Mastermind 2023 Semi Final 2

 The Tale of the Tape

Well, the handicappers do seem to have a sense of humour this year, don’t they? After last week’s top heavy semi final which pitted highest and second highest scoring players from the first round against each other, this week saw the two lowest scoring qualifiers pitted against each other. No fewer than 12 other qualifiers scored more than Blake Robinson in their first round heats. Proof positive that the production team really don’t apply any kind of seeding.

Well, you can’t blame any of this week’s semi finalists for the way that the semi-final places are allotted. You can only beat the people up against you. Hoping to do this was Stephen Finn, first to go, who was offering my banker subject for the evening, the Norman Conquest. I was right to think that this was the way it would prove to be too. I took five of these, most of them about the immediate aftermath of Hastings and the first couple of decades of Norman England. Stephen did a lot better. I remember in the filmed end piece of his heat he talked of going away to start work on his next specialist and this all appeared to have been time well spent, since he posted a score of 10. Good start.

Blake Robinson by way of contrast was offering my least fancied subject of this semi-final, Borussia Dortmund. I speculated in a recent post that I might just be able to sneak an odd point and that is pretty much how it turned out. Blake seemed to be going pretty well, but just a couple of wrong answers kept sneaking in as he was building up a head of steam. Nothing to be ashamed of in a 7 point round for a semi-final, but that three point deficit looked worrying, especially considering that there were still two more contenders to go.

Anna Milford Goldstein had built her first round win on a great general knowledge round overhauling the deficit she faced at half time. You can’t reckon on doing that in a semi so it was vital for her to post the highest total that she could on her round on Popes of the Renaissance. Well, she gave it a lash, and I’ve no doubt that she knew her stuff. But as with Blake’s round she just couldn’t quite get the uninterrupted run of correct answers that she needed to push her score close enough to Stephen’s. Like Blake she ended with 7, while I ended with 3.

Colin Rogers-March – and I don’t want to be horrible here – looked down and out after his first round heat specialist round on Judy Garland. Yet he came back to take the win. Then he had scored four on Judy Garland. Now he was answering on the Film Musicals of Alan Menken. Now, granted, he knew more about it than I did. I took three to take my aggregate to 13, and I’m very happy to take the money, er, points and run on that. However he only took a couple more to end with five. I did know Poor Unfortunate Souls, and I thought that there were at least a couple which I was surprised that he couldn’t dredge up. No doubt that he had shown he could be a big hitter in GK, but you just can’t afford to leave yourself that far behind at half time.

It was a quick turnaround for Colin, then. And fair play to him, after a rather disappointing specialist round he put in a rousing, battling performance in GK to add another 10 to his score. Double figures in a semi final GK round is something to be pleased with even if his overall total of 15 didn’t look likely to win.

Blake started a couple of points to the good on 7, and indeed he too added his own double figure round, going one better than Colin had. His 11 points took the target to 18. Well, at least it meant that those who came after couldn’t afford a collapse.

Anna had won her heat with a most rousing 14 on General Knowledge. Sadly she wasn’t able to quite repeat such heroics this time out. She was caught out by a few, and she needed a couple of the questions to be repeated, which you cannot blame her for but which can’t have helped her at all. In the end she scored 7 to finish with 14.

I wonder what was going through Stephen’s mind as he walked to the chair. In my semi final I needed 11 and no passes on GK to get to the final and I walked to the chair thinking – keep a cool head here, son, coz you’ll never have a better chance of getting to the Mastermind Grand Final - . Well, dare I say it, the place in the final wasn’t exactly being handed to him on a plate, but Stephen was never going to be presented with a better chance of reaching the final than he was now. To be fair, he made no mistake. Had he just repeated the 9 he scored on GK in the heat it would have been enough, but he did considerably better than that. Very little in the round gave him much trouble and in fact he gave us the best GK round of the night, ending with 13 for a total of 23. Very well done sir.

Two places in the final down, and four still to go.

The Details

Stephen Finn	The Norman Conquest	10	0	13	0	23	0
Blake Robinson	Borussia Dortmund	7	0	11	0	18	0
Anna Milford Goldstein	Popes of the Renaissance	7	0	7	0	14	0
Colin Rogers-March	Film Musicals of Alan Menken	5	0	10	0	15	0