Can't say I was a huge fan of Gary but he was alright, maybe a bit cocky though. The deal wasn't bad, but as others have said, it'd have been nice to see him play on to provide some more tension.

The games this week have either been or average or memorable mostly for the wrong reasons.

Derek's and Ronnie's were memorable due to the bad luck and early deal; and Janna's, Bash's and Gary's shows / games were just average in my opinion. The only standout was Eunice, who provided a great show and had a great game.

What a rubbish deal. I mean, he should have been out of the chair a whole two rounds earlier and taken £2,500 more!!

And surely turning down the second £13,500 on that board was a risk, even though some people don't seem to think so (admittedly not as much of one as turning down the 11k would have been, but still a definite one).

There were only two boxes higher with very little fallback, and it's as near as makes no difference a 50:50 chance you'll hit at least one of them in the next 3 boxes and we all know what this banker's like with one-box games these days. Indeed we saw that with the 8-box offer!

I thought he played it well actually!!

Do the posters here actually enjoy getting involved in the same old argument, day after day after day? Particularly those who like to use needlessly disrespectful, arrogant and insulting language to hammer home their same point over and over again?

Is it actually fun to continually announce to the readers here that a particular player/game/decision was 'sickening', 'disgusting', 'pitiful' or 'humiliating', when of course it's only a silly TV programme which is nowhere near important enough to warrant such aggressive language?

What's the appeal in doing that?

I may make the same point over and over again but I try not to criticise anyone on here. That's why I try and back up my opinions with probability statisitics as you can't argue with fact.

The ones we never got to find out about because of their games going the way that they never had the chance to take the gamble.

You sure you've posted on the right forum?

Replace "week" with "year" and you might be getting there...

Lost my enthusiasm for watching regularly around last Christmas though still see the odd one (mostly 1p wins it seems!), but keep checking in here to see if I'm missing any classics. It certainly doesn't look like I have been missing much, certainly in gameplay terms.

Apart from a brief blip either side of the last summer break it seems like caution has dominated ever since the post-Laura crazy era came to an end. I'm no Wakeyist but I can't be bothered to sit through all the dross in the hope of seeing the increasingly rare great game any more.

I still love the Saturday fever!

His game was easy to get into - and once the Banker called to warn him if he found the biggie the offer would be £3,500 once he said No Deal we all knew what would get found!

£11,000 was respectable on the board but I too would have won peanuts today!

I had a 2 month break from the show and started watching again recently. Nothing has changed. It is utter dross with the occasional decent game. There are less nauseous sob-stories but the show is over-run with target driven players who don't consider the board whatsoever and will take £10k - £20k and run. Ronnie's deal yesterday was one of the most appalling I have ever witnessed.

I'm just glad I witnessed the show before its decline so at least I have memories of what it once was.

Allow me to append the word 'appalling' to my list.

Looking back at it the big wins and big gambles have always been the exception rather than the rule, apart from a few short spells in the history of the show. The early days were relatively cautious, but of course had the novelty value - what's a classic after you've seen 20 shows is probably a forgettable one once you've seen 700.

Then of course it really took off in spring 2006 and had a couple more great spells later on, but what shows through in the end is perhaps a basic flaw in the format, in that most people see fairly modest five-figure sums as life-changing and won't risk them if there's any chance of leaving with (virtually) nothing. So there's two standard games, the early deal for £15-20k on a decent board, and the game that never gets going and they have little choice but to go to the end and win a blue or low red. It takes a rare combination of player, board and offers to produce anything else.

That might be a good point. The British population in general seems to be relatively risk-averse with large sums of money, especially compared to the Americans and Australians - perhaps surprising given how much of their economic ideology we've shared in recent years...

Furthermore, with the board set as it is, £20,000 is a realistic target - yet also a slightly ambitious one, not that far short of the mean, and so a lot of players get sucked into chasing losses in the low five figures (although a lot don't, as this very game illustrated), but also enough games get to £20,000 (about 40-50% I think) that we get lots of Deals in that region, sometimes when the board's worth a fair bit more in my book (I'd have been looking for £30k when Ronnie Dealt, £26k would have been a tricky decision).

There is little you can do to really change that, and goodness knows have the producers ever tried - tilting the entire show towards gambling (and arguably effectively promoting it on teatime television, a highly contentious thing to do), making absolute joke offers (or in one case of an all-or-nothing gamble, no cash offer at all), milking the top prize winner (created by a joke offer, let's not forget) for all they could and more...

...it worked for three months, then the players worked it out and you had that week where three players in five games took the third offer, and the 'Wakey Winter' was shown for what it was - an aberration caused by psychological pressure that the players let themselves get sucked into. I truly think that Philip's third-offer Deal changed everything, especially as it kinda-sorta worked. (I don't think Adrian's was as influential, sadly. Next game: £14,500 offer at eight-box with the mean under £19k, audience stand-up poll: 0 say Deal, player says No Deal.)

The one element of this still clearly present is a social stigma against anyone who Deals before eight-box, which in turn causes people to turn down the eleven-box offer rather against their will, then sometimes take eight-box offers that are less generous. We got one of those on Thursday, I'd have gone at eleven-box or five-box but not at eight-box! At least Ronnie clearly played to his utility curve rather than to the gallery (compare and contrast with Dot!), even if we can question the merits from a statistical viewpoint (and heck, even I did).

Apparently the risk-aversion of most British game show contestants plays havoc on shows with a risk/reward element. See also; the mid-series format change in Duel, the ugly 50k-75k-150k tilt on Millionaire. I don't think that's a statement that should be seen as much of a value judgment, merely a statement of what appears to be a truthful generalisation (albeit with some exceptions), and one which anyone in the business of game shows in the UK needs to be aware of.

Nope. I hate it, but if decent people on this forum are getting slated because they would've dealt or whatever, I can't just watch them trying to get their point across only for other members to blank it or be abusive back. It's just frustrating why members post bad comments about the contestants day in/ day out. Ok, contestant's aren't celebrities, but they provide us with a link with what the show was like for them and their personal experience for those who haven't ever been to the studio, and it would be a real shame if they stopped signing up because they've been called names such as coward, waste of a show etc.

Apologies if this comment has gone over the line.

The show was OK to be honest - better than the shows this week but like others was disappointed at the 11K deal but pleased he had a good proveout.

It's a catch 22 situation with the contestant selection - some of them are not very well off people/indebted etc who'll jump at the chance of 20K and not analyse the board

The show pays out more than 90s money game shows but can't survive on 10-20K wins forever.

There must be middle of the road people out there who can go on the show not be targetist and gamble more than recent contestants have been doing, surely?

An average game, nothing overly special but a decent victory over the banker.

I am seriously starting to wonder the same people are now posting on this thread.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/show ... p?t=776111