I am not taking away from Lete's amazing episode, puzzle perfomance, and elimination. It was all fun to watch, but just because the edit clips her saying she is good at puzzles and then shows her completing a puzzle does not mean she is instantly a puzzle queen.
I am mainly responding to people who are now saying CT's puzzle advantage is nullified by Lete being on grey... you mean the undisputed best puzzle person is now canceled out cause Lete did good on a daily challenge puzzle and then beat a very checked out Justin.
There have been other puzzles this season that Blue team has crapped out on. There was the mini final where orange came in last during the endurance portion and WON the challenge, where was Lete carrying blue team?
Don't get me wrong, Lete may above average in puzzles, she may prove to be top 10% in puzzles, but a single edit and episode in which she does well in two puzzles is not some slam dunk evidence she is a puzzle queen. We need to be a bit smarter than simply beleiving what an edit tells us to think.
Stop reading if your not into stats theory, but puzzles have a wide range of skills, randomness + variance
Starting with skills, not every puzzle requires the same knowledge base, and some require more intuition than others. The fact that we group people on a linear scale of 1-10 on good or bad at puzzles is dumb. Cara can beast a memorization puzzle but has also crumbled at math before. Math comes easier to some people, but the math they do on the challenge, almost any human brain can learn to do with repitition and methods training. Therefore, unless someone has dominated puzzles for 4-5 seasons (CT and to a much lesser textent Anessa) we can not call them a puzzle queen, because they may have just gotten puzzles in their skill wheel house.
Randomness + Variance. Most of the puzzles have a lot of randomness (random error to use the statistical term) which means that even if someone has a skill of 7/10 in puzzles and another has 5/10 in puzzles the 5/10 might win around 30% of the time. This is because in things like the shape puzzle Lete did in todays episode, if you randomly place a couple first pieces right the rest could fall into place and you could look like a genious even if your first few placements were essentially random. Not every puzzle is random, but most have at least some randomness built in, based on if you are lucky in your first few moves. Or even how your pieces and randomly laid out versus someone else. This creates a high degree of variance, meaning basically the range of outcomes in any given puzzle outcome is wide. Bananas beat CT in a 3 puzzle elimination (similar format to the elim we just saw between Justin and Lete), even as a Banana stan I would admit CT has far less duds than Bananas in puzzles. But! To my point Bananas has the high upside to smoke a puzzle and downside of getting stuck on it forever (hence he has high variance).
This has turned into a PSA, but basically please do not use a single puzzle outcome ever as evidence of puzzle superiority, you need a sample size of at least 10 puzzles before we can start saying with any degree of accuracy that X is better than Y at puzzles, or X is a puzzle Queen.
