Welcome to this week’s Mastermind review. We’ll begin with John Castell. It’s only fair considering that he went first. John was answering on Reptiles and Amphibians of the British Isles, and there’s no doubt tha he knew his stuff. However there were enough things which just refused to take the plunge off the tip of his tongue to prevent him posting a really challenging score. I managed 3 on my second best subject of the evening, 2 of which were the first two questions of the round.
Lisa Cowan did better with her round. She was answering on
the Salem Witch Trials, and for over half of the round it seemed as if she was
on course for a dozen or more. She just missed out on a couple on the run in
but sall of her good work meant that she hit double figures and laid down a
challenge to those yet to come with 10. I managed one lucky guess to take the
aggregate to four.
Siddarth Iyer gave it a pretty good lash on his specialist
subject with Indian Premier League Cricket. I have no idea how I knew that
there were 8 teams in the original IPL, but it came from somewhere to give me
my one point on this round. Siddarth fell just short of double figures with 9,
but unless our final contender produced a round right out of the top drawer he
was going to be well in contention at the turn around.
Well, I wouldn’t say Rebecca Russell-Peach’s round on
Edward VIII was quite out of the topmost drawer, but it certainly was from well
above the bargain basement. Like Siddarth before her Rebecca scored 9 which
meat that she too was very much in contention as the half time oranges were
being passed around. Me? Well, I said in my preview that this was likely to be
my banker subject and so it proved. I scored 6 to take my overall aggregate on
the specialists to 11. Crack open the champagne, mother.
John was first back to the chair. Three points off the lead
and two points of second and third he had absolutely nothing to lose. His round
never really quite caught fire, but what he did well was to keep his head and
keep plugging away and scoring on the questions he knew. By the end of the
round he had added a perfectly respectable 8 to take his total to 15.
To be honest it was always highly unlikely that this was
going to be enough for a win. Nonetheless, by the end of Siddarth’s GK round
the target was still 15, as Siddarth scored 6. He became the leader on the road
through not having incurred any passes to John’s 4. But surely he wasn’t going
to stay in that position?
Well, no, he didn’t survive in the lead after Rebecca’s
round. However she didn’t find it an easy task to accrue the 7 points that she
needed to go into the outright lead. Her 7 took her to 16. This meant that Lisa
only needed her own 7 point round to take the win and the place in her semi-final.
Was this going to be one of those shows in which all 4 contenders post
relatively modest GK scores, though?
No.
I don’t know that you can ever really relax in the chair during
a Mastermind round but Lisa never really looked under stress. She wasn’t going
as fast as we’ve seen some contenders go I the last year or two, and she wasn’t
amassing a monster total. However she was answering calmly and she was
answering well. She reached the target with quite a bit of fuel left in the tank
and powered on to 11 to win by five points.
My thanks to all four contenders, and well done Lisa, best
of luck in the semis.
The Details
|
John Castell |
Reptiles and
Amphibians of the British Isles |
7 |
3 |
8 |
1 |
15 |
4 |
|
Lisa Cowan |
The Salem Witch
Trials |
10 |
0 |
11 |
0 |
21 |
0 |
|
Siddarth Iyer |
Indian Premier League
Cricket |
9 |
0 |
6 |
0 |
15 |
0 |
|
Rebecca Russell-Peach |
Edward VIII |
9 |
0 |
7 |
0 |
16 |
|
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