Graeme Cole brings us the rundown from our regular Rugby double-header
Zohaib Rehan impressed everyone at last weekend’s double event in Rugby, and not only because he turned up on time. Zohaib won both the Friday evening final and Saturday’s main event final, giving him his first two FOCAL event wins of the season.
CO:Rugby returned for the fourth year running to its now-familiar home at the West Indian Association Social Club. Presiding over the weekend was prolific event organiser and chaotically profane master of ceremonies MSR, originator of the recent co-event trend – and long may it continue – of giving out chocolate and randomly-chosen Very Short Introduction books as prizes.
20 players met for Friday evening’s warm-up event. One of my games in the first round featured the conundrum solution CROMULENT, which I was surprised to learn was actually in the dictionary – indeed, a perfectly cromulent word – when I always thought it was just invented for that Simpsons episode. Well, it turns out both things can be true. It’s a rare case of a made-up word being subsequently adopted by the dictionary:
After everyone had played four games, Friday’s final was a closely-fought match between undefeated players Zohaib Rehan (4 wins, 250 points), and Tim Hebbes (4 wins, 242 points) who was playing for his first FOCAL event win. The final was decided on the crucial conundrum OLDWARMUP1, which Zohaib solved to win 68-58, taking his first FOCAL event win of the season and his fourth overall. People’s champion Adrian Fletcher (4 wins, 201 points) recorded his highest FOCAL event finish yet, also undefeated but beaten into third place on points.
With the trophy presented to Zohaib and the random book lottery for the top five players completed, it was time to finish the evening in the venue’s ground-floor bar which featured darts, pool, and a new entry in the ongoing Signs With A Story Behind Them competition:
The following day, 30 players arrived for the main event. The first round was a random draw, as is typical, and this time the random number gods contrived to put multiple event winners Dylan Taylor, Tom Cappleman and Tom Carey against each other on the same table. Random is as random does, as they say.
After two rounds, four players remained undefeated on four wins out of four (Tom Stevenson, Zohaib Rehan, Dylan Taylor, Adam Latchford). The perennial lunchtime quibbling about how exactly my long-serving co-event argument-generator Atropine should decide fixtures after round 1 was almost, but not quite, avoided. After a discussion on the relative cromulence of various kinds of “upfloats” and “downfloats” between “win groups”, someone provided the helpful summary that “there are two types of draw: those that make some people unhappy, and those that make everyone unhappy” which I may yet adopt as the official Atropine motto.
In round 3, recent CO:LON champion Matthew Brockwell achieved the weekend’s highest individual game score with 93, having also got the highest game score in the Warm-up the previous day (80). Although it isn’t the highest 9-rounder score ever achieved at a co-event, 93 is exceptionally high – Countdown used the 9-round format for more than 3,000 episodes between 1982 and 2001, and in that time nobody scored higher than 83.
Top of the table after eight games each was the undefeated Dylan Taylor (8 wins, 522 points). Nobody else won all eight of their games, or even seven (does that make Dylan’s standings position double-darrenic?), but of the four players who won six games, the previous day’s champion Zohaib Rehan (6 wins, 530 points) secured the other place in the final. In third place was Tom Stevenson (6 wins, 511 points), joint holder of the Countdown record for the highest score in a single game (154).
The final featured some excellent spots from both Dylan and Zohaib, including OZONIDE (a chemical term concerning ozone and a carbon-carbon double bond) and SUNSUIT (“as in SUNSUIT”, Dylan helpfully clarified). With the scores tied on 57-57 going into the final round, it was Zohaib who solved the crucial conundrum GISCULLEN2 to take the Rugby double and his second event win of the season.
Dylan continues a remarkable record in recent FOCAL events: the last time he entered a FOCAL event and finished outside the top two was the Lincoln main event in January 2025, in which he came third. In the 14 tournaments he’s entered since, he’s reached the final every time, and lost only three of those finals: against Jack Worsley at Blackpool, Tom Cappleman at this year’s Lincoln Hangover, and now Zohaib in Rugby.
Congratulations to Zohaib, and many thanks to MSR and Adam Beach for their continued tireless work in running these events.
Next month on the FOCAL circuit we’ve our first Irish and Scottish events, with Monasteraden and Edinburgh respectively. The former is fully booked, but plenty of space at Edinburgh if you fancying giving it a go!
focalcountdown.com 