Golden Snitch

""At your feet is a little ball called the Buall'dib. You get a hold of this, and everything everyone else has done is null and void. You snag this... and we win." * picks it up* "This?" "WE WIN!!!""

- From Sluggy Freelance, "Ch. 31: Torg Potter and the Sorcerer's Nuts - Life at Hoggelryth"

A competition involving a series of events or activities, in which the final round counts for a disproportionately large percent of the team's total score—and in fiction, will tend to be worth more than all previous events combined. Thus, whoever wins the final round earns enough points to win the entire match, regardless of just about everything else that happened before it.

In works of fiction, the Golden Snitch is widely used to do one of three things:
 * 1) Create a sense of tension for the heroes, who had been on a winning streak up to this point, but now have to worry about being defeated in the finals (usually because their star player has been taken out of play due to an injury, or the heavenly angels decided to stop helping the team).
 * 2) On the flip side, allow for the losing heroes to have a come-from-behind win.
 * 3) Allow one person (typically The Hero) to be solely or at least largely responsibly for winning a team game.

This is a common trope in Game Shows -- very common. One standard approach of a game show is the "1-1-2" rule, where the first two events are worth one point and the third—the show's equivalent of the Golden Snitch—is worth two points; whoever wins round 3 is guaranteed at least a tie in their overall scoring. The reason for this is simple: it maintains tension, by making sure that if someone wins both of the earlier tiers, the viewer will keep watching because that person is not guaranteed to win after round 2.

It is worth noting that in an actual game show, it is rare for the Golden Snitch to entirely invalidate the previous rounds. The final round may be heavily weighted, but a player who swept the first two rounds may easily be able to force a tie (sometimes leading to a round of Sudden Death) instead of taking an outright loss. In fictional games, the skew will generally be insurmountable: 1-1-3 rather than 1-1-2 (Or, in extreme cases, 1-1-1000). Most game shows have a fixed number of rounds, and it would be anti-climactic for the outcome to become a foregone conclusion before the final round is even played. On the other hand, giving too much weight to the last round makes the earlier rounds less interesting.

Whatever the case, if poorly played, it can leave audience members perplexed as to the point of everything they had just sat through for the last 20 minutes. At the same time, it prevents situations where someone can get a truly insurmountable lead (thus causing people to change the channel because they can tell who "won").

When handled well, the Golden Snitch still awards a significant advantage based on previous points. This is commonly done by either increasing the value of points earned in the last round, making it possible to win despite being completely behind, but very difficult, or else giving the player/team with the most points a head start.

Compare One Judge to Rule Them All, where points are awarded by actual judges (one of whom is the "snitch") rather than the players' own progress during the game. In video games with a Karma Meter, a choice at the end of the game that pretty much decides your final morality is a Last-Second Karma Choice.

See also Instant Win Condition (and all of its varieties) for situations where points and scoring are not involved in determining who wins.

Anime and Manga
"Ibiki: The question iiiiiiiiissss......Do you want to pass? Naruto: Um...Yes? Ibiki: Congratulations, you all pass!! Naruto: Wait, what?"
 * The first part of the chunin exams in Naruto is a 10-question quiz, the last of which is not revealed until just before the end. Those taking the test are told they may forfeit the question (and fail), or take the question... but never be allowed to retake the test if they miss it. Turns out the 10th question is a Secret Test of Character: Just accepting it is an instant pass, and the nine other questions are meaningless as far as score is concerned (they're actually there as a Secret Test of Character of a different sort).
 * Spoofed in Naruto the Abridged Series.


 * Justified Trope, because this was, after all, just the first part. I.e. the weeding-out process to see who didn't have the guts for part 2, a very harrowing field assignment.
 * Also justified in that "passing" the test just gave you more chances to show off your skills, whereas your score actually affected whether or not you became a Chunin - so both were relevant. The majority of the entrants pass the first test, to Anko's displeasure, but less than a third of the remaining teams make it to the third round.
 * In Seto no Hanayome, after seeing that his beloved daughter's team is losing the school athletic competition, San's father [the P.E. coach] announces that the final race will be worth 333 points.
 * This is also an Incredibly Lame Pun as "san" also is a Japanese word for "three". So it's worth sanbyaku (three hundred) sanju (thirty) san (three) points.
 * Katekyo Hitman Reborn's Ring Conflict Arc involved Tsuna and his Guardians battling the assassination group Varia for the Half Vongola Rings. Whoever's side can claim the most completed rings (out of seven) wins. After Xanxus succeeds in his Evil Plan, he and Tsuna have a final battle with all of the rings at stake. Thus rendering the other fights entirely pointless.
 * It doesn't end there.
 * It gets even more stupid; The only ring that really mattered was the sky one - when he had that he was within his rights to end the conflict and have the heroes killed as the successor. It was only because he sadistically wanted to see Tsuna's guardians beaten up that he didn't go through with that, and got to the stage where the ring rejected him during their fight. Yep, all the other 6 life and death fights where pointless, and they found this out after fight 2.
 * An episode of Gintama revolved around a pet competition between Sadaharu and Elizabeth. After Elizabeth gains 1000 points over Sadaharu in the talent portion of the show, the host reveals that the final round—a race to the finish—would earn 20,000 points and the win. Katsura gets annoyed by this and demands the rules be changed to be more fair, but the race continues as planned.
 * When questioned, the host admitted that the first part of the competition was a ratings booster.
 * One of the funnier bits exclusive to the anime version of Eyeshield 21 takes place during the school festival episode. The white team (containing all the Devil Bats except Hiruma and oddly OOC Mamori and Yukimitsu) are hopelessly behind before the last game... Until they find out the last game is worth more than all the other events put together. They react appropriately.
 * One chapter of Hayate the Combat Butler centers around a quiz show with a final question worth 10 points instead of 1, and answering wrong disqualifies you. Nobody is surprised by this.
 * Amusing in that the winner gets it wrong, but the hero pushes herself to make it a right answer.
 * In the MMORPG-style Greed Island arc of Hunter X Hunter, there comes a point when the heroes form a 14 man team to participate in a sports competition, the prize being something that effectively causes Loot Drama. The opposing team's leader is one of the game's admins. 8 wins out of 14 matches will win the competition, but once the heroes start winning, the admin steps in for the next round and announces that his particular round is worth 8 points overall. Meaning that the heroes must beat the ridiculously overpowered admin at his own game, or otherwise start all over from the beginning.
 * A quiz show in Cromartie High School has four questions. The fourth of which is worth "three million points". The first three were apparently worth none.

