blonde poker forum

I happened to watch a tv programme last night called "The Mint".

It was a quasi quiz show where viewers are asked to solve a puzzle and then phone a premium rate number and guess the answer live on television where they can win anything upwards of £20,000. (For some reason they changed how much you could win at various times of the night).

The quiz question was this: there were 3 balloons and wrtten inside them were "44" "80" and "ninety-six" and the legand "add the numbers". Not as easy as you may think. Various people guessed 220, 124, 16, 3 etc etc etc. In fact every possible combination of the numbers seemed to be guessed. Alll were wrong.

After a long time (I don't know how long I watched the chit but I guess 2 hours... I know I am a sad case but I really wanted to know the answer) they suddenly said. "We are only going to take 8 more calls on this puzzle". Ahhh at last I thought I was going to find out the answer. But no. Once 8 more guesses were given they announced "That's it for tonight, we will go back to this quiz in the future!". So, they get another huge number of saps paying 75p a call in a month's time or whenever to guess exactly the same numbers which were guessed last night.

On a huge number of levels this programme was disturbing and just plain wrong. The presenters kept saying "ooooh good guess" to wrong answers without giving any clue to work out the correct answer. They kept imploring the viewers to call now "Just think how sick you'll be if you know the right answer and someone else gets the 20 grand!". Plainly encouraging people to gamble (There is obviously no skill ionvolved in the game...it's just a glorifield lottery). How can the gaming board allow this nonsense yet if you miss the first hand of a poker tournament you are disqualified? And alteranates aren't allowed to play. Each caller was limited to 150 guesses! Thats £122.50! FFS! But the worst aspect of all was they never revealed the result and will open the quiz again at some later date "If you don't call now, you may not be watching when we come back to this puzzle and someone else will get the money!".

All in all I have never been so angry watching a television programme. How thiis genre haven't been banned is beyond me. It's an absolute disgrace and an ugly stain on British television.

End of rant.

If this is what i've got to look forward too when changing nappies at 2am then god help me!!  :D

So i take it you didnt get through with the right answer then Keith? ;)

p.s. - is the answer not 31? :)up

Keith, this sort of utter rip off crap has been going a while on various channels.....Im suprised you havent stumbled accross it before....utter utter disgrace as you say.

The ones that get me are those that say 'not all calls will get through, but you will be charged'

lol...I remember reading something about this program a while ago. Basically they were investigated because they couldn't come up with a proper explanation as to how they got their end nr. This was after a viewer complained and demanded to be shown the result (because they never tell you WHEN they will get back to this quiz you have no idea whether they actually do give the result) They then had a couple of mathematicians work on one of their puzzles..and TRY to come up with the nr the program makers had given them..and they found "it was impossible to do so if done in the manner described in the question, even for someone with a fair degree of mathematical knowledge is takes a big effort to come up with this nr at all" So they'd ask to see the calculation the program makers had used BUT the company said "we can't give that to anyone as it might give people an unfair advantage"

man..how this sort of stuff is legal is beyond me.

BTW..the stuff in quotes are not exact quotes but fairly similar.

31 was one of the answers I came up with. Obviously wrong if it had any logic involved!

The only mildly amusing thing about the whole sorry affair was that every 15 minutes or so some poor soul came on and guessed 220. As though noone in the previous hour could possibly have added the 3 numbers correctly.

Watching these programmes is going to be very dangerous in the near future as Jake is 13 months now and I don't want to swear in front of him! And I confess alot of vulgarity was passing my lips as I sat through this torture last night!

I went through the same experience as you Keith the first time I saw this. There was some puzzle showing some poker chips and the question was 'How many chips?'. OK, I thought, that's badly worded - do they mean the number of physical chips, or the total value of the chips? Someone phoned up and gave one of these answers. 'Ah, they must be looking for the other one', I thought. A couple of callers later and someone gave the other correct answer. 'Sorry, good guess, but not right'.

'Eh?' I thought. Maybe I counted wrong? I triple checked - those were the only two possible answers. I then watched in dumbfounded amazement as, over the course of the next hour, over half the callers gave one of these two 'correct' answers. At no point did the blonde ball of fluff that was presenting pass any comment that people were giving the same wrong answers. Was she an idiot or complicit in the fraud?

Of course, no one got the answer and they moved onto another puzzle. Callers are charged 75p for each call whether they get through or not. There are passages of the programme where five minutes will go by without them taking a call - all the while people at home are racking up the 75ps in order to give their answer - an answer which, in their view, cannot possibly be wrong.

There seem to be about four of these channels on Sky now, and ITV seem to have it on every night. Of course, it's a goldmine for the TV company - very little overheads. The channel (in this case ITV) are happy as this is helping to stem the lack of cash they are getting from advertising (because no one is watching their shitty programmes these days).

Not only are these programmes fraud, but they are so obviously fraud that I am amazed there hasn't been more of an outcry.

Normally when I'm channel surfing if I hit upoin any type of quiz show it is whisked away in 0.00001 seconds so I've never endured this before.

surely at the end of the day anyone with half an ounce of common sense can see that these programs are a rip-off and will steer well clear of them..................

