If you didn’t make it to the GSN live chat featuring all four Grand Slam semi-finalists on Saturday night, the transcript is here. At the time, I was typing too fast to follow all four conversations, but I think my fellow semi-finalists all come off as very likable and funny. Here’s maybe my favorite excerpt:

17:21:41 PDT JMJ: Michelle, Are you married?
17:21:41 PDT Michelle Kitt->audience) Is this Brad Rutter?

And if you missed any of the tournament, there’s no transcript of that, but GSN is doing a big nerd-athon next Saturday starting at noon Eastern–all seven episodes followed by the final game at 7pm. Set your DVRs.

I didn’t really expect to coast through my semifinal round like that, not against one of the stronger players in the tournament. Granted, our bracket was a little easier than the Brad/Ogi/Ed/Leszek/Dave side, but you don’t just beat Kevin Olmstead and John Carpenter on spunk and spinning lessons.

So how did I win Kitt and caboodle? Part of it was was just the luck of the draw when it came to the questions. All the real killer questions in the match that I can remember fell to Michelle: the length of Noah’s ark in cubits (are you kidding? is this some out-of-touch New Yorker’s idea of answerable red-state Bible trivia?), the name of the prison in Prison Break (not hard if you’ve seen it, but I haven’t), and the only time-consuming anagrams from the match that I can remember (singers DOORMEN MAY and HI TONY SHOW TUNE). If I can allow myself one moment of Ogassian hubris, I don’t honestly think you could reorder those questions in any permutation that gives Michelle the match, but there’s no way the margin should have been a tournament-best 2:45.45. Thirty seconds longer than Rutter-Lingo girl? Are you kiddding? Michelle’s way better than that.

Even more than question draw, though, I think there’s something bigger and more psychological going on here. Until an aghast editor sees it, Wikipedia has a bizarrely complete statistical compendium of the Grand Slam results. Look at those final times: the average gap is over one minute eleven seconds! Only three matches featured a margin under 40 seconds (two of them Michelle’s Millionaire “upsets”)! Ed Toutant points out on the message boards that only three times did a trailing player use less time than his opponent in the fourth round, and the only time a comeback actually won the round was Olmstead-Kitt. These players are more closely matched than those times indicate.

Clearly, it’s hard to come back from any deficit whatsoever in Grand Slam. Players are just checking out of the games too early. Not intentionally, but the mysterious human brain must just be better at algebra and anagrams when it knows it has the confidence of a little time cushion. (I’m reminded of those studies showing that girls do just as well as boys on math problems when they get an empowering lecture first, or that minority students do worse on standardized tests when they even have to write their name or identify their race at the top of the page. Confidence gets those cerebral juices flowing.) This is a problem as a contestant; it’s an even bigger problem if you’re a network exec. What good is your split-second lightning format if one player always ends up winning by a full minute or two? The game is simple and elegant as it is, but I wonder if it doesn’t need to be tweaked somehow so that early-round wins have less effect on the overall final-round clock.

Or maybe you just need to orient your contestants with better pep talks about hanging in there, comebacks are possible, etc.

Or maybe Amanda Byram just needs to change her oft-repeated “Anything can happen in Grand Slam!” mantra to “Only one thing can happen in Grand Slam!”

(By the way, the fist-bump at the beginning of our semi-final match was all Michelle’s idea. She and John Carpenter had it planned for the quarterfinals, but he forgot.)