Comic Books

 * There's a fine example of this trope in one of Carl Barks's classic Donald Duck comics: The Tenderfoot Trap (1957). Donald, Scrooge and Gladstone are all entrants in the Pizen Valley Contest for desert prospectors. The contest consists of five different events. The first four are worth 10 points each, and Gladstone wins them all. Then comes the final event, Wild Burro Catching, worth 50 points! In other words, the previous events were a complete waste of time...
 * ... or not, as Gladstone's luck subverts the trope. Trying to find a burro, he quickly gets lost. This leaves Donald and Scrooge to fight for the prize. However, they end up tied, meaning they split the points. Final score: Gladstone 40, Donald 25, Scrooge 25. Gladstone wins!
 * Of course, remember that Gladstone's superpower is that he's ridiculously lucky.
 * A similar example involved Scrooge McDuck engaged in a sporting contest with fellow millionaires. He's won every year because his opponents suck, but in the tournament appearing in the book a new, physically-fit competitor appears and seems ready to sweep the competition. What makes it fit the trope is that the character is so confident of his victory that he volunteers to concede the trophy if Scrooge can win even one event.
 * Another competition (oddly enough, also a prospecting contest; possibly a remake?) between Donald, Scrooge and Gladstone where the prize was a valuable gold mine. Gladstone wins the first two (boil a kettle and find a valuable). The third is to catch a burro, and Donald and Scrooge pulls shenanigans that end up gathering every burro in the area. Meanwhile, Gladstone gets lost in the mountains, and finds the mine that's used for a prize... which somehow allows him to claim ownership of it.

Film
"Gordon: "District 5 has had some losses... but The Ducks are undefeated!""
 * Parodied in History Of The World - Part I. When in a tight spot during a life-size game of chess played in a castle courtyard with people wearing costumes, the King executes "Royal Privilege" and declares that he gets three moves. After getting himself out of trouble, he loses interest in the game, declares his next move to be "Gang-bang the Queen!", and rushes onto the field. "It's good to be the King!"
 * In The Mighty Ducks, the Ducks lose almost every game, forfeit one because the team revolts, then have a few Training Montages in time to sneak into the playoffs with a 2-11 record. Of course, they sweep through and win the Minnesota State Title. (Truth in Television, of course, in that State sport Championships are decided by the playoffs, not the season record.)
 * Perhaps it was a case of Gordon's motivational speech holding too much weight:


 * In Caddyshack, the entire climactic golf match is nullified when Rodney Dangerfield makes a double-or-nothing bet on the very last putt.
 * Double Subverted in the climax of Dodgeball.

Literature

 * The Trope Namer is the Golden Snitch, a recurring plot device within the Harry Potter series. While each goal scored in a game of Quidditch is worth 10 points, catching the Snitch scores 150 points and ends the game immediately. It's not a guaranteed win, though; if your team is more than 150 points behind, you'll still lose, and in at least one game this was done deliberately by the losing team to limit the damage. (Also, considering how hard it is to be up by 15 goals, you're really losing if you have to resort to this.)
 * This also happens in the Triwzard Tournament in the fourth book; Winning the first events doesn't actually give you anything except a head start in the last event, and the first person to make it to the finish in the last event wins the entire tournament. So the first rounds aren't pointless, but proportionate to the time and effort spent on them they come off as quite unnecessary.
 * Other than the fact that an early-round screwup could have fatal consequences, of course.
 * Though the match with Ravenclaw in the third book did require some strategy for when to catch—since the houses that go to the Quidditch Cup are the ones with the most cumulative match points, Gryffindor would win the game but not qualify for the cup if Harry caught the snitch when they weren't far enough ahead.
 * To be fair, the most Quidditch we see is played at high-school level. The professional matches played in Goblet of Fire (and in the accompanying book "Quidditch Through The Ages") suggest that real Quidditch matches are much more high-scoring and may last several days.
 * In fairness, consider what happens if two house teams are 2-1 for the year. Then, the efforts of the seekers are meaningless -- equal. It is the points scored by the normal goals that make the difference. If the professional matches are scored on total points, rather than number of wins, then the same principle applies -- the top 2 teams might each have one loss, the seeker's contributions are the same, and the need for the regular players to score lots of points matters. Hence the snitch would become less of an "instant win", and more of a "Do we risk letting the game continue to try to score more points, or do we think we've gotten enough and can end the game?" issue. This gives the multi-day, high-point scoring system (similar to an existing British game, Cricket, without the 2-day play limit.)
 * In Lord Brocktree, Lord Brocktree needs to win the allegiance of King Bucko and his court. King Bucko always allows anybody to challenge him for his crown. There are three parts to a challenge: the bragging, the feasting, and the fighting. The announcement then adds that "In the event of the first two challenges being won, lost or declared a tie, the third challenge will decide the winner". Brocktree and his entourage realize that Bucko's doing this entirely for his pride, and train Dotti to target that specifically in the challenges. She comes out ahead.
 * In Unseen Academicals, the old foot-the-ball game apparently scores by counting injuries inflicted, but actually scoring a goal is an automatic win (and very rare - Trev's late father Dave Likely is a hero because he scored four times in his entire career). This is very loosely based on assorted street football games played in medieval Britain.
 * Parodied in Earth (The Book). The end of each chapter has a scavenger hunt with 5 items in Easy, Medium, and Hard, which are worth 10, 20 and 30 points each, respectively. Below that are the six Super Hard items worth 1,000 points each. The catch, of course, is that these items are all either intangible ("the innocence of youth"), no longer existing, ("the Colossus at Rhodes") or completely fictitious ("Soylent Green Eggs and Ham"). I'll leave it up to your judgment as to which category "God" falls into...
 * In the short story "Fields" by Desmond Warzel, the last twenty people remaining After the End divide themselves into two baseball teams as a means of keeping themselves occupied. In a league with only two teams, it is of course a foregone conclusion that those are the two teams which will meet in the World Series; thus, to keep things interesting (and having nothing better to do), they play an entire 162-game season solely to determine which team will have home-field advantage in the Series.

