The 1% Club’s tricky maths puzzle leaves 13 contestants reaching for their passes

A deceptively simple numbers puzzle caused an unexpected shake-up on The 1% Club, with 13 contestants using their passes rather than risk getting the answer wrong.

The challenge appeared as the show’s 35% question, with a large group of players still in contention. But despite having only one missing number to work out, the puzzle proved difficult enough to leave many contestants unsure.

Hosted by Lee Mack, the ITV quiz show puts 100 contestants through a series of timed puzzles designed to test logic, reasoning and common sense rather than traditional general knowledge.

Each question is assigned a percentage based on how many people are expected to solve it. Players have just 30 seconds to find the answer, while every contestant eliminated adds £1,000 to the potential jackpot.

Can you spot the missing number?

For the 35% question, Lee showed the contestants a coloured circular diagram containing a sequence of numbers.

He asked:

“What number replaces the question mark when you read it clockwise from the start?”

With only 30 seconds on the clock, the remaining contestants had to identify the pattern running through the segments and determine which number belonged in the missing position.

The solution was based on consecutive multiples of three appearing in alternating segments.

That meant the missing number was 27, the next number in the three-times table.

The pattern may sound straightforward once explained, but 13 contestants chose to use their pass rather than risk elimination.

Lee was visibly surprised by the number of players who opted to play it safe before moving on to the next round.

Another “easy” question caused an even bigger shock

The maths puzzle was not the only challenge to cause trouble during the episode.

Earlier in the game, a question described as an apparently simple test of common sense eliminated 23 contestants.

Lee told the players:

“John writes with his right hand and the last word he’d write if he was writing this sentence would be be. If Keith writes with his left hand, what would be the last word he would write in the sentence above?”

The answer was still “be.”

The fact that Keith was left-handed did not change the order of the words in the sentence, but 23 players failed to make that connection and were eliminated.

The result surprised viewers watching at home, with several taking to social media to question how so many contestants had missed what they considered a straightforward point.

One viewer wrote: “How t have 23 gone out?? Being left handed doesn’t mean you write words in the wrong order.”*

Another commented: “Too many people thinking too hard on that one #The1PercentClub.”

A third simply asked: “TWENTY THREE out on THAT?!?!”

Other notoriously difficult quiz-show questions

The episode’s puzzles are part of a wider collection of challenges that have tested contestants and viewers across Britain’s biggest quiz shows.

On Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, one question asked which letter had never begun the surname of a Best Actress Oscar winner from the 2000 awards ceremony onwards. With £32,000 secured, contestant Glen selected G from the options G, K, M and W — and his answer was correct.

The 1% Club has also featured a puzzle involving the birthdays of Edna, Jen and Amir. The solution depended on matching the numbers in the dates to the positions of words within the sentence, leading to January 24 for Amir’s birthday.

Meanwhile, The Chase once asked which food someone with a nightshade intolerance should avoid, offering sweetcorn, potatoes and carrots as the choices. Contestant Steve selected sweetcorn, but the correct answer was potatoes.

For The 1% Club contestants, however, the biggest challenge in this particular episode came down to a simple-looking circular sequence — and for 13 players, the safest move was to use their pass rather than gamble on the missing number.

The 1% Club is available to watch on ITV1 and stream on ITVX.