charles M. Schultz	12 - 1	16 - 3	28 -4
Bernard Walsh	Harold Larwood	13 - 0	10 – 0	23 - 0
Michael Frankl	Frederick the Great	10 - 3	11 - 2	21 - 5

Repechage Table

Beth Webster 28 – 2
Andrew Teale – 27 – 5
Barry Nolan 26 – 3
Howard Davies – 26 – 5
Ricki Kendall 25 – 4
John Berridge 24 – 3