Live-Action TV
"Kelso: (as the host) The girls have 50 points, and the boys have... zero. But the boys still have a chance, as this last round is conveniently worth fifty...one."
 * On Cheers, They had the Best Boston Barmaid competition in which Carla won every round, including customer service, only to be informed at the end that she lost to the terrible, blonde barmaid because the winner is always the barmaid with the biggest breasts.
 * On The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert's Metaphor-Off (Or "Meta-Free-Phor-All") with Sean Penn involved four questions. The first three were worth one point each. The last question was worth ten million points. It could decide the winner.
 * Likewise, in one episode of Out of This World, Evie's team sweeps the entire game, netting 900 points. The final question is worth 1000. Surprisingly, they win anyway.
 * The creators of Whose Line Is It Anyway? gleefully tweaked their noses at this trope by having The Points Mean Nothing—what's more, not only do the point values have no meaning, the awarding thereof is completely arbitrary and the "prize" is just the questionable privilege of a bonus game.
 * Not always questionable, sometimes winning meant you got to sit out the bonus game instead of participating.
 * The reason this was adopted in the original British version was originally for quality control — they filmed more games than there was time to include in one episode. Thus, the least funny/successful games could be left out. If the points were meaningless, they wouldn't have to account for the missing points at the end of the show.
 * In the British version, at least, the "prize" was to read the show's closing credits in the style of the host's choosing.
 * An episode of Welcome Freshmen had an academic bowl being won a team that answered all of three questions, by luck to boot, which all happened to be worth 10 times that of previous questions.
 * An episode of The New Addams Family show had Gomez competing against Death for his life in this fashion. The last round is worth all of the points, and when asked "Then what was the point of the matches before?" The reply is just "better ratings".
 * The Championship Gaming Series truly screwed the pooch on this one -- the contest's five disciplines were hugely idiosyncratically scored -- acing both Dead or Alive rounds five-nil, (for a total of ten points) taking the top two spots in Forza Motorsport (taking six points and conceding one), and winning FIFA by three clear goals (Net profit of three points) will result in a tie if the opponent team wins all the Counter-Strike rounds (18 points). Of course, which discipline counts as the golden snitch is up in the air, as the rounds were never played (or at least, broadcast) in any specific order.
 * The very last round of Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation is always worth one point more than the difference between the losing time and the winning team, "which means that anyone can win!". Of course, The Points Mean Nothing anyway; the only real stakes are bragging rights.
 * Although subverted, though definitely not averted, in Episode 26 wherein it was worth one million points. Which was still well and truly enough that anyone could win, but there was no "exactly" about it.
 * On at least one occasion, Shaun just admitted he didn't remember what the score was and set the final round at an arbitrarily high number of points.
 * The Beauty Pageant in the "iWas A Pageant Girl" episode of iCarly seemed to follow this pattern. Sam is an uncouth loudmouth going on about fried chicken during the introduction and answers her special question stupidly. Both of these on their own would be enough to stop someone coming first. But somehow Sam comes back to win, as she performs a tap dance routine in the talent section.
 * Appeared in an Imagine Spot on That '70s Show.


 * Competitions between the three presenters on the British motoring show Top Gear often include a Golden Snitch for the final event making the other events sometimes completely unnecessary. For example in the original Cheap Car Challenge the final event was to add a point for every pound under the limit the presenter spent. This allowed Clarkson to come from behind and win because he spent a grand total of 1 pound for his vehicle.
 * The general flaw is that instead of awarding points for rank in any one event, they are awarded based on actual performance which is often unbounded and never weighted. The problem can work in reverse when points are subtracted for poor performance and a breakdown or other misfortune can result in thousands of points being lost.
 * Usually by James May.
 * Dave Gorman's Important Astrology Experiment judged the value of astrology by measuring elements of Dave's happiness on three scales - Love (on a scale of -100 to +100), Health (on a scale of -100 to +100) and Wealth (in pounds) - and then adding them up to see if the total was positive or negative. So he could be dying alone, but as long as he had more than £200... (And that's exactly what happened; with all three scores circling the drain, he put up a longshot bet just before the arbitrary cut-off point, and scored £500. So astrology works.)
 * Even though teams on The Amazing Race have their time disparities preserved across legs (if you checked in N minutes after the first team on the previous leg, you have to wait N minutes after the first team departs on the current leg before you can depart), the show will usually set up an equalizer near the start of every leg where all the contestants end up arriving at an airport several hours before the first flight, or (more uncommonly) at a task location hours before it opens. The vast majority of the time, this wipes out most if not all advantages and disadvantages between teams had from the previous leg. However, demonstrating that Tropes Are Not Bad, the first season's lack of these equalizers led to two teams being over 12 hours ahead of the rest by the end of leg 9, making the game essentially Unwinnable for the rest and making most of the remainder a Foregone Conclusion.
 * They also have none-announced "non-elimination" rounds, which, since the idea is to be the last team standing, makes the entire leg pointless. The first team may, or may not, win a prize but all teams continue to the next leg and (as the first poster said) the order in which they arrived really does nothing to alter the odds. They also have "Fast Forwards" which if completed first allow one team to skip over all other tasks.
 * National selections for the Eurovision Song Contest have been known to feature this, notably the Ukrainian entry in 2005. Having played out the preselection over the course of fifteen knockout rounds, the broadcaster bizarrely added Razom nas bahato, an anthem of the previous year's Orange Revolution, as a "wildcard" entry in the final. It won the vote (and promptly had to be rewritten to remove the political content, in accordance with Eurovision rules).
 * In The Finder Walter needs to take a sanity test from Dr. Sweets, if he passes he can officially take part in any investigation as a consultant, if he fails Walter would be considered insane. Walter fails, but Sweets can get him to pass if Walter tells him what compelled him to find things.
 * Kamen Rider Fourze pulls off something similar to Naruto. During an astronaut qualification exam, there is a "bonus" question about describing the test papers . Idiot Hero Gentaro and Cloudcuckoolander Yuki pass the exam answering only the bonus question, meaning that regardless of score, answering that bonus question is enough of a qualification. The exam proctor mentions that the school board chairman (also the series Big Bad) only put it in for "a little joke".

