TBW - she had £15,000 in her box.

That 73k proveout offer was ridiculous.

So it was - but it would've been only just for that to be an OBW.

They didn't need to emphasise how bad that Deal was, but they still went out of the way to do so. That's the difference between celebrating a goal excitedly, and 'doing an Adebayor'.

Ok i really liked Jess but even i'm struggling to put a positive spin on this.

Obviously she felt that £23,000 was too much money to turn down and I can sort of emphasise with that, but even so that board was far to strong to walk away, and she should have at least held out for £30k.

Maybe if Jess had spent less time in her hotel roon revising and hung out in the bar with Bryan for a couple of hours each night she might have had a better understanding of how to read the board. On the other hand i can see how some people might find a strong board a little overpowering, she wouldn't be the first player to have erred on the side of caution simply because she thought her luck was about to run out.

And yes, even i thought that £73k proveout was a little on the highside

That 73k offer was designed to rub salt in her wounds when she suddenly realised she dealt a a poor offer for her board. She would have struggled to destroy the game after that and it was almost bound to be an increase, but what an increase, pitched, I think, to tip Jess into a tearful reaction.

I thought it was disgraceful how Edmonds went on about the over-inflated "offer" of £73k to reduce the girl to tears.
And why he banged on about the student loan when she had already said that's not why she is there. Does he not know how student loans work? - The fool. Even a contestant said that she would not be paying it off straight away.
If they are looking to close down the show by alienating viewers so that even fewer watch it, they are doing a damn good job

Why did she take the £23k anyway?

I've found another explanation. I alluded to it earlier, but now that JS Boy has pointed out that she actually said she wasn't squarely thinking of that, I think it's the only thing that can explain it.

Trainee accountants face a string of exams, and very often fail them, and retention rates are relatively low. Jess may well have been thinking, at this point, that she couldn't afford to lose the £23,000 in case she lost her job, and couldn't get another one.

I can't see another reason for a mathematically competent player with no binding ties to take that Deal. I believe that StatsMan is a trainee accountant, and there might be others on this forum who have been on training contracts for longer than my two months...

Horrible mathematical decision to deal at £23k only eclipsed by the most unbelievable proveout offer for ages. When you consider that Amy dealt £75k at 5-box in June 2009 with a very similar board to today's but with the 50p replaced by £20k, it shows how ludricrous it was.

I'd have gladly accepted somewhere in the £40k-£50k region as believable at 5-box.

'Easily frightened' isn't really the right expression. 'Blind targetist' fits the description better...

For all we know, she might have, on a worse board, turned down somethinglike 8k on a blue/20k finish!

Even ignoring the rest of the game, refusing the bankers gamble was ludicrous. £12,000 upside against £8,000 down with £15,000 guaranteed. Come on!

My take on why she dealt and as I said earlier the student loan had no bearing on it, is because she had not really studied the game thoroughly. I think even though you are good at maths, which I think I am reasonable at, you do need to watch quite a few games to understand what are good and very mediocre offers and also how the dynamics of the game changes, especially from 8 box to 5 box. I thought she was really unsure and what tipped it was that Noel, said what a good offer it was and appeared to almost say she should deal and I don't think he gave his usual counter view about going on.

I'll give you some credit for that, and I'll add three more points, two specific to this period, the other general;

1) The eight-box going rate was drastically reduced for Hallowe'en, so it's a bit disconcerting to see games where the Banker tries to buy the box there.
2) Noel might have been dwelling on how he talked Jeron out of a second-offer OPW two games ago. Could that, somehow, be the epiphany that stops his intervention once and for all?
2a) The edit might have given a misleading impression in this regard, anyway. Indeed, it probably did; it usually does, from what I've been led to believe by reliable sources here.
3) More pertinently, the offer generosity is only relevant in the context of utility theory. I can't blame them; I never studied the utility of money explicitly even in my Economics degree, only through my own research. This is why we get so many naively target-driven players - a limitation in game strategy that unifies both ultra-conservative players like Richard with ultra-aggressive players like Corinne. Even if one knows the odds of, say, leaving the £250,000 and a blue to the end, on those coinflip finishes, maths can hardly help you - you still have to know what you'd take, and very few would explicitly think along the lines of "what sum of money is half as useful to you as £250,000?", which is the correct approach under the principles of utility theory to determining what you would take on a £250k/blue finish (and this rule generalises).

Knowing the odds only helps in recognising the scale of the risk and reward inherent in any No Deal. You still have to translate that to your valuation of money. For instance, my overwhelming ambition in life is to buy a house, which could be turned into a Corinne-esque approach of blindly chasing £250k, because I live on the borders of Surrey and Greater London, and even a little two-bed house costs nearly £250,000 here (and this is a cheap place to live compared to the surrounding area!). By contrast, if I lived in parts of the north of England I could get a similar property for a third of that, so my aggressive target might be £75,000 (which a former contestant from Liverpool said would get her a house without a mortgage).

However, in practice there are smaller things I could do with smaller amounts of money - recording an album in a recording studio is a long-term ambition, I could buy a new PC to replace the damaged laptop I'm typing this on, I could resume my singing lessons, I could shift all of my shopping to Waitrose, I could get a personal trainer. And that's before one considers that I could save my money and put it towards a deposit on a house at a later date. Therefore, on a given board, I am going to have to consider all of those - in a high-pressure situation, no less - in making my decision.

Needless to say, most people can't do that. I'm not even sure I could, and I could reasonably be described as one of the leading analysts of this show in the country. No surprise that just about every contestant is inclined to adopt simplified approaches of one kind or another. This is a hugely complex game in practice, despite its simple veneeer, and I am glad Noel recognised that in his introduction today.

Yes, it was a bit of a baffling decision for a Trainee Accountant to make, certainly not what I would have done (or most others for that matter). I mean, you'd think she'd work out in proportion to the average, it wasn't a great offer. Then again, a 'blind targetist' would take little notice of that, and no amount of advice is likely to change their decision...