Two from the top and the rest small, please Carol

Submitted by DrDave on Sat, 18/12/2010 - 20:53

Penny dropped: it's the Countdown numbers game!

There's a special captain's treat that I save for myself, which is picking the teams for the Peter Rooke Cup. I'm after the best team of 8 players for the matches from the available pool, who together are inside the grading limit of 1120 (formerly 1120).

After some fiddling with a spreadsheet, I managed to hit exactly the limit of 1120 this year, one chap dropped out, then the closest I could get was 1119, which is still pretty good.

Then today our opponents cancelled because of Weather, so I have to start again...

Anyhow, at that moment I realised what I'm sure everyone else realised long ago, which is that the problem is similar to the Numbers Game featured on the long-running Channel 4 programme Countdown.

And of course, someone with a long Sunday afternoon to fill has scripted and made available to the rest of us a Numbers Game Solver; hat-tip to Xiberpix.

Shame the League rules allow only addition of the grades...

P.S. I believe Peter Rooke was a Teignmouth postman, who created a team competition to be played as a knockout, intended for 'ordinary' club players like himself.