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Grand slam winner

From Countdown

A grand slam winner is a contestant who becomes an octochamp (or viscount in case of Series 46), series champion and champion of champions, essentially giving them an unbeaten run of 13 to 15 wins (depending on the length of their Championship of Champions). This is regarded as the highest accolade to achieve on Countdown.

Grand slam winners are typically undefeated in all of their televised competitive games alone, excluding games in the Supreme Championship, the 30th Birthday Championship and special episodes (unless they had a previous stint as a contestant in an earlier series, in which they lost a game). As a point of interest, each of these contestants' defeats (if any) are listed here.

To date, there have been seven grand slam winners:

All but one of these were No. 1 seed for their finals; the only exception is Graham Nash, who was No. 2 seed behind David Williams.

Grand slam points totals

9-round era

Typically, a 9-round grand slam winner played 12 9-round games and 2 14-round games. As Scott Mearns only played two matches in his Championship of Champions, his 872 score comes from just 13 games. Mearns's average 9-round score is 64.45, and thus his theoretical score for 14 games would be 936. Thus, he is listed above Don Reid here.

Rank Name Wins Points
1 Harvey Freeman 14 964
2 Scott Mearns** 13 872
3 Don Reid 14 926
4 Nic Brown 14 859

Mixed formats

Graham Nash is the only grand slam winner who played his original series in the 9-round era and the Championship of Champions XI in the (old) 15-round era. He score 684 points in his Xicount run, and 406 points from 4 games in the COC. Therefore, his points total if reducing his score by 9/15 accordingly for the CP, CQF, and CSF games, and by 14/15 for the CGF game, becomes 270 for this run, and 954 points from 15 games if he is to be included in 9-rounders. However, as he played an additional game in his COC compared to Freeman, Reid, and Brown; and two more than Mearns, this cannot be considered to be a comparable total to Freeman or Mearns's scores. If his three COC games (excluding the final) are thus reduced to two, his total becomes 888.

Doing the calculations in reverse, i.e. multiplying his Series 43 games by 15/9 (and the final by 15/14), is 991.666666 for the first 10, 95.357 for the GF. Thus this gives him 1087 for his Xicount total and 1493 for his 15-game total.

Rank Name Score
Graham Nash
(raw)
1090
Graham Nash
(adjusted for 9-rounders, 15 wins)
954
Graham Nash
(adjusted for 9-rounders, adjusted for 14 wins)
888
Graham Nash
(adjusted for 15-rounders, 15 wins)
1493

15-round era

There have only been two grand slam winners exclusively in the 15-round era, and both of these runs came after the change to the new 15-round format in 2013, and both had COC runs comprising of four games.

Rank Name Wins Points
1 Zarte Siempre 15 1816
2 Ahmed Mohamed 15 1775

See also