Seeing as we have a thread called 'Worst deal ever?', I thought I'd set up a sister thread about the worst NO deals ever.

The obvious ones for me include Elvis, John G., 'Player 14', and, of course, Joycey. Any more suggestions will be appreciated.

Corinne - Declined £88,000 on a 1p/£250k board.
Gurpal - Declined £70,000 on a £5/£250k board.
Kerry-Anne - Declined £140,000 on a £10k/£250k board.

John G - STILL stands as one of the worst decisions to ND ever, not only did he give a speech on how much the money (£25,000) would mean to him and his family, but it was VERY generous on a two blues, £1,000 and £50,000 and £75,000 board. The only option for a large increase was the 10% round to leave him with the big two. Of course, he did hit the 10% round, but the crash round...

Di - £44,000 offer with two blues, £20,000, a low-ish red (may have been £10,000) and £250,000. This is a large gamble, but not the most reckless we have seen and you need to be a Rich/Morris type contestant with no limits AND be able to take disappointment to gamble this... BUT, Di was neither, it showed as soon as she declined the 44k that she was in no way stable enough to gamble like that and her deflated attitude when getting to the 10p/ £20,000 board clearly indicated she hadn't expected it to turn out like that at all...

And ANYONE who gambled on a £250,000 and blue board where the offer is well over £50,000... so of course Alice doesn't count and I can only recall Katie recently where the gamble would have made sense... but Joycey declining £90,000 on the basis of being 'famous' is the stuff of pure idiocy.

My benchmark for £250,000 gambling is usually having a fallback of no less than £20,000 and a reasonable, but BELOW the mean offer (excpetions are made for DIRE offers quite like the blue scenario, like Laura's £45,000), so I would also put Rich and Kerry-Anne as bad No Deals as they simply stood to lose more than they could gain.

Gaz (early 2010) turning down £21k+ on an £100k/£20k/5 blues 5-box is one I can easily think of, but very similar to Elvis.

Mariyam from last month comes to mind.

Of course there was Fin from the early days who no-dealt a massive £44,000 on an 8-box of 4-blues/£10k/£20k/£100k/£250k, and then took out the top 2 in the next 2 boxes just like John G did when he no-dealt £25k! At least Fin still got a decent amount in the end unlike John!

I suppose you could say Doreen No-dealing £20k on a 7-blues/£250k board

And an honorable mention to Martin (October 09) for No-dealing £6,100 on a £1/£35k, it was a good decision statically as £6,100 was a terrible offer for that finish, but more for the way he took it when the gamble didn't work out. If memory serves he said No deal, won £1 and got very emotional, poor guy

'Player 14' - 100k/15k/3 blues, turned down 28k. Just... no.
Kerry-Anne - risking 130k on a coin flip with a potential reward of 120k
Sheran - OK, she had the best 100k board you could possibly ask for at 11-box, but that's no justification for turning down an AMO (offer was 30k, mean was ~28.2k)

To an extent, any no deal can be technically justified as long as it isn't on or above the mean. And even some AMOs being no dealed can be understandable if the stakes are very low.

I agree about Elvis. The board was £100k, £15k, £3k, £250, £5. He was offered £22,000 which is almost DOUBLE the FD and the mean was £24,051. His offer was 91% of the mean and he declined it. I was so shocked when he said No Deal.

Rich - OK, I know he had £50k and £250k left but he was offered £160,000 which was about 107% of the mean!

There have been a few, but Elvis' one made the most mad!

To be honest I think Rich HAD to no-deal given he had £50k back-up and he had the chance to be the first male quarter-millionaire, whether it was an AMO or not. If he'd dealt at 2-box and had the £250k in his box he'd have got a load of abuse just as much he did given what actually happened so in my book he couldn't do right for doing wrong really.

The damage was done when he went on at 5-box really.

Well remembered with Sheran's hilarious 11-box AMO, a board so bizarre as to clearly be very difficult to read - it was in the Wakey Winter too so the decision was hardly a shock. Speaking of 11-box AMOs rejected in that era, Dennis!!

I didn't actually realise Dennis' offer was an AMO until the banker phoned up to point it out.

I just looked up that game. The mean at that point was £14,719.14 (using this) and the offer was £15,001! How do you decline that?!

Some non-AMO rejections that were also highly questionable:

* Theresa (April 2007) - turned down 21k on a 100k/75k/5k/1k/4 blues 8-box.
* Craig (played the game after Laura!) - turned down 15k on a 100k/20k/10k/5blues 8-box.

Actually, let's be honest, there were many, many questionable no deals in the first half of 2007...

Theresa made a bad enough No Deal at 11-box, not helped by Noel saying 8-box was "business end" before the 11-box offer even came in. (Simon was on BB commentary duties and commented "offers like that show 11-box can be business end too"! )

Just thought of some more

Paralympic Emma (June 2009) who no-dealt £26,000 on a £50/£75k ending and ended up with £50. That was pretty bad

Jean (May 2010) No-dealing £24,000 at 5-box with £50k as the highest amount remaining. Yes it was a strong board, but that £24,000 was just about bang on the average!

Possibly even Jimmy Carr no-dealing £14k on a £750/£35k finish

I remember Emma - I'm half-surprised she didn't have a second chance game shoehorned into the schedules for transmission in late August seeing as Channel 4 are the Paralympic broadcaster (if that ill-advised gamble had paid off I'm pretty sure they'd be airing a repeat of it at least once next month, too).

I would say Balbina but she had quite a stable board (15k was the lowest IIRC).

Well I think Ricky's £26k can be added here now.

Not in isolation, we've seen worse on very similar boards before and the generosity pattern was set fair for future rounds. It was actually a fairly typical early-2007 decision (and in fact I think Kirsty from that era turned down £26,062 and a plaque on a very similar board). In the context of the near-certainty of the Banker seeing inside box 10, and hence that offer pattern being likely to crumble one way or the other, there's a case for it being in this company.