ARGH!!! NO NO NO!!!

Three Christmas specials and three disasters...

And even an attempt at forcing a feel-good ending doesn't work...

(...or, if you're a cynic, another attempt at manufacturing cruelty pays off)

Right, after two blue wins in successive themed shows, today is the day to play, because I would not be surprised to see Endemol do anything to stop it being three in a row.

A legitimately good start for Jay, regardless of that, and the offer reflects that. Crikey, they've even let his cautious mum in the audience, they must be rattled.

Second round has one, and only one, big hit; stick wouldn't be unexpected in a regular game. Third round is an all-blue! Cracking board; offer is deliberately the wrong side of The Rock, and were it not, I'd be considering it.

Round 4... is excellent! Four of the Power 5 at eight-box... "The Banker will have to stop you getting to 5-box now." No personal trainer could offer a tougher abdominal workout than the one I got from that remark. OK, it's over twenty grand, but come on. Jim sees it for what it is, and whether Jay does or not, he makes the right call.

And in one round, the merit of the five-box twist comes crashing down like a dropped barbell. Still, four- and three-box offers coming. Funny how they improved the ratio to 2 good/1 bad (from 50/50) to further entice players on, isn't it... he even goes and hits the £50k right off the bat. *Beep* this, I'm off to watch Miljoenenjacht.

*skims through thread* ...well, I told you it was going to be a red win... 8-)

...oh, riiight. I didn't see that desperate twist coming. I should have done, but I didn't. "£1,000 is a lot of money, I can treat my nan." "Don't upset your nan, you can win even more by gambling now." Stop *beeping* projecting your intentions onto the player. There we go, he gets nothing. On an ordinary episode, that could have been a £30k OPW. As it is, instead of losing £30,000, Endemol might just have lost 30,000 viewers. Which is far more costly to them in the long run.

And to think Halloween shows gave us so much luck.

Alas...

I must admit, I can't see why Noel says "the Banker wants to stop you from getting to 5-box" when surely he knows that the opposite is true.

But if Jay had taken that £22k, it would have been some OPW...

Worse game of the month, period!

As if yesterday's was cruel, this was deceiving at the most extreme!

I gave up on this week yesterday, and thought I wouldn't bother watching but look at the run-through on here. I might not return till the New Year if they keep forcing this artificial sh*te on us.

More bad luck there. Ignoring the 'extra incentive' to get to 5 box in these games i thought that the £22k 8 box offer was quite tempting esecially given the 66% chance of finding the holiday on top of the cash. Having said that it was a justifiable decision to play on given the strength of the board.

As for the final twist, the odds were stacked against him, not sure I would have wanted to take on that gamble.

I'm glad I've saved my five Miljoenenjacht reports for Christmas now! (And especially after the game I've just watched... which was almost the perfect anecdote to this!)

Actually, thinking about it in more depth, this is payback for Christmas 2008, where it all went the right way for the contestants (Ellen, Lauren, Billy, Ian, Carrie etc all getting massive wins). Stan, Butch, Leon and Jane all won lots too even if they didn't get OPWs. I guess all that had to even itself out eventually!

(Or it's evening out Halloween as Unclekevo suggested - last Christmas wasn't very good either, so that could have been the payback for 2008!)

Very interesting assessment. I enjoy reading your posts! He thought the £1000 was a lot to pay off his nan and I am not sure if he said what job he had. You could argue the 1 in 3 chance to win £15k was better odds than we get playing the £1 national lottery scratchcards. Still I was expecting the producers to sweeten the pill a little bit like saying don't find it and you'll get £500 esp given his back story. They make the rules to suit nowadays so anything is possible.

I doubt they will worry about losing viewers. The sort of people who enjoy seeing this ending this would have been there knitting in front of the guillotine at the french revolution. I include my nan in that list too As im off this week I look forward to seeing how the next few shows pan out.

I can imagine the players who win peanuts are so upset with themselves that they don't post on these threads what was going through their mind during the match. I would probably never watch that show again if I was a blue winner and I bet I Jay, Jen or Darren weren't watching their shows.

btw, I didn't know what 'Miljoenenjacht' meant until google assisted.

norwichdonder: he said he was a personal trainer, which coincidentally is a line of work I'm thinking of entering... I suspect that his income has been disrupted by injury from the crash, and hence he's in a much worse financial position than he'd otherwise be.

(Coincidentally, having done some of the accountancy exams since Jess's game, I suddenly understand her Deal!! I'd still have gone on myself, mind, but anyone who thinks the Deal was inexplicable for someone in a mathematical line of work has not experienced the insecurity created by the accountancy exams... although having said that, StatsMan has, and was still highly critical... but I digress.)

The real issue I had with it, and it's not a first-time offence for this twist either, is "here's an offer. Go on, we really want you to take it, so we'll make it more generous. Go on, go on, go on." It's goading of the worst kind - it puts Noel's slanted use of language completely in the shade.

Yes that is very true and Noel (presumably word prompted via his earpiece) is terrific at giving the player guilt/doubts etc. I haven't seen that ending before but I will admit im not a die-hard. My personal view is that any offer at around the £20k mark is worth considering unless you don't need the cash and will play to the bitter end even if its the 1p club. It would be an interesting statistic to see how many people have dealt at around the 20k figure with the upper power 5 in play. Given that the deals are generally castrated if a power 5 is revealed you can understand why human behaviour plays a lot on past experiences.

Just when you think the week couldn't get much worse - a very promising 8-box is destroyed by the 1 in 70 chance of hitting the top 4 in 4 boxes.

The twist at the end were horrible and I would have tried somehow to try and get 2 boxes to pick instead of 1 (even if it meant a lower reward).

Well, that was excruciating to watch, not least because I knew that what would happen back in May, what I didn't realise was that the crash from 8-box was going to be as dramatic as it was. The trouble was, in the producer's eyes at least, £1k was to all intents and purposes as bad as 3 blue wins in a row, so in a desperate attempt to rescue the game to a chunky sum, the gamble comes out, in the knowledge that a nothing win would create far more of a talking point than 1k anyway. 66% of nothing but a handsome 15x multiplier on the grand left Jay's hands virtually tied, he was obliged to go for it.

It's sort of similar to Kerry's game from Jul '09 in terms of the gamble reward, except she only had a 50% of nothing (having dealt £900), only that time it was the pilgrims 'goading' her on if anything as it was great odds for an even-money shot, whereas today of course was skewed in the banker's favour, which made all the difference - this seemed cruel, whereas Kerry's was ludicrously generous (yet still dramatic).