That is what can happen when people try their luck on a board that is clearly not in their favour. It is not just about bravery but judgement and dealing at eight-box was the sensible decision as there was a 64% chance of taking out one of the top two, and that would cause the offer to crash.

Yep... if I had been watching, then with that £10,000 offer... I would have believed the Banker this time...

OMG that was well sad so wish he'd got more seemed like a well nice guy

A blue in your box would mean 75% chance of taking out the £100K, so would you deal at £10K?

Admittedly if you felt utterly sure there was a blue on the table you could play to the end with an eye on the guaranteed swap - and your EV of doing so would have been £30k. Wouldn't take a Mark to take that on, I would too.

TBH, 10k wasn't a particularly good or bad offer for the board at the time - yeah, it could've stood to have been a couple of grand higher, but it's not derisory at the same time.

Those early offers were astoundingly generous though!

I don't know what you mean by EV but a blue in your box means 75% chance that the £100K would be taken out and 50% chance that both reds would be taken out. To get more money you would have to go to the end, hoping to keep one red at two-box and hoping that it is not in your box if you were going to swap. I would say that that is pushing your luck based on the probabilities.

You just KNEW the one time someone thought the banker was lying he was actually telling the truth. I would have said that if the earlier offers hadn't been dealable, they just might as well let the banker see in the box at the start of the game since nobody's ever going to be successful on the catapult.

Charles - EV = expected value.

Basically if you were going to go to the end and swap with the confident assumption you had a blue in front of you, the situation was a four-box offer of £10k on a blue/blue/£20k/£100k board and no further offers.

I'd take that on, but it wouldn't take much more for me not to. And that's based on being 100% sure you had a blue in front of you. If you weren't, and let's face it you couldn't be...

Well today would be a day where anyone (i.e me) who had no confidence in managing the catapult today should have been out like a shot at either 11-box or 8-box. I've no idea how confident Ricky was in hitting the target and perhaps with the generosity of offers there was an argument for going to 5-box today but I think he took at least 1 gamble too many today.

If expected value means what offer you can expect to get, then the expected value cannot possibly be £30K because you cannot expect the £100K to remain as it is more likely to be taken out in the round.

It is £30k. Assuming you know you have a blue on the table and that you will no deal to the end and swap your box - there is a 25% chance of ending up with each of the 4 amounts left on the wing.

Expected value is calculated by adding together the values got by multiplying each probability by the win you would expect.

I.e. (1/4 x blue) + (1/4 x blue) + (1/4 x £20,000) + (1/4 x £100,000).
We don't know what the blues are but they will both be neglible so we have
(1/4 x £20,000) + (1/4 x £100,000) = £5,000 + £25,000 = £30,000

Of course playing like that can be foolhardy - if you had a £250k/£1/50p/10p/1p board, you could say that the expected value of your win would be £50,000 but as you stated, 80% of the time you will far less but on boards like today, it's not the worse tactics if you can afford to take the risk.

If you play poker, you will know that sometimes you will call a bet even if you have a small chance of winning if the potential win if you get lucky will be worth the risk.

Well, it wasn't a great surprise for me that Ricky decided to go to the end today, i got that impression from his time on the wings. Reminded me a bit of Dale actually, he certainly seemed to adopt his 'Go for it' mantra. There's no doubt in my mind that he pushed his luck too far today - over half the average at 8-box on a wrongly lopsided board when there's significant chance of hitting one of the top 2 (around 54%) that would cripple such a generous offer is not really playing the odds effectively, to but it mildly. It resigned him to the inevitable chasing losses scenario, and what irony that he should end up taking a deal that was the most generous in terms of the mean, but when it didn't even matter.

Something of a horror result, perhaps theme-induced, perhaps not. What a different story it might have been had he played a previous game of the week, and they had played his. The law of the Deal Mismatch strikes again...

Thought Ricky might be pushing his luck a bit there when he turned down the 8 box offer, but that was a nasty crash.
Don't really understand why someone as good at reading the board would press on regardless like that, especially after he made it clear what the money would do for him

I agree that he pushed his luck when the board was not in his favour, at eight-box the chances of taking out at least one of the top two is 64%.

It looks like he was unable to deal because he would have huge regret if £100K or £250K was in his box. He should not have let that stop him from dealing though because you can only make your decision based on the board.

It seems to me that the majority of posts on this Forum involve calculations and stats. You all seem to forget that even though it is just a game of luck - it still involves one person (quite often on their own), standing in front of a crowd of people, doing their best in their own ways. Not everyone is a statistition! Ricky was always going to play that game, we all knew that and it's just a shame he didn't have the right colour in his box in the end. There is alot to be said for working out stats, but not everyone remembers every deal there has every been.....every board composition possible and every stat that may or may not come to fruition! To berate a person for their own personal choices seems overly harsh. I would like to know how many of you posters have actually been on the show? Just a thought!

They said he was a good board reader though, afraid he did not live up to that reputation, he just gambled and did not know when to stop. As Noel says, good board readers rarely go away with a blue.

I'm probably one of the statisticians on the forum but I've also seen a fair amount of games so I have a foot in both camps. Every player is entitled to make their own decision - there are some I've seen made that I wouldn't have taken (both too cautious and too brave).

I have just watched this episode for the 3rd time to make sure in my own mind that my comment is not just a rash statement.

But, I get the impression that Ricky was under the influence of something which marred his judgement !!!