Thursday evening, and it's been a dang-diddly good day as far as I'm concerned. I left you yesterday in a vaguely irritated state about the Intelligence test paper; well, shortly after that I found myself up in a most respectable fourth place - this was a surprise.

So, after a merry afternoon of writing up my diary - slowly - I wandered off in the general direction of my final Scrabble session of the week. There was plenty going on, very little of it at my table; Barry Grossman marginally hauled himself up to the top of the Combined Dictionary division by virtue of 300+ and 100+ point wins over Karl Khoshnaw, the previous leader.

Meanwhile, I was quietly racking up three out of three to move into... fourth. Again. Obviously the Scrabble gods weren't wanting to give me a medal, and I would have to make Muttley-esque efforts to earn one by some other means.

There was another impressive performance in the OSW division, which was won by a youngster playing his first tournament - unfortunately, I didn't get his name, but he's obviously one for the future. I can certainly vouch for the fact that the assembled field were no pushovers.

Thursday morning followed Wednesday night in the traditional manner; once again I was setting up for a gruelling three-hour Intelligence paper - this was extremely tough in places, requesting - for example - an appropriate three-word anagram of

Once again, I had a spare hour this afternoon and this time I thought I'd try out for the British game show Countdown. There are three things you need to know about this:

1. Format. Three types of puzzle:
   
   
   • randomish sets of nine letters from which you need to create the longestpossible word;
   
   
   
   • random sets of six numbers chosen from 100, 75, 50, 25 and 1-10, which you need to manipulate using the standard mathematical operators to form another randomly chosen number between 101 and 999;
   
   
   
   • anagrams of preset nine-letter words.



2. Getting on the show. Impossible in my case as I've been on it before back in 1994. Why should that stop me?



3. Medals. Much to my surprise, this was a medal event. You can imagine me making Muttley-type noises at this point, because in fact I came a very close second and have a corresponding bit of shiny metal hanging around my neck. Which was nice.

In my final session of the day, I've had my first ever experience of the game Entropy¹. Just like Continuo it seems to be a game with quite a large luck element, and in this instance I'm saying that to excuse my successes rather than my failures. I won two out of three, including a quite big win over the inventor of the game. Which, again, was nice.

Well, only one more day before I have to depart the luxury of the MSO Website office here at Ally Pally en route to Nottingham for the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship. Will I get a medal for Intelligence? Will my Entropy go to pieces? What will happen when I find out that the title given to my articles is surreal and makes no sense? Be sure to tune in tomorrow for the final exciting instalment of The Wizards of MSOZ (oh dear, oh dear...) to find out!

¹ Entropy rules can be viewed here - GR