darn. i thought she was gonna go on the barge, perhaps they should now move to the Queen Elizabeth.

Kind of knew the 1p was going to come out there...

The banker says this is one of his best months ever, and he's loving this weekend.

Banker's offer:

£13

Thank goodness for Shannon's cautious deal or we'd probably at 5 blue wins a row right now instead of 4.

Helen says

NO DEAL

now the banker will be talking dirty to her

The banker phones back and says if Helen wins 50p, the curse will last throughout next week, but if it's the £50 then it's the end of the curse.

Banker's offer:

SWAP

Helen says

NO SWAP

Helen wins £50 from box 1.

Box 17 with Gordon contains the 50p

Helen says she feels fine and has had a wonderful time on the show.

It's still just £151.01 paid out in the last four games...

And that's an amazing statistic - five and a half years of DOND UK, and only now do we get four consecutive blue wins for the first time...

It's not just the fact that we've had 4 blues in a row brought to the table but the fact that we've had 4 all-blue finishes as well as virtually no dealable offers (Hilde's 5-box offer was dealable statistically but not really in the context of the game).

The odds of 4 all blue finishes in a row are about 1 in 311 (the odds of no dealable offers are pretty much incalcuble given the banker's mood is not definable statisically)

Lets lay a quid on tomorrow being a blue win

£151.01? I'm sure that's gonna be in the top 20 lowest weekly payouts for a long time...and suddenly the thought of the jackpot being won continues to diminish

This week has paid out £17,151.50 - third worst week ever! (See viewtopic.php?p=702480#p702480)

And it would have been the worst week ever had Shannon not been cautious...

Oh yeah, I forgot about Shannon's game...

Any round where you go twice off the top (kicking the top two amounts) is just debilitating. It happened TWICE today, both with £75K/£100K and £20K/£1K. Yowza. There's a 30% chance of doing that at 5-box, but with 11 left, the odds are down to 5.4%.

The boxes are just being obnoxious. That's really all there is to it. Of course, these cycles that are referenced do have reason; while it's certainly not entirely comparable, if one flips a coin a large number of times, let's say 1591 as a totally random, uninspired number , you can expect that at least somewhere along the line you're going to get an unbroken clump of all heads or all tails. For a random event to truly oscillate between one result and another even in a setting where they're equally likely outcomes is extraordinary. So I'm not surprised that Noel has many opportunities to call Deal a "cyclical" game of sorts.

h2005 steals my Mr. Observant title from Friday, I hadn't noticed the phone had actually changed. I actually kinda liked the Swap Shop rendition better, if that's what one would call it.

I noticed when Helen's box was opened at the end they didn't play the usual tension music, just the heartbeat sound effects.

Well it's certainly been one heck of a week, only one red win in six days.

But again Helen had no luck with the boxes. The offers haven't been great and the Banker has had little if any incentive to be generous, but at the end of the day - as others have remarked - the game is cyclical and cruel as it may be on those chosen to play during this run all we as viewers have to do is ride it out in the knowledge that it cannot go on forever...

Be positive!