Game Shows

 * The $100,000 Name That Tune used the 1-1-2 rule, as shown above. This was extended to a 1-1-2-4 setup in most tournament episodes during Jim Lange's version. (Note that if the players split the first two rounds, the third round became absolutely meaningless.)
 * In the show's second season, the final for the tournament held for the first season's contestants who qualified for the "$100,000 Mystery Tune" but were unsuccessful had a 1-1-1-3 setup, so if the first two rounds were split, the third was meaningless.
 * Legends of the Hidden Temple used the 1-1-2 rule; however, winning all three rounds had a significant advantage: If you won via tiebreaker, a bad setup of the bonus round could make it Unwinnable (the points/talisman fragments are the contestants' "extra lives").
 * The final survey on Family Feud is worth triple points, far more than enough to win with even if you lost on all of the others. (On the other hand, usually if the game gets this far, it means both teams are getting pathetically low scores on the other rounds. Normally, the double-point round is enough to determine a winner, but team with a run of good answers can win even before that.)
 * Some versions (the Louie Anderson one, among others) have three rounds of regular scoring, where a team can theoretically get up to 100 points—but probably not since unique answers in the survey are omitted. The fourth round is the triple-point round and that usually has only three or four answers and thus almost always scores all 300 points, enough for a guaranteed win. This ends up a 1-1-1-3+ situation, the final round nearly making the first three entirely moot, even if one side won all three normal rounds.
 * "Winning" the round, and getting all the available points, are two different things. A family could, in theory, win every preceding round, but only because the other side couldn't get enough answers correct, whereas any answer given after the switch, regardless of popularity, wins those points. If things ever do get to triple-point scoring, it's mainly to just wrap up the game.
 * Triple points could also be a "tiebreaker" if both teams are just below 300. In this case, it doesn't matter what the multiplier is, whoever wins that round would win the match anyway.
 * In The Price Is Right, a contestant that loses their pricing game still has as good a chance of making it to the Showcase as one who wins. However, turn order in the Showcase Showdown determined by previous winnings, and going last is a significant advantage, since you know exactly what you have to get to win, and you win by default if your opponents both go over before your turn.
 * Inversion: A malignant example is the Whammy in Press Your Luck. Getting just one will wipe out your accrued wealth, regardless of lead or total. As such, this is fatal to a player in the endgame regardless of score or skill. You automatically lose if you get one on the last spin of the game. (Unless there happens to be a tie at $0, which actually has happened on the show.) Because of this, passing your earned spins onto 1st place (2nd if you're in 1st) is a viable strategy, as they'll be forced to use those spins.
 * The "$3000/$4000/$5000 + one spin" spaces in the final round can usually help a contestant lagging behind to overtake the leader and win the game and even more so if they land on the space multiple times.
 * The revival, Whammy: The All New Press Your Luck, also had this but later versions of the show introduced the Big Bank, where all money a player loses to a Whammy goes into the Big Bank. A player that lands on the Big Bank space and then answers a question correctly would snag all the money stored. Since whammies were commonly landed on, the Big Bank usually gotten tons of money stored and this could guarantee that player a surefire win of the whole game if they don't hit a Whammy afterwards.
 * The revival also had 2 rounds of spinning on the big board like the original had done, but it was very common to see people mainly win in the 2nd round of spinning since round 2 typically had prizes with higher values than the prizes in the 1st round.
 * Go, a Bob Stewart show where the round values were 250-500-750-1,250, and the winning score is 1,500. If a team wins the first three rounds, to fill the half-hour, they get to play the bonus round twice. However, like the Name That Tune example, if the first two rounds are split, the third round becomes meaningless.
 * Wild 'n Out has variable scores for the different sections in each minigame, but the Freestyle Slam at the end can allow any team to score more points than the other games combined (this is usually edited out in the broadcast, though).
 * Nickelodeon Guts and its successor, Global Guts, had the Crag (and all variations thereof), whose completion gives a player 725 points for 1st, 550 for second, and 375 for third, meaning that unless you lose at every event before then, you can easily turn the game around in your favor by getting first or second. Plus, there's an added bonus that rewards players who would otherwise be tied, but did better in the front game.
 * The new version, My Family's got GUTS, changes this to an American Gladiators-style setup: For every 10 points a team gets, that team gets to start up the Crag 1 second before the other team (for a maximum of 7 seconds). However, like AG's Eliminator, whoever finishes first wins, and some teams have come from a 7 second wait and still won.
 * American Gladiators was decided by the Eliminator from Season 3 on (in the first two seasons, it was total point score that mattered and the Eliminator simply added to the points accrued); first across the finish line won. The points scored in previous rounds were merely used to determine how big a head start the leading player got (one half-second per point).
 * In the 2008 edition, the Travellator, an inclined treadmill which the contenders must climb with the aid of a rope, becomes a golden snitch within a golden snitch - it's the very last obstacle that must be surmounted before crossing the finish line, and it's an order of magnitude more difficult than anything else in the event, especially as the contenders are now completely exhausted. If the first contender to reach it fails to make it up on his/her first attempt, his/her opponent will almost invariably catch up and the match essentially turns into a contest of luck.
 * Similarly, Supermarket Sweep's numerous question rounds simply determined how much time each team got to run through the store in the "Big Sweep" round at the end of the game. The winner of the "Big Sweep" then got to play for the big $5,000 prize.
 * On The Joker's Wild, if a contestant spun three Jokers in the main game, the game ended automatically on a correct answer, whether it was the champion or challenger who did it. The champ would only get a last spin if the challenger reached the $500 mark first, as it evened up the number of turns each player got.
 * In the "Beat the Devil" bonus round a "natural triple" here (three of the same dollar amount) instantly won $1,000 in cash and a prize package.
 * Merv Griffin's Crosswords had a musical chairs system with three "spoiler" contestants who can steal on clues missed by the front two contestants. If a spoiler makes a successful spoil, they get to switch places with one of the contestants, and their cash and prizes stay at the podium. Sure this sounds harmless, but several games were decided by a last-second steal, and wouldn't you be aggravated as a contestant if you worked so hard (for such low payouts) to rack up that cash, only to see you get usurped by a contestant who did nothing the entire game just because you made one wrong move?
