Mastermind 2025 Semi Final 2

Talk about Life being a rollercoaster! Last night’s second semi pitted these four contenders:-

							Table Position
Claire Reynolds	10	0	13	0	23	0	7
Phil Nowek	7	0	14	0	21	0	12
Lewis Jones	5	0	14	0	19	0	17
Rashmi  Bhardwaj	8	0	10	0	18	0	20

You may notice that Claire Reynolds’ name is in italics. This is how I show you that the contender was the highest scoring heat runner up, and therefore not on my original table. Heat winner Mike Noyes was unable to make it. So this gave us a semi final line up in which the strongest performer Claire, who lost out to Nancy Braithwaite in the first heat, was the only one who didn’t yet have a win under her belt.

First in the chair was teacher Phil Nowek. He was answering on the TV comedy series Blackadder. Now, if ever there was a fill yer boots subject for me, this was it. I managed 10 answering all on the questions about the individual episodes correctly. Fair play, I didn’t know Darling was originally called Cartwright. Phil, well he put in a superb round right up until the last question. Was it premature, I wondered, to speculate whether we might get two teachers into the final?

Next up was Claire Reynolds. Claire, so it seemed to me, was having the time of her life and didn’t sop beaming for the whole show. Quite right too – it must have come as a wonderful surprise when she got the phone call from the production team inviting her to the semis. Her subject was Joseph Chamberlain. Good choice. A fascinating figure in British politics at the end of the Victorian era, I can imagine that there was a lot for Claire to get to grips with. Me, I only got the 1, but Claire got a very good 10 to put herself right in contention.

Rashmi Bhardwaj was answering on film star Gregory Peck. Now, the thing about old Greg was that he lived into old age and he kept working for pretty much all of his life. So that was a lot of ground to cover. I picked up 3 of these and surprised myself by doing so and this brought my aggregate innings to a close with 14. Rashmi pushed on to 6 points and maybe could feel a little bit aggrieved to come so close on The Blue and The Gray without getting the point. That was the first of two close decisions, and for what it’s worth I thought that the ruling was correct.

The second came in Lewis Jones’ round on The Legend of Zelda video games. Now, I don’t know much about these, as you can see from my score of zero. But at one point Lewis was asked in which video game etc. etc. and replied Four Swords Adventure. Clive refused on the grounds I was called Four Swords. Now, I don’t know, this seems extremely harsh to me and I’m not sure that I would agree with this ruling. As it was Lewis struggled with the round and scored four.

Which is where the rollercoaster started to climb for Lewis. Returning first to the chair for the second half, Lewis delivered a GK round that absolutely smashed it out of the park. He’d been in a similar position in his heat, and swinging for the fences had brought him fourteen points and a win. Last night he outdid this by scoring 15. He was too far behind for this to bring him a spot in the final, but Lewis, if you do decide to give it another go sometime, if you can get the right specialists you will be very much a contender. Very much.

Sadly Rashmi didn’t manage a brilliant GK round last night. She scored five. However, this was a semi final and being a Mastermind semi finalist means never having to say you’re sorry. It can’t be taken away from you.

Claire had scored 13 on GK the last time that she passed this way in the heat. The GK round that she produced last night was on another level. Very little passed her by as she passed Lewis’ score and just kept building and building her own total. In the end she scored 15 to set the bar at a daunting 25.

Of course, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that this would be the winning score, and that we would not have 2 teachers in the final. Phil had scored 14 on GK in his heat. That would bring a tie break if he could repeat it and if he could score fifteen then he would win. He gave  it a decent lash too. However when you’re chasing such a big goal you have so little room for error. Phil produced a good GK round. But as it was, good was not going to be good enough. Phil scored 11 for a total of 22.

Congratulations to Claire! Only 6 out of 95 other contenders had outscored her in the heats, yet she had not been in the original line up for the semis. Now she finds herself in the final 6 contenders, with every chance of winning the lot. We can have opinions about top heavy semi finals and bottom heavy semi finals, but the fact is that Claire’s score was higher than the runners-up in last week’s top heavy line up. Jolly good show!

Phil Nowek	Blackadder	11	0	11	0	22	0
Claire Reynolds	Joseph Chamberlain	10	0	15	0	25	0
Rashmi Bhardwaj	Gregory Peck	6	0	5	0	11	0
Lewis Jones	The Legend of Zelda Video Games	4	0	15	0	19	0