Two The 1% Club players lose £95,000 after fiendish triangle puzzle

Two contestants on The 1% Club saw a potential £95,000 payday disappear after being caught out by a deceptively simple triangle puzzle.

Christopher and Scott had made their way through the ITV game show by combining logic, common sense and the occasional lucky guess. But when host Lee Mack presented them with a picture packed with geometric shapes, both struggled to work out the correct answer before time ran out.

The show is known for testing contestants on logic and observation rather than traditional general knowledge. This particular puzzle proved that even a question that looks straightforward can become surprisingly difficult under pressure.

Can you count all the triangles?

Lee asked the contestants to study an image and posed a simple question:

“How many triangles are in this picture?”

On the screen was a large triangle divided into numerous smaller shapes. Some were obvious triangles, while others could only be seen by combining several of the shapes within the larger design.

That detail made the puzzle particularly difficult.

As Christopher and Scott examined the image, the studio fell quiet. Both men appeared to be struggling to keep track of the different shapes while the clock continued to count down.

Lee repeated the question as Christopher looked towards the floor, seemingly still trying to work out the total.

When time expired, Christopher committed to his answer.

He believed there were eight triangles in the picture.

Scott, meanwhile, had counted considerably more and entered 19.

Neither answer was correct.

The answer was 18

After a dramatic pause, Lee revealed the solution.

The correct number was 18 triangles.

The key was to look beyond the individual shapes. Several sections of the image could be combined to create additional triangles, meaning contestants had to count both the obvious triangles and those formed by joining shapes together.

That pushed the final total to 18.

For Christopher, the result meant he had missed a significant number of triangles. Lee asked him what had gone wrong, prompting Christopher to laugh and admit:

“I clearly didn’t count all the triangles.”

Scott had come remarkably close with his answer of 19, but his method had its own problem.

Scott kept counting the same triangles

Lee asked Scott whether his answer had been a guess or whether he had actually been counting the shapes, particularly because he had ended up just one away from the correct figure.

Scott explained that he had started out counting carefully, but eventually lost track.

“I started counting, and then I just kept counting the same triangles over and over and over again,” he admitted.

With the clock running down, he eventually panicked and settled on 19.

“And then I just panicked and put 19.”

Despite being only one triangle away, Scott’s answer was still enough to cost him.

For both contestants, the deceptively simple picture proved to be the moment their run came to an end, with £95,000 in winnings slipping away because they could not land on the correct total.

The puzzle ultimately came down to one crucial detail: remembering to count the larger triangles created by combining the smaller shapes.

The correct answer was 18. Would you have spotted them all before the time ran out?