What does everyone else think a FAIR final offer for Laura would've been.

A lot of people on here(myself included) think 45K was a steaming pile of something

I think 75-80K would be fair considerin the risk involved!

Germaine got £75,000 when he had the quarter-million and a low blue (I think!). Laura's should have been in excess of £90,000 - but then I doubt if we'd have got the same end result.

Yes, an offer of over £70k would have been fairer... think about David J's £70,000 with £10k as the backup, and Claudine's £107,031 with £10k as the backup... £45k with £3k as the backup really is a stingy offer. It was obviously made to force her on to get the first ever £250k win... or it was because the banker thought she'd deal at a smaller amount and wouldn't gamble.

It is not the banker's job ot be fair but to minimize the winnings and provide a testing offer.

Judging by the fact that 50% of the people on the sweep said Deal shows it was well pitched.

The £45,000 offer was a tactic. The producers knew they had to offer low to encourage her to No Deal. The fact that the offer was so ridiculous showed to me that they knew exactly what was in her box.

Knowing that the 1/4 million is in there, they do what they can to make her win it. As for the banker - he is just a messenger

The £3,000 was better back up than Jennifer Miller's £750 but obviously not as good as Morris's £20,000 and David's £10,000. I think about £60,000 to £65,000 would have been fairer, but of course if the banker had been fairer we might not yet have our first quarter of a million winner!

Over £80k at least especially after the no deal the previous offer. Perhaps the banker thought she would go cheap. She did only want £20k after all so she could of still dealt at the £45k unluckily for the banker she didn't.

Absolutely!

It caused Laura massive problems, and so it was the right offer. I don't want to see no-brainer offers, either obvious Deals or obvious No Deals.

Also, the big difference between this game and Claudine's game is that Claudine had already rejected an offer in excess of £44k before the two-box stage. I doubt that anything other than a massive offer would have tempted Claudine at all. Laura, on the other hand, had shown caution on the wings and agonised over the prior offers. For her, an offer of £45k was not ridiculous at all.

It should have been somewhere between £70,000 and £125,000. £70,000 being David J's offer in a similar situation and £125,000 being Kirsty's in a excellent and generous situation.

I thought it was low, but not by too much. I'd still be dissappointed to go away with £3k arriving at it most other ways, so would have found the offer worthy of consideration. I'd have said £55k - £60k would have been fair, or £45k with a blue on the board instead of £3k.

£45,000 is a low offer for the board, but I think the banker pitched it right. He's realised that by making unnecessarily high offers for the £250,000, it's losing him more in the long run than a large win itself could cost him.

Looking at the sweep before the decision to no deal, 13 players suggested for Laura to take the deal, and 8 said to no deal. Without knowing what's in her box, if the other players did what they suggested if it were their game, the no dealers would win an average of £126,500, and the dealers £45,000.

Including Laura's decision to no deal, this makes an average winnings total of £78,340. So, an offer of £80,000+ would cost the banker extra money, and even then a player may no deal, pushing the average winnings up!

Also, by the players saying what Laura should do at the two box stage with the £250,000 in play, they've given priceless information to the banker, which could cost them tens of thousands of pounds by that alone, especially the dealers!

There was probably a better pitched offer between £45k and £75k, but then, we wouldn't have a quarter millionaire, and it certainly made things interesting. Just shows there's more to this game than it looks.

What id' compare it to (sursprise, surprise) is Anna's final two boxes. She had the £1 and £250.000 and was offered £91k!

I don't think it was to low. It was just the offer the banker decided to make. There is no point in comparing to other games, because if we had similar offers for certain situations, then there might as well not be a phone, as we'd know the offer!

Also, Laura nearly gambled away her target, and showed huge courage to win the £250,000. Giving her an offer £25,000 above her target is not going to force her to no deal. Her courage and bravery was amazing and saw her go home with £250,000. It is unfair on her brilliant gameplay to say that the result was purely manipulated by the producers.

Too low? Probably, but I doubt he needed to go much higher to take her out. I reckon her tipping point was somewhere between £50k and £60k, and I'd have offered the latter.

Is the wasted money from excessive offers in those finishes greater than the price of the big wins? I'd say no: if you make an offer that forces a No Deal, your liability increases to the mean. However, if £45,000 was enough to take some players out, it is better to have made that offer than one of, say, £70,000.

You could actually argue that last night, the biggest gamble of all was not Laura risking £42,000 for the jackpot and the glory, but the Banker risking a similar sum and his reputation on the conviction that Laura was cautious enough not to risk £42,000 regardless of the potential rewards. As it turned out, it was the Banker's gamble that backfired.

I wonder how many of the calls for Deal on the wings were from contestants who didn't want Laura to go on, but would have taken the same gamble themselves? If even three of them were, that means the average Banker liability if every player had that finish of (12*£126,500)+(10*£45,000)/22 = £89,455.

I reckon that an offer of £75,000 would only have been turned down by two contestants on the wings (Craig and one other, I'm not sure who the 'one other' would be but I suspect there would be one). The average liability of that finish would then be (2*£126,500)+(20*£75,000)=£79,682.

Instinctively, I reckon the optimal long-run offer there would be £60,000, plus or minus five grand. The key difference, though, is that the Banker is making offers to individual players - and there were good reasons to believe Laura was more conservative than many players. However, in turning down £19,999, Laura challenged that assumption; I reckon about half of all contestants would have turned down that offer and half would not, and by that logic the best strategy is to work on the assumption of average levels of risk aversion - implying an offer in the region of £60,000.

Noel said she needed to be taken 'very, very seriously'. She wasn't, and THAT was the mistake. The Banker assumed she was a conservative player who had a rush of blood to the head at £19,999, but even though she came with a target in mind she wasn't afraid to deviate from strategy when she saw a rubbish offer. And THAT was Laura's masterstroke.