Oh dear...

Noel opens box 12 and reveals £50,000

Box 9 with Kristi contains the £75,000

The Banker got him cheap and he won the mind games...

Not sure he got him cheap to be honest. Decent enough offers. He did well to reject the 21k twice but with the increasing volatility and the fact that 75k was the top of the game, the deal was quite reasonable.

Sod's law the one in ten chance immediately came in. Any other scenario and the offer couldn't go up very much.

O-HO, it's a new turn of phrase! I'm not sure what to say about that, other than to point out that a few players adopting such a philosophy will go home with next to nothing. Like the one last Friday...

Anyway, we have someone who's evidently had to retrain after the banking crisis, and although he lucked out into a reasonably lucrative field he still reports financial trouble. Whether that's anything to do with his gambling or not is not my position to judge, but we have set up the scene for an internal conflict on the big decisions, and that makes Noel's mediation role utterly critical.

Two oranges, two blues and £35,000? I'll take that round quite happily, and so does he. Five-figure opening offer is still quite startling in light of it, though.

Another solid round, twenty grand offset by two blues, and the top four are still intact. There were references to 'Power Four' as early as Jennifer's game, and £35,000 being placed in the same category began only in Nick's game, a game better remembered for other reasons. Hilarious jibe at the demographic split amongst the pilgrims, and an offer that doesn't surprise me one bit.

All-blue! With the penny in it! Shame there had to be unintended product placement for Nestlé, but this is now in territory where a third-offer Deal could be on. Needless to say, that's the cue for an offer that's really not very generous at all. One of the biggest ever? Anyone? Top-100 but not top-50, I'd imagine. And there goes the top prize, so we're going to five-box... oh, OK, the ADP ideal is reinforced by sticking after the £250k goes in round four. First decision of the game, above the FD as well as the £20k breakpoint, and it definitely feels psychologically as though this is a perfectly acceptable Deal. Huddy encourages aggressive play again, and we get it... blast. If this is a stick, it's an insta-deal. It's not, it's not even half that, it's an offer designed to create another dramatic finish.

Oh there we go. Quite rightly a Deal, and maybe the producer was worried a blue win with a third-offer peak would have had an effect they wouldn't much have liked. The proveout goes entirely his way too, allowing Noel to get all histrionic without the show having to pay out properly big money today. Top comedy at the end too, a sign that he could take this outcome just fine, probably much better than a crash after a gamble - thus proving it was the right decision, even in light of the OBW being confirmed.

The Banker got that one spot on, and kudos to Steve for admitting it. But what a game it was!

Ouch at the 10% chance of "disaster" in proveout, but still a good game. Very reminiscent of Dave's game last month, with Steve being in a similar financial situation to him too.

That felt tense from quite early on and I thought the £10k offer at 5-box was really cruel until he doubled it, but I guess they were tactics to make him deal, but I'm glad he played the board as I thought it was too strong to walk for £21k at 11-box, and even at 8-box there was very little chance of it going really wrong. I wonder if they actually will give him the two cheques in the two envelopes?

And I still can;t stop laughing at Noel's reactions to anyone cheering low numbers in proveout - if I was a pilgrim I'd do it deliberately to wind him up!

Enjoy 20 grand, Steve and family!

I get the £21k offer in regards to what was turned down last Friday at 5-box but where did the extra £8 come from.

Not sure I'm too happy with the OHO club - unless Noel counterbalances it by reminding players that if they gamble, they have to accept the circumstances that if it goes wrong, they won't get another chance either.

Excellent play by the banker at 5-box. £20k was the second "deal in a nano-second" offer for me and watching the game you have to accept that for everyone sensible 5-box deal followed by the 10% perfect round, you are going to get the sensible 5-box deal followed by the nightmare 10% round.

It was indeed £21,008 that Gaz turned down, that along with all his other offers had 8 on the end becuase he said how significant the number 8 was to him at the start of the game!

For me it was simply if it was an all-red finish, or indeed £75,000 at the end it'd be at least £20,000 so I think I might have fancied my chances...the 8-box £21,008 was more attractive to me!

Exactly. The fact that you only play once makes it much more significant. Statistically, mean winnings would be at their highest if everyone played to the end (barring some very bad luck of the boxes). However, since you can only play the game once, it means that contestants may not want to risk large sums of money because they'll never get another chance to get their winnings back.

Though really, any contestant who doesn't grasp that basic concept doesn't deserve to be on the show...

Yes, the stat linked to that is the banker would've paid out (about) an additional £10million if every player had gone to the end taking their box, but that's not that surprising as most times the £250,000 comes to the table, the banker is going to save a lot of money barring pretty strong luck that can keep the other big money with it to make it feasible to go for (although having said that, the 2 winners of it didn't have any backup... , but like I said, most times ).

The "Only-Here-Once" mentality is potentially dangerous if confused (which I fear it is) with going the end offering the optimum result in the game, some players worryingly still think that is a surefire winning tactic. A better tactic is to make the banker pay more for your box than he had initially bargained for, and I think Steve achieved that at 5-box today. We'll ignore the 2-box finale, as that'll only add to the case for the O-H-O brigade, and no doubt be the subject of Noel's intro tomorrow.

Hmmm, I think Steve made the right decision for the board at the time, the odds against getting that finish were sufficient enough to make the deal justifiable (I might even have gone one round earlier myself but it's hard to say) Really unlucky in the proveout but kudos to him for taking it so well "Banker's Gamble" indeed

Cannot fault the deal at all, it was a decent offer for the 5-box he had. It's just a shame the 1 in 10 chance got hit, but he took it reasonably well.

I hope this doesn't sound racist, but... When I was watching Steve select these boxes and he was saying "These people are just jumping out at me", I thought "Yeah, your system seems to be 'take out all the black people first'". He stopped short of newbie Caine, but up until then I was sure that he must be doing it intentionally! (Not that I'm accusing Steve of being racist either - it's as good a system as any.)

Haha, I thought the exact same thing! I was waiting for someone else to mention it first though.