oh not a pound cry

Poor John, it was a good game, and I'm glad to see a system being used because that's always interesting. And he went all the way - now that takes guts.

John deserved a big win after all his advice to other contestants, not forgetting the tingle!

If only John had a different set of circumstances in his game, he would have left with loads. 8 is a really bad box for trainwrecks!

We've had:

Barbara - Won £1
Dot - Just a very very bad trainwreck.
Raj - Won £1
Ashok - Won £250
Debbie - Won £250
John 'tingle' - Won £1

Can you expand on this? What evidence do you have for any patterns post-Sequencegate?

Welldone John.

Well Done John. Should have tingled a bit.

That was a really unlucky game, one of those who deserved a lot more.

When you think about it though, the odds weren't in his favour... Johns are unlucky, that position is unlucky, long-running players are unlucky, and then there's box 8 as Richard mentioned above! Not to mention a slight resemblance to 1p Trevor as was said when he first appeared all those weeks ago...

seems to remind me of Mike's game winning £1 and the £15,000 went at the same point as well!

Another disappointing game

Of course, there have been some good games with box 8, like Chris' (Female) game.

And when the 1p went, I was relieved!

Come to think of it, hardly any of the long-running players have done particularly well, have they? Gary got £29,999 and Karen got £17k, but other than that they've all had total disasters (Raj, Lucy, John) or won disappointing four-figure amounts (Pat, Khanny, Sarah ).

Yeah, and the only two members of the 30-show club you missed were John M and Dave W, who both won fairly average 5-figure amounts. (Thanks to the other Dave W for the stats of course - he's also credited Ashley with 33 shows though it appears we didn't count his missing shows on here.)

Then Sarah never really did 33 shows then.

Yes she did.

I think because Raj's and Sarah's positions stayed empty, it should still count as "their" shows, whereas Ashley's was filled by Harry for all the time he was away, so it wasn't really him. Although James took Raj's place for one show, too.....urgh, I don't know.

She missed 2 or 3 didn't she (1 filming day? Sure Daniel can confirm!) and Raj was similar.

Ashley missed 6 shows I think, he was replaced but went back to his original position. Joseph of course was absent for about 50 (at a rough guess) and took up a new position when he came back.

I think the Association of Deal Or No Deal Statisticians needs to make an official decision here on when missed shows are counted!

Very disappointing game.

Let's hope that £250,000 is in the contestant's box before long so Noel will finally shut up about it!!

I've been thinking about yesterday's game, where the whole mood changed when Barbara decided to swap her box. Swapping shouldn't have any effect, and yet it seemed as though everyone around her was concerned before the swapped box was opened.

With random distribution of the amounts, there's no advantage to swapping. However, if it isn't fully random, then some information can be gained as to what the contents of the player's box could be through the opening of the other boxes.

My theory is, while we don't know what's in the box, it may be possible to have more than a 50% chance of knowing where the money is located, based on the knowledge of the previous boxes.

At the moment, it's only a hunch. If the independent adjudicator isn't using computer methods to randomise the contents of the boxes after Sequencegate, then it could be worth looking into past games' trends. If it is random, then it should have no effect on how well a player does.

In other words, while it may seem like no harm can come from the swap decision, it could help you to win more in the long run, and conversely, to lose less.

For those of you who didn't know, in Germaine's game, Boxes 8 and 12 (Germaine's) were left and the two amounts remaining were the £1 and £250,000, respeciively (However, Germaine took the £75,000 deal and then the £250,000 was revealed to be in his Box 12).

I know of at least one player (Ron) with Box 8 having a red (£20,000) in his game. Any others, especially those with one of the Power Five?

Surely that's just because it was a fairly unusual decision? Most players say "Ooh, I'd never swap my box", especially with such a big difference between the two amounts, and lots of people take the opinion that they'd rather find that they'd never had the big money in front of them than that they'd had it all along and given it away. I doubt anyone was worried because they actually knew what was in the boxes.

That's a point - there were a few edits at the start of today's show. There was an odd cut right at the beginning, and then there was something cut while Noel was on the phone to the Banker at the start; they probably had to cut out all the references to Barbara's game because Noel referred to it as being on the Saturday.