Incredible work from FOTB Daniel Hurst (@danielmarkhurst), a complete collection of stats for the original run of The Cube, in time for the new series next week.

Points of note:

• Barrier is obviously the most used game, being played a whopping 21 times. It felt like a *lot* more.
• Meanwhile there are *forty* games that have only been played once, and a further 22 that have only been played twice. What a waste of effort!
• The Bell Curve of Boring. It’s something that affects most if not all money ladder shows and has done even since Millionaire, and the force is strong in this one – over two thirds of the outcomes are on the middle three rungs. As the results get more predictable, it becomes far less entertaining to watch – everyone stops in the same place. TV needs to get a lot smarter going forward to combat this.

Great work Daniel. The Million Pound Cube starts next Saturday at 9pm.

And that means I’m *likely* to move Bother’s Bar Game Night from 9pm to 10pm to avoid clashing such a momentous event. More details in a few days.

Meanwhile, I’m going to run another community game of Among Us tomorrow (Sunday) from 9pm – just turn up in the Discord voice chat and play. It won’t be recorded.

Finally, I’m opening up the Stool Pigeon on Monday for your Autumn/Winter industry goss. Exciting!

I have to say, putting the Celeb Special up against Bother’s Bar’s Game Night 20: Champion of Champions 2020 is brave – expect it to put loads on in +7.

Thanks to Twitter for pointing out that Gordon Ramsay’s B/£\NK B/\LΔNCE is looking for contestants.

Whilst we’re here, what the hell has happened in The Netherlands? Why does Avro Tros now look like a rubbish cable music channel of the early 2010s?

In other news, Michael Mcintyre’s The Wheel films in Bovingdon Airfield (Hertfordshire) in October, tickets from Lost in TV.

FOTB Ash The Bash is doing a charity stream of 500 Questions on Saturday, starting from midday UK, and finally gives us the answer to the question “does slightly rubbish format 500 Questions become better if it actually asks 500 questions?” Needless to say, I’m hoping to become the contestant around Q498.

You’ll be able to catch the action on Ash’s Twitch stream.

The community is hoping to raise money for Save the Children, and you can donate here.

Also of note is that the second series of The Wall starts on Saturday night at 9:15pm, which feels quite late. We discussed series one here.

Alright, some final words on Weakest Link US for now. We’ve already written quite a lot about the theory.

Pros:

• Jane Lynch is good.
• The set’s quite nice.
• Paul Farrer’s updated music is grand.
• I like having the questions on the screen.
• I like that there are picture questions.
• They didn’t “do” immunity. Phew.
• I see what they did with adding the top money from the previous round to the chain for the next round.

Cons:

• The quizzing needs to be speedier. If Anne Robinson was able to get through 25-27 questions in three minutes, you should be doing more than 16 in 2:30.
• The final vote is silly silly silly. The point of having the final round worth more money is to create the incentive to keep strong players on to build the bank, now there is… no incentive. I know they did this on the George Gray one as well, but at least it had the mitigating circumstance of having to wrap up in 22 minutes.
• But this is irrelevant, because Weakest Link where the top prize of a round is $500,000 is absolutely insane. There is no possible route to a chain that doesn’t feel stupid – either your early stages are worth so much you’ll rake it in banking after each question, or worth so little compared to the top prize nobody wins anything because you need to get more right than people probably will to be worth anything. Consider the rule of four, if they did a round like that in the UK, the fourth rung on the ladder would be £100,000, from a £10,000 start. For answering a question!

I think they could absolutely afford to be a bit more generous in the early rounds if they’re going to be a bit less generous in the later rounds. The first two, maybe four rounds should absolutely be played to the Rule of Four (with the reminder that in all versions of UK Link (except the Comic Relief special), by accident or design four questions = 20% of the target), multiples of:

$500 – $1,000 – $2,500 – $5,000 – $7,500 – $12,500 – $17,500 – $25,000

If they must play stupid money than I can accept a slower chain with more interesting gambling opportunities, although I’m still not sure how much I love it:

$5,000 – $10,000 – $25,000 – $50,000 – $100,000 – $200,000 – $350,000 – $500000

We know with the Rule of Four, and on a set chain with a double or triple round at the end, and with a 3:00 starting time, players usually won between 20-30% of the top prize – whatever it might be. With this extremely top heavy game, you’ll probably end up giving away a little bit more (but unlikely to be several hundred thousand dollars more, certainly closer to $100k than $300k) and have a more satisfied, happier audience. Most of the game will still be played on the lower rungs (because as we’ve previously suggested, basic probability suggests getting a large chain is extremely unlikely), at least the decisions are more interesting there.