The Chase Australia and UK : Do Chasers Succumb to Nerves in the Final Chase?

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For today’s blog, we’re going to move away from analysing contestant data and instead analyse Chaser data using:

  • For Australia: this Google document from James Spencer, which covers the entire history of Andrew O’Keefe’s reign as host from late 2015 to mid-2021.

  • For the UK: data from this website, which covers the entire history of up until 26 November 2021.

What we’re interested in is to see if there’s any sign that the Chasers respond to pressure by becoming less accurate in the Final Chase when the Final Target is larger.

THE CHASE AUSTRALIA

To check this out we’ll first chart the accuracy of each Australian Chaser across different Targets, grouping the smaller and larger targets to ensure that we have sufficient sample to reduce the sample variation to a reasonable level. That chart appears below.

What we find is that:

  • Overall accuracy rates differ by only 3.4% points, from 83.6% to 80.2%

  • Anne has the highest overall accuracy in the Final Chase, and Cheryl the lowest overall accuracy, but on a much smaller sample. Brydon is second, and Issa third.

  • There is little evidence for a decline in accuracy as the Final Target size increases for any Chaser. Indeed, amongst the five Chasers who have the most appearances (excluding Shaun and Cheryl), three of them have above-average accuracy when Final Targets are highest. That said, Brydon’s accuracy is below average for Targets of 15, 16, 18, 19, and 20+.

It might not be the Final Target size that beings pressure, however, but instead the size of the Prize Fund at stake. Here’s what the analysis looks like when we review Australian Chaser accuracy by Prize Fund size.

We find here that Brydon and Mark both drop a few percentage points in accuracy when the prize fund is $40k or more, but still answer correctly more than 4 questions in 5.

THE CHASE UK

The same analysis of Accuracy versus Final Target for the UK Chasers results in the following chart.

One obvious feature of this chart is the relatively larger range of overall accuracy across the Chasers, although much of that range is currently the result of Darragh’s extraordinarily high level of around 88%. Here too, though, we see little evidence of accuracy levels declining with Final Target size for any Chaser.

Finally, let’s look at the relationship between UK Chaser Accuracy and Prize Fund size.

We see no compelling evidence that any Chaser becomes less accurate as the size of the final Prize Fund increases.