3 years on from Harry Savage's incredible streak in Countdown series 88, 2026 saw another speedcuber on the show and like Harry Savage, he also performed incredibly well.
Charlie Harrison is a former national record holder for 3x3 blindfolded, he got an mean of 3 of 21.51 in 2023 and is still ranked 5th in the UK and 79th in the world, he is also ranked 2nd in the UK and 18th in the world for 4x4 blindfolded.
He first told me he was good at Countdown towards the end of 2025 and asked to do a similar countdown game at a cubing competition in Manchester in January 2026 where he beat everyone else at the competition combined.
However, he was unable initially to find this conundrum I made: CATMENHERS (however, I suppose this doesn't strictly follow countdown rules)
In June 2026, he appeared on the official show and quickly proved to be one of the best ever players, potentially even better than Harry Savage, he won his first 8 shows which made him an octochamp and then he qualified for the season 93 finals, he also solved a cube blindfolded in his 8th appearance within the 30 seconds given on the countdown clock.
Charlie Harrison is notable as he is the 2nd fastest ever to solve 8 conundrums, the combined time to solve each of the conundrums in his 8 opening shows was around 15 seconds, meaning he is usually able to unscramble a random 9 letter word in under 2 seconds. Notably, he is 2nd only to Patrick Thompson who was also competing in that same series and would eventually beat him in the finals.
Charlie Harrison began the quarter finals by beating Megel Barker and then won the semi final against Luke Selway but narrowly lost to Patrick Thompson in the final, however, due to his incredible performance in series 93 and very high score, he has still been invited back to the series 87-94 Champion of Champions, it appears unconfirmed whether he could face Harry Savage there next year.
In the final he was neck and neck with Patrick Thompson for the first 80 points but failed to solve a numbers game: 25 50 75 100 1 9 → 264 which Patrick Thompson found, this put him down 10 points, he continued 10 points down for the rest of the game which put it down to a crucial conundrum which if he had won he would have had a chance at another conundrum but unfortunately he was beaten at finding Cartouche from ECCAUTHOR. The final ended up having the two best conundrum finders ever battle it out.
I hope to bring some form of Countdown with him and/or Harry Savage back to a cubing competition soon.
