Now that we have seen someone win the elusive £250,000 jackpot,
how long do you think it will be before we see the next winner?
Will the contestants gamble more to win it now,
especially if they are enticed on by low banker offers,
and increased expectation for them to go for it?
If you know any spoilers don't vote!

Assuming that nobody like Fin or Khanny or Craig takes it to the table...

It will be won within a few weeks of Endemol wanting it to be won, whenever that may be. This will be made clear by a flurry of very low late-game offers and possibly a flurry of £250k box appearances beforehand, as happened last month.

As for when that will be, I'd guess late 2007.

As KP said, Endemol can loosely control when the £250k will be next won to a certain extent, due to the banker making low offers at the 2 box stage when the £250k is still there. I still think the box selection is done at random, so it may not work one day by offering a low offer and making the player gamble - there's still a 50:50 chance that they'll get the £250k, and luckily for Laura, she had it sitting in front of her all along. Unluckily for Morris and Kirsty, they didn't.

For the £250k win to happen again, we need the £250k to be on the table, we need a gamber to bring it to the table and no deal to the 2 box stage, and then of course the banker can really control what happens, depending on how he pitches the final offer, which of course would be a low offer to encourage a gamble (unless of course we get a huge gambler like Morris - i.e. no dealing a > £100k offer when the backup is less than a Power 5 amount). Based on this, I think the next set of cirumstances may come up a couple more times this year, but I don't think it will actually get won again until late summer / early Autumn at the very earliest.

It will be interesting to see how the banker acts when the next set of circumstances do arise, and also it'll be interesting to see if, as time progresses, whether the banker will start offering really low offers throughout the games to encourage gambling...

I know the game is interesting to us diehard fans, but for the rest of the viewing audience, I have a feeling the jackpot will be increased. They did that for U.S. Millionaire for a time, and I'm pretty sure that some people want to be the new all-time champion rather than co-champion.

I'll admit that the whole concept will sound like a ratings stunt, but as long as they do not resort to a Celebrity Do or No Deal, I'll be happy.

I think the five-box and eight-box offers are very significant in terms of determining when the next winner will come, particularly for an average player facing a relatively average board - I'd argue that was very much influential in Laura's game, though the offers were only just too low to get her out of the game.

The £250k will be in the final two every 11 shows - just more than fortnightly. I'm going to assume that between 50% and 80% of the contestants in such a situation will Deal beforehand, dependent upon Banker strategy particularly at the five-box point. That implies a wait of between 22 and 55 shows for the next active-play £250k two-box showdown.

I reckon the offer will then be such that a typical player (amongst those who have made it here, which will include but not be limited to reckless gamblers) will gamble with a safety net of £10k upwards. That'll happen in one in three of these finishes. And then, of course, the £250k has to be there (or, heaven forbid, the player swaps for it, but that doesn't change the odds).

That means the expected waiting time could be anywhere between 132 and 330 shows - amusingly, the average of those two values, 231, is the number of two-box finishes possible!

I'd thus work on the assumption of a 200-250 show wait, implying the second quarter-millionaire will be created in autumn 2007 - but this is subject to immense variation. We might have a December flurry of players bringing it to the table, we could have a drought as happened in the six months previous.

Will the jackpot be increased? The £500,000 specials picked up ratings just below those of regular episodes, but against infinitely fiercer competition; it's hard to draw conclusions from there. But here's something I've mentioned before and will mention again: Friday nights have proved disastrous for Channel 4.

Unanimous launched on October 27 offering a prize that started at a million and then rapidly diminished, and the ratings... started at a million and then rapidly diminished. A succession of US sitcoms fared equally badly. Their biggest ratings draw on Friday nights are 'new' episodes of The Simpsons that have been aired on a digital channel a long time ago, and even these struggle to get 1.5m viewers - hilariously, repeats at 6pm get better ratings. By comparison, DoND gets 3m on a regular basis in a dead afternoon slot, and 2.6m on its last Friday appearance - in the dead of summer, against EastEnders and the World Cup, in an awkwardly shifted slot that many might not have been aware of.

Italy have weekly big-money specials thrown on Friday nights in addition to regular episodes, if I'm not mistaken. Channel 4 could do the same when Big Brother isn't on - Friday night £500,000 special episodes with a truly random player selection (the all-up vote only worked as a one-off) at 8:30pm. That last bit is critical. It is compulsory to avoid EastEnders; after that, the competition is near enough non-existent (drama reruns on ITV1 and unfunny comedies on BBC1), and you've got a shot of at least 4m viewers, triple the current ratings in the slot when there's no BB.