Just as they do with the European Lottery Emails, the Nigerian bank account money making scheme and the Barclays Server reboot please send us your account number email!!  ;goodvevil;

Bingo! You've used the word which I was searching for while the steam was pouring out of my ears.

Fraud.

That's the simple explanation for what I witnessed last night.

Those shows drive me mad  ;grr;

the problem is Matt, is that these shows pick on the poor and desperate,(and maybe drunk!).....not us with a couple of brain cells,....apparantly The Mint takes 100k a night !

The OFT is currently investigating these types of programmes and I have heard several radio investigations into them too

A complete rip off, pandering to the sad gullibility of many people.

I would expect tougher regulation, possibly price caps etc before long

ITV however, to put a different viewpoint across, would be really in trouble without them....its viewing figures and advertising rates are down and income from these programmes is subsidising drama budgets etc

ITV is rumoured to be the subject of takeover due to years of poor amagement and underperformance

i believe Julian is a big fan of these quizzes

i gotta get that number,
i got three answers,
one of thems gotta be right, right?

 rotflmfao

Apologies but in the days when i was poor and desperate - this still would have been the last solution i would have come up with to aleviate my problems.

The show doesnt pick on the poor and desperate, it picks on those who are too gullable to realize they are being ripped off.

And whilst yes programs like this should be instantly banned from tv and their creators imprisoned for fraud i dont have much sympathy for those who are gullable enough to think that television shows like this are the answer to their financial problems.

My old man always said "Fools and their money are easy parted."

 The first time I saw this crap they had a 'blankety blank' type quiz. There was 1 answer left and the puzzle was Hair ____ . My guess of 'retw*t' was way off the mark as the true answer turned out to be the more obvious 'pencil'. Still intrigued by what a hair pencil is used for tho...can anyone shed some light? :dontask:

is that the same thing as a "tyre---thingemiejig"?

'Jobs beginning with A'

The obvious top answer was Alchemist. Have a guess what the £150 answer is. Go on, guess. Guess till the end of time then have an extra half hour. You'll never get it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX7-JgLH6oE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX7-JgLH6oE)

Clip is worth watching for the dozy cow who phoned up the wrong quiz show, channel-hopping dimwit that she is.

How do I get a job as an a**** ******r!? And what the hell is one...

I guessed Acrobat, hilarious answer though. It is genuine mind, I googled it.

Oh dear, I have now been sucked into watching YouTube clips of these programmes. The fact that a) they're live, b) there's only one presenter at a time and c) the programmes are content-free means that there is a real knack to presenting these things. There's probably a lot of cross-over with local radio phone-ins, hence presenters like this guy, who was totally flummoxed by this caller.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzJotjN2imQ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzJotjN2imQ)

He could have at least said he was stumped.

They're an absolute joke. No idea how they get away with it. Saw it once with a number of sterling notes on the screen and the question was how many £s or something..literally every combination was covered..visible pound signs, number of notes, total value etc etc Went away and turned the TV on an hour and a half later and they were still guessing.

They're even infecting Australia - but these guys have got their number.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzVTr2YHy9c (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzVTr2YHy9c)

A friend of my sisters found a mobile phone a couple of months ago which was a contract phone with an unlimited amount of credit. Rather than do the honest thing and try to find out who it belonged to, she rang up these shows constantly for a week making THOUSANDS of calls.

About 1 in 15/20 actually got through to the studio and she actually got some of them right.

The cost of the calls obviously was far higher than the money she won but as it wasnt her phone she was onto a winner or so she thought.

Shame she wasnt bright enough to realise it would be fairly easy to track her down as the studio had her name and address  rotflmfao

Thses programmes are basically scams, they create a subjective puzzle which viewers pay £1 a punt (Even ones who don't get through) to attempt to decipher.

Most of the viewers haven't been watching the show, so the obvious answer gets repeated over and over and over and over again. (Trust me, I was sad enough to watch it for a whole day.)

I wouldn't be surprised if they change the answer as they go along. At best, they make the answer so ubelievably innocuous that they know it will take ages for someone to guess correctly.

I'm sure they come up with somesort of justification for their answers, but when they are as cryptic as this, there are an unbelievably high amount of variations. How they can say our answer is wrong and theirs is right is beyond me.

Yep, it's a horrible programme that they doesn't just pray on gamblers, but also on those who are convinced it's as straight forward as it looks.

From what I recall, they were investigated by Watchdog. However, I'm unsure as to what came from that...

'We found that these shows were a potential death trap'

(http://www.watercress.co.uk/home/images/lfw.jpg)

and what they dont tell you, or maybe they do in the very small print messages that pop up at the bottom the screen.

You can enter for free on the web and 50% of there contestants have to be from web entrants.

BLONDE!

thanks, that was entertaining

absolute scams, i think someone should force them to give anyone who has ever rang their money back. I could do with that tenner ;whistle;  The one where the girl does it in her underwear is pretty compulsive viewing at 3am having had a skinful