 * Fun House had the Grand Prix, a Gimmick Level race around the studio collecting tokens worth 10 and 25 points, as well as earning 25 points for crossing the finish line first. Either team could easily clean house in this round, especially when they added in a "token bank" in the latter seasons, giving both teams more chances of racking up the points.
 * Finders Keepers. Winning the hidden pictures round only earned the team the right to do the room search. If they failed to find the object, the money for that attempt went to the opposing team. So even if one team completely dominated the hidden pictures round, if they failed too many searches, the opposing team would win without doing anything!
 * The "dare" system in Nickelodeon's |Double Dare is similar to the Finders Keepers example; Each time a question is passed to the other team (known as "daring" the opponent to answer; the controlling team can "dare" the other team to answer, and be "double dared" to answer it in return, after which thy must answer it or take a physical challenge), the dollar value for it is doubled (twice the amount on a "dare", four times the amount on a "double dare"), and if the question is answered wrong while a "dare" or "double dare" was in play (or the physical challenge was not successfully completed), the last team to pass the question gets the money. Savvy players, therefore, could pingpong a question with their opponents to rack up the cash, then get the answer right or win the physical challenge to net them a huge lead (or give the game to the opponent on a silver platter, if they suck).
 * In theory, anyway. In practice, most of the players didn't want to take the chance that their opponent would know the answer after all. So if they Dared, it was because they didn't know the answer to begin with, and if the opponent Double Dared back, it went straight to the physical challenge.
 * Remember, too, that this show had a 1-2 format, making it even worse than the usual game show Golden Snitch; it was possible to hold the opponent completely scoreless for over half of the game and still lose big.
 * And finally, the bonus round: eight purely physical tasks, each with a more valuable prize. In all, a dumb but athletic team not only stood a much better chance of reaching the final than one that was smart but weak, but also would win much more once they got there. So physical talents could be considered a Golden Snitch.
 * The Video Challenges in Nickelodeon Arcade could be horrendously guilty of this; essentially, one teammate has to meet or beat the challenge set forth by the "video wizard" on a certain video game within a time limit, and depending on how much their partner wagers out of their score (which can be anything up to their total, or up to 25 points if they have less than that), they could effectively double or bust their score, depending on if the challenge is beaten, making or breaking the game for them.
 * Or it would have been had the player placing the wager bet more than the 5 or 10 points that most teams bet.
 * Nickelodeon had another show around the same time called Make the Grade, where the object was to answer at least one question for every subject and every grade level, thus lighting up your whole board. However, they also had physical challenges called "Fire Drills", where the contestants got to choose which player podium to return to based on how they placed in the Fire Drill. Very often, a contestant who spent the whole game answering questions and building up their board found themselves losing because one of the other contestants placed first in the Fire Drill and stole their board (the worst ones come when the kid in first place is one subject/grade level away from winning, and the thief answers the last one needed).
 * Masters of the Maze had the maze which took up most of the actual show. The previous (question) round determined which teams would go into the maze and which teams would go to the maze first, and the team who made it through the maze the fastest would win the game.
 * Body Language was a rare case where the first two rounds were in fact completely meaningless, or at least they would be if points weren't also consolation prize cash. To wit: The first two rounds were worth $100 each, and the second two were $250. You had to get $500 to win, which is only possible by winning both later rounds, whether or not you won the any of the first two rounds. If neither team got to $500, there was a tiebreaker for the game that completely ignored the previous scores.
 * Super Password used a 1-2-3-4 pattern where the first to 5 was the winner. If the same team took the second and third rounds, it won; if they were split, the fourth round decided the winner. In neither case did the outcome of the first round have any significance.
 * Jeopardy! does this with the "Final Jeopardy" round in which players may wager their winnings up to that point. It is entirely possible for someone to come from 3rd place to win if the leader AND second-place both fail the question.
 * On Wheel of Fortune, the last round involves one final spin of the wheel, after which all consonants in the puzzle are worth the value spun plus $1,000. If it comes up on a high enough value (particularly the $5,000 space), the final puzzle could allow someone who previously hadn't won at all to overtake the leader and win. To be fair, all contestants keep all winnings, so it's hard to complain about a second-place score in the $20,000 range.
 * Really, the game is full of Golden Snitches, as getting such things as the Jackpot and the $10,000 Mystery Round spot gives the player that gets them a marked advantage over the competition. But by far the worst offender is the Prize Puzzle, which nets you a trip worth at least $5,000 for simply solving the puzzle. Certain Genre Savvy players will immediately solve a Prize Puzzle, even if they haven't even spun the wheel yet, because they know that the prize itself is worth far more than anything they could hope to win that round and don't want to risk hitting a Lose a Turn or Bankrupt and giving the puzzle (and, by extension, the prize) to another player. In a normal game, where nobody gets a special space like the aforementioned two and they don't get an obscenely large Final Spin, the winner is more often than not the person who won the Prize Puzzle.
 * At least once, this has been subverted: one contestant went from a distant third to $35,000 thanks to a $6,000-per-letter Speed-Up, but still lost to someone who had $38,500.
 * The British show Keynotes has a particularly bad case of this: £30 for the first round, £60 for the second and £120 for the third. Not that all games were decided by the third round; at least one had a £30-0 victory.
