Prizegiving

This week:

• The Secret Admirers award (for receiving the most challenges) goes to Bunnery, who was challenged 28 times
  
• The Open Relay award (for sending the most challenges) goes to Bunnery, who sent 50 challenges
  
• The Turing award (for the most solo games played) goes to sharon, who played solo 51 times.
  
• The Enigma award (for sending the hardest codes) is awarded to Mr.Puzzlewit, whose codes took an average of 9.67 guesses to break
  
• The Plaintext award (for sending the easiest codes) is given to DOM, whose codes took only 5.02 guesses to break on average
  
• The Quick Thinking award (for the fastest game) goes to Sarah, who completed a game in 3 seconds
  
• The Deep Thought award (for the slowest game) goes to laura, who took 1 day 23:59:54 to finish one game
  
• The Brute Force award (for the highest average) goes to Toad, who took an average of 7.89 guesses to break codes
• The Bletchley award (for top codebreaker) is this week awarded to Sarah, whose average number of guesses to break codes was 3.88 over 33 games.

Bit of a quiet one, this time - only 302 games played (259 less than last week). That's probably to do with the fact that DOM and Sharon - who are normally our two hardest working players - only played 76 games between them, accounting for 25% of the week's total.

DOM and Sarah spent the final 48 hours of the week jostling for first place, but Sarah managed to move slightly ahead by employing the 'stop playing a game if it starts to go wrong' technique. That gave her the edge (3.88 compared to DOM's 3.9), but might cause her problems this week, as they all expired this morning. Even taking into account her completed games from today, she's only managed to bring her average for this week down to 9.2 (so far). Still, she wins the Bletchley, so perhaps it was a worthwhile sacrifice.

Toad reappeared this week, and even managed to earn himself an award in the process - OK, it was the Brute Force award for his average of 7.89, but it's an award nonetheless. It probably just takes a few games to get back into the swing of things. On the subject of high averages, the spread of results has widened considerably this week - the highest (7.89) and lowest (3.88) results give us a spread of 4.01.

Congratulations to everyone who won an award - they'll now be visible on your personal statistics pages so that the rest of us can marvel at your skills.

Predictions

Last week, I predicted 'DOM, Laura, bin1, ICE CREAM' - it seemed to be going quite well (relatively speaking). I'd got one name in the right place, but then Sarah snuck in and pushed DOM into second place. That gave us the final results of 'Sarah, DOM, Breadmower, Janet' - one name in the wrong place. I never seem to get any better, do I?

This week, I'm confident that Sarah's not going to be able to spoil my predictions (famous last words) - I'm going to go for 'Laura, Janet, Bunnery, DOM'. Good feeling about this one :-)

Until next week...