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Conundrum

From Countdown
"Crucial" redirects here. You may be looking for Crucial - A Champion’s Tale.
Martin Gardner solving the conundrum INNERMOST.

The conundrum is a buzzer round where a 9-letter word is shown to contestants in the form of an anagram which must be unjumbled. The first person to buzz in and provide the correct answer in 30 seconds or less scores 10 points. The conundrum is the final round of the game, and another conundrum is shown in the event of a tie.

The conundrum is hidden at the start of the round and then turned over to reveal the scramble as soon as the clock is started. Each player may buzz in and guess only once. If any contestant buzzes in with a wrong guess or does not answer, they are "frozen out" of the round and the clock is then re-started for the other player to buzz within the time remaining. Since Series 65 in 2011, wrong guesses are revealed in final cut as INCORRECT. The round ends when either one player answers correctly, when the 30 seconds expire or when both contestants buzz in and fail to guess correctly.

A crucial conundrum occurs when the two players are within 10 points of each other before the final conundrum round, and hence the winner will be whichever player can solve it. Since 2003, the studio lights are dimmed on a crucial conundrum and since 2017, the lights turn pinkish-purple.

Pre-COVID, conundrums were presented on a board so that audience members could see; if neither contestant found the answer within 30 seconds, it was – from 2003 – often thrown over to the studio audience. A correct answer from an audience member won them a Countdown mug. Post-COVID, conundrums are presented digitally and unsolved conundrums are thrown over to the co-presenter, lexicographer and celebrity guest. The mechanical conundrum board is still used on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.

If the total scores are level after the conundrum, another conundrum is presented as a tie-breaker. Tie-break conundrums continue to be presented until one is solved, and the same rules apply for each conundrum. Tie-break conundrums are rare, and a third is even rarer. Tie-breakers may theoretically continue ad infinitum, but on some such occasions only the solved conundrum is broadcast in final cut to save time, such as in Episode 6157.

From the show's inception in 1982, the game was declared a draw if the scoreline was level after the conundrum and both contestants would return for a rematch the next day, except in series finals when tie-breaks were necessary. After Series 21 had a record 4 drawn preliminary matches, the rules were changed in Series 22 so that all matches must now be settled by tie-breaks. Games may still end in a draw on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, which does not usually have tie-breaks.

The conundrum is often posed as gibberish comprised of two or three words (or occasionally, one word with a prefix/suffix, or an abbreviation), similar to an anagram fodder in cryptic crossword clues. The scramble may be tongue-in-cheek, or even as one whole word to pose a true anagram pair. For example, DEVIATION can be jumbled up as ANTIVIDEO, EMULATING as GLUTAMINE, SEGREGATE as EASTEREGG and BONHOMOUS humorously as OOHSONUMB.

Conundrums are designed to be gently puzzling rather than annoyingly baffling, so extremely rare and obsolete words with definitions that are difficult to comprehend should be avoided for this purpose. While the Oxford Dictionaries Premium website is Countdown's sole source, almost all answers are considered everyday words and appear in standard single-volume print and online dictionaries. Obscurer verbs and adjectives, loanwords and terms from academic subjects may be preserved for knockout matches in the finals and a Championship of Champions to increase difficulty. Conundrums are set by the producer, currently Damian Eadie. Plurals of 8-letter nouns and verbs in present tense form are usually not used in conundrums, although nouns which exist only in plural form such as DROPPINGS and CASTANETS may be used.

Although conundrums, when unjumbled, must reveal only one 9-letter word, an "illegal" conundrum with two or more possible answers may be posed in error. For example, in Episode 7012, the conundrum jumbled as LOVECRISP had COVERSLIP and SLIPCOVER as possible answers.

During the recording of the programmes, conundrums may be changed and/or re-shot in the game in the event of discrepancies or mishaps which would not produce suitable outcomes in final cuts.

For the purpose of differentiating between which contestant presses their button to offer a solution first, both the Champion's and Challenger's nameplates have a perimeter light which illuminates when their button is pressed, with the Champion's button sounding a "bell" and the Challenger's as a "buzzer".

On occasions where one of the contestants is visually impaired or blind, the conundrum scramble is phonetically read out, the most recent example of this being on Episode 7855.

Some top notch contestants have been noted for frequently solving conundrums in under a second, as indicated by a buzz before the clock has illuminated the first light. The record for the fastest combined time over 8 conundrums by an octochamp (to the quarter of a second) currently stands at 17.75 seconds by Tom Carey. In the Series 57 finals in 2007, the series runner-up in the form of Jeffrey Hansford adopted a tactic which became known as "Hansfording" or "fudging", where he would buzz in as soon as the letters started to turn over. In his semi-final, he was too slow to answer, but correctly guessed as soon as the clock re-started. As an act of sportsmanship, his opponent declined to buzz in.