 * Beat the Clock, particularly the version hosted by Monty Hall from 1979–80, is a prime example. Even if you were behind by the maximum possible amount of $2,000, the game came down to who could get shuffleboard pucks the furthest. Whoever was in the lead would go both first and last (admittedly a big enough advantage that an upset was uncommon), but as long the farthest puck that hadn't fallen off was yours, you won, even if you were behind the entire game! And then there was the Gary Kroeger version, which had two: the first had points accumulated translated to positions in an untimed stunt, last to finish is out; the second was a variation on Bid-a-Note from Name That Tune played between the last two teams (here's a stunt, whoever says they can complete it faster plays; if they fail, they hand the game to their opponent, and the first bid is determined by a trivia question).
 * In fact, on the Monty Hall version, the winner of the shufflepuck table round was that day's champion (and got to come back on the next show, unless reaching the $25,000 limit), even if they failed in the "bonus stunt" and ended up behind the other couple (by as much as $2000 to $300).
 * The first fifty minutes of The Crystal Maze concern the players completing challenges to win crystals. These crystals do nothing but increase the amount of time that the team is allowed in the Crystal Dome at the end (five seconds per crystal). This is made even worse by the fact that it didn't matter how much time you had: if you collected more negatively scoring silver tokens than positively scoring gold tokens, you failed anyway. (You had to get 100 points to win.) A perfect example of this can be found in a team that won eleven crystals (the average was four) and ended up with 198 gold... and 167 silver.
 * The Crystal Maze wasn't a true example, but the ineptitude of many contestants made it seem that way. The amount of time in the dome should matter, if the team has enough common sense to use the earned time to sort and discard some of the silver tokens, rather than collecting everything indiscriminately.
 * In the first format of Play the Percentages, a couple could immediately win the game and a cash jackpot by guessing exactly how many of 100 people correctly answered a knowledge question.
 * On the Canadian comedy-quiz show You Bet Your Ass (where the absolute top prize was $2500, Canadian), the setup was 1-1-2-n. First round had questions worth 100 points; second round did the same but mixed up how they were offered; third round had questions worth 200 points; the final round was effectively a series of three Final Jeopardies in a row to each player, with the minimum bet being 500. You have to build up an effective base to have a chance in the final round, true, but at that point almost anyone can catch you if they're bold and smart enough.
 * Also each contestant got a different set of questions, so they'd just have to hope they get easier ones.
 * On the British game show The Million Pound Drop, to win anything at all, contestants must answer one final All or Nothing question correctly, picking from two choices. Picking the correct answer means they get to keep their winnings, while picking the incorrect answer means they leave empty-handed. The show has already seen a team lose £525,000 on the final question, and as of this writing, nobody on the show has won a single pound after 5 episodes.
 * This has, unfortunately, transferred over to its American counterpart, Million Dollar Money Drop. It makes you wonder why anybody bothers going on these shows, since an otherwise perfect game can be absolutely shattered by a single question that, unlike other game shows of its ilk, can't even be opted out of. Seriously, who the hell thought of these rules?
 * Averted in German game show Beat Raab (Schlag den Raab): A series of twelve contests (contender vs. the show's host), awarding one through twelve points. Thus, similar to the Eliminator, contestants have to judge when to put in the most effort, as giving all in the earlier contests might leave one too weak for the more rewarding ones.
 * Parodied by one Japanese variety show, in a game where the celebrity guests were asked questions worth one point each. However, the final question was worth 1,000,000,000,000 points. The score at the end humorously showed the winner's score as 1,000,000,000,003 (give or take a point or two) squeezed into very narrow digits.
 * Parodied in the 1978-79 game show sendup The Cheap Show, which used a 1-1-20 system.
 * Dancing With the Stars has gotten notorious for this:
 * It happened in the first season. It was a head-to-head, Kelly Monaco against John O'Hurley, which Kelly won. Criticisms over who really deserved it and how much of a role Kelly's fanbase played, prompted ABC to do a rematch of the final several months after the season ended. It would be for the title, effectively discarding the entire season, and for some inexplicable reason Kelly agreed to it. John won, and he won. No word on whether Kelly was forced to relinquish the trophy.
 * The 11th season final featured Evan Lysacek and Nicole Scherzinger (with Erin Andrews as the also-ran). Every round had half of the score determined by the judges and half by the audience...except the final. It was played out over two days. The first had two dances receiving a single score normally. The second had two more dances, each receiving a score from the judges only, effectively making the split 3/1. The judges, who were pretty vocal about wanting Nicole to win, scored her 2 points higher than Evan (30-28) in each of the latter two dances, turning what had been up to that point a tight contest into an easy victory for Nicole.
 * And of course, every so often we get a very literal Golden Snitch, where the contest simply awards huge numbers of points to one or more contestants at completely random moments in the season. Any time you see some scoring wonk or something with a cute name like "dance-off" or "dance marathon", you can be sure you're going to see this. Of course, since points don't carry over, all this does is ensure that someone the producers want to keep around doesn't get eliminated.
 * The Newlywed Game, at least Carnie Wilson's version. First round, where the women are asked about the men: each question is worth five points. Second round, where the men are asked about the women: each question is worth ten points... except for the last question, which has two parts, and each part is worth fifteen points.
 * The most famous version with Bob Eubanks was basically the same, except the last question was one part and worth 25 points.
 * MTV's Trashed, to an extent: Questions in the first two rounds earned 50 points and 100 points each, respectively. The show's final round featured rapid-fire questions at 150 points each for 39 seconds, making come-from-behind victories quite easy. However, winning the earlier rounds had a significant advantage: the more possessions you saved, the longer your time limit in the Bonus Round.
 * German game show Schlag den Raab (internationally syndicated as Beat Your Host) consists of 15 games (which can be actual sports, often unknown ones, games, trivia quizzes or any ability test of strength or dexterity). The points are scored 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15 for a total of 120 - first to 61 wins. Not exactly a Golden Snitch, but the first games hardly matter.
 * Entirely averted in British show Only Connect, where the question editor proudly announced that due to adjustments to the difficulty of the Connecting Wall (making it harder) and the Missing Vowels round (making it easier), Season 2 saw the rounds give, on average, equal points as each other to within a point... Despite the quick fire nature of the missing vowels round making it feel like it should be swingy compared to the other rounds.