Probably within the next 3-6 months i reckon

I agree with a lot of what you say KP, some very interesting
observations there! The only thing is that we all expected the first
250K winner to come from someone who had another of the Power 5
in the final two, or at the very least 10K, not 3K, so it really is
all about the offer.
For example, if 1p and £250,000 were the final pairing, the banker's offer might be quite low, say £30,000, and very tempting to gamble on. This means that as long as the 250K gets to the final two in active play, there is always a chance of another jackpot winner, providing the banker keeps the offer relatively low, and unless they are wanting to save money, why would they want to stop the 250K being won, I don't think it would reduce the level of suspense necessarily. That's there every show, and when people win the jackpot it can only help the ratings!

the 2009/2010 option has no chance.Theshow cant last that long without a jackpot win, surely? people including me would just turn over to something alot more interesting.


however i think in the next year definitely

It's true, I think we all expected a Kirstyesque game to produce the £250k win, rather than a Banker misjudgement (if, indeed, that's what it was. I believe otherwise) at the final two.

Oddly, the ratings for this week (along with Sunday's show, the ratings for which are only provisional so far) may well influence Banker strategy assuming we look at the Banker's role being to maximise the show's profit. After all, that profit is the advertising revenue minus the prize money (or at least, that's the part of the equation the Banker can influence in any way), and largely unchanged ratings for the £250k win and the week thereafter would imply that advertising revenue would not be affected by a £250k win so the strategy should be to simply save money! If that's the strategy, we can expect final offers at close to Series 1 levels, and there would never be a second quarter-millionaire. Unless 'good' Banker play turns viewers off...

I'd still say that about one in three final offers would be No Dealt, though. It's just that you'd get some finishes like Laura's and some like Claudine's, when my initial rule of thumb would have suggested that Claudine, and not Laura, would be the only quarter-millionaire to date!

Remember at the end of season one/start of season two we had FOUR 1p wins in 12 shows. We also had in that period Lance, Nick and Billy going away with huge amounts and Debbie, John and Lindsay leaving with £600 between them. Very strange occurences can happen on DOND, meaning almost anything could happen. For all we know, we could be creating quarter millionaires every show for years to come. We just don't know.

Between 3 and 6 months...

It's an interesting theory, and certainly one that would make sense for viewing figures, however, I would not personally like the thought that someone who has been on the show for only a few shows could get the chance to play for £500k... it'd be a bit unfair on all the hundreds of other players who have only had the chance to play for the £250k shows. This was of course true with the Christmas £500k specials, but at least they were only 2 specials over Christmas, and aren't done every week. It would also mean having 2 episodes of DOND on Friday, which would be a bit odd, and I assume it'd mean scrapping the Sunday shows as well.



That's an interesting theory - the thing is, as I've said before, ratings cannot really affect things like this, as the programmes are filmed so far in advance - they're currently filming ealy March episodes, so any change in banker tactic based on viewing figures of the episodes soon after the £250k win won't come on screen until early March.



Noel made a similar comment at the end of Laura's game - and it is of course a valid comment to make - like you said, we had several 1p winners in a short space of time (although the 1p is more likely to get won due to people going on if their game goes wrong), but who's to say the £250k won't come to the table several times in a short period of time, with a gambler playing with it on the table who goes for it and gets it - we could indeed have several £250k winners in a week!

I probably wouldn't necessarily like it for exactly that reason, but I'm not sure how it's done in Italy, and I was speaking in terms of their effect. Yes, you'd scrap the Sunday shows, after a bright start they've been lagging behind the weekday episodes - so much so that Laura's game will probably not be the highest-rated of the month despite the extensive spoilers.



Yes, there is a lag time, but it's a given that any £250k win will produce a moderately significant ratings increase courtesy of spoilers, though too many would reduce the impact of each one.



Strange things do happen, yes. I've just worked on the assumption of relative normality for the basis of what could be considered a reasonable expectation.

Gut reaction here - within the next 3 months.

Don't ask why as it's just a git reaction.

I'd say it is 3-6 months away, the games after the 250k will say to some people not to take the game too far and be overly confident so soon we'll be lacking with confidence until someone gets the 100k and then we'll see the 250k being won shortly after!

The other question would be how they would select the contestant to play for the 500K games. Would it be the contestants, or could you get DOND games filmed so close to the airing date that it could get a horrible reality twist whereby viewers could vote for the contestant that they wanted to play for the 500K. That's not an idea that I would advocate at all, but it's the kind of thing that could happen in the future given the rise of viewer participation TV!

I think that the next £250,000 winner will be someone who is either filming at the moment or is about to start filming. They will have seen Laura's game on TV (I assume) and take lots of courage from that and therefore be brave enough to carry on to the end. I think it'll be another person like Laura who will win it, quite quiet and generally someone who says deal if asked to give an opinion or advice. I think the banker's problem was that he underestimated Laura and expected her to deal at £45,000, so well done to her for proving him wrong. I don't even think Noel thought she was going to win it.

It's Endemol. It might happen. If the format goes to ITV1 I can seriously see it happening.

If this is a true spoiler free thread then we know when it won't be. It won't be in the next couple of months.

I hate it that the big results get spoiled. it happened on millionaires and it happened on DoND.

The fact is we watch the next two months knowing that no one will win the £250,000.

Certainly not as long as it took to create the first, as the players now seem a lot more keen on getting down to the later stages of the game rather than dealing early.