The 1% Club contestant makes baffling mistake on question that left 11 players stumped

A contestant on ITV’s The 1% Club left host Lee Mack stunned after admitting she had chosen her answer simply because she liked the name of the team.

The question was part of a 70% round and proved surprisingly difficult, with 11 contestants giving the wrong answer. But while most players at least studied the information on screen, Zainab admitted she had barely looked at it at all.

Could you get the sports question right?

Lee Mack presented the contestants with a series of results involving fictional sports teams and asked them to work out which team had performed best.

The question was:

“Based on the results shown here, which of these sports teams is the best?”

The four possible answers were:

• A) Breezers
• B) All Stars
• C) Flames
• D) Gems

Players had just 30 seconds to study the results and make their choice.

When time ran out, 11 people had selected the wrong answer.

The correct choice was Breezers, the team that had won every one of its games. The results, rather than the team names, were the key to solving the question.

Zainab admits she ignored the numbers

After the answer was revealed, Lee turned to Zainab, one of the contestants who had been eliminated.

When he asked which option she had chosen, she revealed that she had gone for All Stars.

Her reason caught Lee off guard.

Zainab explained that she had not really studied the figures at all. Instead, she simply felt that All Stars sounded like the strongest team name.

That prompted Lee to question her logic, asking whether she had really chosen the team based on its name rather than the results displayed on the screen.

Zainab confirmed that she had.

Lee then asked what she thought all the numbers on the screen were there for.

Zainab admitted she did not know, explaining that she does not watch football or sports.

That gave Lee another opportunity to point out the joke in her reasoning. The teams were fictional, and the question had not specified football in the first place. It simply asked which sports team had the best results.

The exchange became one of the episode’s more memorable moments, particularly because the correct answer could be established simply by looking at the results.

Another contestant changed the right answer to the wrong one

The episode also featured another memorable mistake involving a question about Vincent van Gogh.

Contestants were shown three images of the famous Dutch artist and asked:

Which of these Vincent van Gogh self-portraits has been altered?

Again, they had only 30 seconds to inspect the pictures and identify the odd one out.

The correct answer was C.

The clue was that the Van Gogh shown in that image was wearing modern earbuds. They could not have appeared in an authentic self-portrait because the technology did not exist during Van Gogh’s lifetime. The artist died in 1890, roughly 100 years before earbuds of this type were developed.

The altered image also played on a well-known part of Van Gogh’s history: he famously cut off part of his ear following a confrontation with fellow artist Paul Gaugin.

Margaret knew the answer, then changed her mind

Four contestants got the Van Gogh question wrong.

One of them was Margaret, who immediately poked fun at herself when Lee turned his attention to her.

She described herself as being “thick as two short planks” after getting the question wrong.

But there was an especially frustrating detail behind her mistake.

Margaret revealed that she had originally selected C, which was the correct answer. She then changed her choice before the time ran out.

When Lee asked why she had changed her mind, Margaret could offer little explanation, joking that “God alone knows” why she had done it.

The moment highlighted one of the hazards of The 1% Club: contestants have limited time to make decisions, and second-guessing an initial answer can sometimes prove costly.

The 1% Club continues to test logic and observation

Unlike traditional general-knowledge quizzes, The 1% Club focuses heavily on logic, observation and the way contestants approach seemingly simple problems.

The show presents players with questions of varying difficulty, with the percentage attached to each question indicating the proportion of people expected to answer it correctly.

The sports question was rated at 70%, yet it still eliminated 11 contestants in the episode.

For Zainab, the problem was not a lack of information. The answer was sitting in front of her in the results. Her decision to pick All Stars because she thought it sounded like the best team name turned a straightforward calculation into an unexpectedly funny exchange with Lee Mack.

The episode also demonstrated how quickly contestants can talk themselves out of a correct answer, as Margaret discovered after initially choosing the right Van Gogh image before changing her mind.

The 1% Club airs on ITV1 and ITVX.