 * British show Fluke saw rounds of quick fire questions interspersed with entirely arbitrary elimination rounds, with the points only giving the privilege to pick first in chance-based games where whatever position you played in gave the exact same chance of being eliminated (Such as getting the choice of two ovens, one with a cooked goose and one with an uncooked goose, where if you opened the oven with the cooked goose it meant your goose is cooked which means you're out, to pick the final bye-bye game in the final episode as an example). Lampshaded via a catchphrase - "What are points?" 'Pointless!' - Not that the questions were any more than fifty/fifty toss ups for the entire show, including in the bonus round. Still, money would be given per correct answer.
 * The new Family Game Night on Hub awards one "Crazy Cash Card" to each family at the start of the show, then an additional card to the family who wins each game. Most cards are worth no more than $1500 or so (and generally only a couple hundred bucks), but one card is worth anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000. Thus, a family could lose all five games and still win the grand prize if the card they chose happens to be the jackpot one.
 * Played with in Beat The Geeks with the "Geequalizer". Each contestant is given rapid-fire questions worth 10 points each, but one wrong answer ends the round for them. There are just enough questions that if one contestant got every single point possible and the other contestant had zero, that contestant could come back from behind, but only if they finished the entire Geequalizer (pretty much unheard of), and the other contestant missed the very first question.
 * The short-lived Scavengers had an odd variant- points were awarded for collecting salvage during each game, rather than for winning the round. However, the final round essentially reset everyone's score, requiring them to carry the salvage they've already earned across a deep gorge over several trips. The more they've got so far, the more points they can earn, but if they mess up the leading team can finish with fewer points than they started with, allowing the trailing team to overtake them.
 * The Nickelodeon game show Wild & Crazy Kids was terribly guilty of this as their shows had a 3 event structure, with double points being awarded to the winners of the second event and triple points (or higher) to the winners of the third. This allowed the host to utter the line "So anybody can still win" before each event. This appeared to insult the intelligence of children about their understanding of competition.
 * The finale of WCG Ultimate Gamer has two contestants competing against each other in three different video games, worth 1, 2 and 3 points respectively, meaning all three games had to be played in order to guarantee a winner, and a player who won the first two games may still lose if they don't win the final game.
 * Inverted in the Horrible Histories game show, Gory Games. Winning a round gets you a Year Sphere, containing a hidden year. At the end of the game, the spheres are opened and the years are added to determine the winner...but BC dates are subtracted, and they go back a long way. If you grab, say, a 1.5 million BC sphere, it'll knock you into flat last regardless of how many rounds you've won, because the positive scores are things like 1066 and 1492. And winning more rounds makes you more likely to grab the dud. It's quite possible, although unlikely - most year spheres are positive - to win no games, gain no spheres, score zero, and be declared champion because the other two competitors got negative scores.
 * Catch 21. In the final round, the scores are wiped clean, and the two finalists play that round without Scoring Points. Winner of that hand wins the game. Say you curb-stomped both of your opponents in the first two rounds (say, 1500-100-0). You're obviously going through to the final, and the guy with 100 points goes with you, since he's in second. Now, your opponent is dealt an ace to start the final round, then answers just one question correctly and pulls a 10-value. Well, buddy, you're screwed. Hope you made a 21 earlier so the bonus prize goes home with you.
 * Inverted in the earlier days of the Japanese show DERO! - the maximum possible prize in the Beam Room round usually accounted for around half the total money up for grabs in each episode, and it was also usually played first. Although it was also Nintendo Hard, so a win of more than half the maximum was rare. Played straight after it switched to a winner-take-all points battle format, and the Beam Room was moved to the last round before the Bonus Round. Under the new format, a Curb Stomp Battle in the Beam Room (as highly improbable as it would be) would guarantee a win regardless of previous score.
 * Food Network's The Great Food Truck Race (first season) had a pretty bad example of this. The winner for each regular leg was simply whoever made the most money over the course of a weekend, factoring in bonuses and penalties from special challenges. The final leg was a race to see who could earn the most in several locations around New York City, and then reach the finish line on top of a certain building. The previous rounds didn't matter whatsoever in the scheme of things, meaning that the team that had dominated the competition up to that point ended up losing out to a consistent middle-runner, all because of that final round.
 * In the Bill Engvall version of Lingo, the setup is now 1-2-5. Mitigated by only having 3 words in round three, but still true if the in-behind team gets all 3 words and a lingo, $2000 usually being enough to overtake anything of a lead the competition might have had.
 * Cha$e claimed that contestants accumulated money for every second they could avoid the Hunters and lost all their winnings if they were eliminated (by being tagged by a Hunter or otherwise), but there was no way to take that money and leave (although the show did have offers to quit the game for a fixed amount). Thus all that mattered was not being eliminated until the last few minutes, then being the first to reach the exit point. A player could easily reach the end with every utility and be eliminated simply because they couldn't reach the exit point first.
 * Couch Potatoes had the "Couch-Up Round", in which players took turns answering buzz-in questions. Buzzing in also stopped a computer that shuffled random point amounts as well as the phrase "Couch-Up"; answering a question with "Couch-Up" lit immediately tied the score if your team was behind, effectively making the first part of the show meaningless.
 * Spanish TV contest Gafapastas is a real-life shining example of this. It has five rounds, the first four are woth 600€ if you manage to do everything perfectly and the last one is 1200€ for the same. Not only that, but while the first four are individual rounds (Meaning both players can get the 600€), the last one is head-to-head answer-this-first squareoff, so a losing player can quickly Curb Stomp Battle their opponent and win by with a huge margin. The current champion has won many games simply because he's really good at the last round. The worst part? Until recently it was 800€ for the first 4 rounds and 800€ for the last. That's right, they changed it to make the rounds MORE unbalanced! Makes perfect sense.

