WHAT?! 😱 30 SECONDS FOR THE HARDEST QUESTION OF THE NIGHT? NO WAY! With a life-changing £99,000 still on the line, contestants were suddenly confronted with a brainteaser so fiendishly clever that many barely had time to understand it—let alone solve it. As the clock relentlessly counted down, confusion replaced confidence. Every passing second piled on the pressure, leaving contestants staring at the screen in disbelief as the answer seemed further away than ever. When the solution was finally revealed, viewers were left asking the same question: “How could anyone possibly work that out in just 30 seconds?” The question looked impossible… but somehow, someone found the hidden logic before time ran out.

When it comes down to it, 30 seconds is really not a lot of time at all to figure out some of the conundrums thrown at contestants by The 1% Club.

Imagine making it all the way to the end through all of their logic traps and then falling at the final hurdle, only for the answer to seem so simple once all is revealed.

If you want to give the ‘hardest ever’ final question on The 1% Club a go then set a 30 second timer and have a crack at this question which knocked out a grand total of nine finalists on the Australian version of the show.

The question is thus: What number comes next in this sequence?

1

11

21

1211

111221

312211

********

You’ve got a sequence of eight numbers to figure out and only 30 seconds to do it, go.

This is a question that had viewers saying they’d be ‘amazed if someone got it within that amount of time’ and ‘hard to get in 30 seconds if you’ve never seen it before’.

Some decried it as the ‘hardest ever’ final question in the show’s history, while others declared that they’d been able to crack it.

This is how The 1% Club goes, the answer is so often obtained by figuring out exactly what the question is telling you, and in this case the correct answer is staring you right in the face.

Are your 30 seconds up yet? Good, time to tell how how this one is done.

Once you spot the trick in the question it becomes easy, it’s just that without the trick you’ll never figure it out, each subsequent line of the code is obtained by writing down how many of each number was in the previous line.

We start with a solitary number one, which gives us the next line ’11’ because there is only one one in the first line. I hope this is making sense.

Now you’ve got two ones, which gives you the next line ’21’ and so on and so forth.

The final line is therefore 13112221, because the line above it has one three, one one, two twos and then two ones.

Fiendishly difficult, isn’t it?

Still, it wouldn’t be much of a final question if it wasn’t and every now and then a clump of contestants make it to the final stages of the show only to fall at the final hurdle.

Multiple contestants were knocked out on the last question of a recent episode of the show here in the UK, where they were shown an ice cube with the number ‘8’ inside and asked to work out what word the picture implied.

It turned out the answer was ‘incubate’, as in ‘in-cube-eight’, which I didn’t figure out in time and neither did any of the contestants who made it to the end.

However, while this Australian number sequence claimed nine contestants, that recent question only took out (rather fittingly) eight.