Radio

 * Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! features this in spades, as every question in all but the final round is worth one point to each panelist, but the lightning round questions are worth two points each and are more numerous than all the other questions combined. That said, since it's a comedy show masquerading as a game show, the score isn't really all that important.
 * In an average game, around 9 points are awarded before the lightning round. Each panelist gets 2 questions worth 1 point each, and 3 more are up for grabs for games like Bluff the Listener. The lightning round consists of 7 questions per panelist (or as many as can fit into 60 seconds, whichever is less), each worth 2 points. Thus, the only impact of the first 50 minutes of the show on the final result is that one contestant might have a one-question lead going into the endgame.
 * Hamish and Andy Invented a game called random John, in which a random phone number is dialed. There are strict rules about how often a call can be made and what qualifies as random. If the person who answers the phone is called “John” the caller gets 1 john point. If the person who answers the phone is called “John Johnson” the caller gets 50 john points, making it something of a golden snitch. However since they have been playing this game for over three months and still have not gotten a single john point, even getting a “John” could qualify as at least a silver snitch.

Professional Sports

 * Audiences often interpret games in this way, e.g. if a soccer player misses an open goal in the first half, it'll be forgotten, but if he misses an open goal in the last second, he'll be blamed for losing the game. Both misses were equally bad, but only the latter is seen as significant.
 * It is very easy for the audience to forget (or simply not care) that in order for the one team to lose the game on the 'last play', the other team had to be good enough to get the game to a state where this matters. ie all that happened in the game up to that point actually matters a lot more than the 'last play'
 * In the Aztec/Mayan Ball Game, most games were won on points, but if someone knocked a ball through a ring, they won immediately.
 * The ring was impossibly high and small, though. But then again, the losing team is sacrificed to the Sun god, so that is probably good motivation to try. Or maybe the winning team is, Historians are unsure what the fuck actually happened during these games except that it was pretty lethal and somebody is Sacrificed to the Sun god later.
 * Resulting in the hilarious mental image of two teams desperately trying to hide their attempts to lose the game.
 * In a "board" (actually mat) game played by the Aztecs, you could score an instant win if all your beans landed on their ends and stayed that way. Which probably happened as often as someone sending the ball through the ring in tlachtli.
 * Note that this ancient version of basketball (apparently) forbade use of the hands and feet: players had to hit the ball with their knees and elbows.
 * A lot of GAA tournaments are like this: seven or eight teams all play each other, but the top four go to the semi-finals anyway, rendering the opening games kinda worthless.
 * Indeed, historically, the team with the most goals won, regardless of the number of points - one imagines points are only valuable as tie-breakers...
 * A real-life example is the Major League Soccer playoff format. The first round consists of an aggregate-score two-game home and home series, meaning that teams that have worked hard all year and finished top of their division have no benefit over a lazy team that barely scraped into the playoffs, especially where 8 of the 13 teams make the playoffs to begin with. This makes most of the season pointless.
 * Something like this happened twice in World Cups. The famous last game of the 1950 World Cup in Brazil was won by Uruguay, practically negating the hosts' two previous dominating victories over their rivals and winning the Cup for Uruguay. And in 1982, Italy advanced to the second round as the worst team of the top 12 after drawing their three first games, then went on to win their next three games, including the final match, to become World Champions.
 * If one really wants to stretch it, any sports playoffs are inherently Golden Snitch-worthy. Possibly the only "playoffs" that couldn't be considered such was the original baseball World Series, before the LCS and interleague play was instituted.
 * The greater the fraction of teams involved in the playoffs, the less relevant the regular season is, even though the regular season represents many more games. The NHL and the NBA are particular examples, where teams with losing records regularly qualify. Of course, if the regular-season divisional titles are themselves of value, then there are two separate competitions and it's not a Golden Snitch. European soccer, where the national titles both qualify you for the Champions' League and make you national champion is like this.
 * From 1979 to 1991, the NHL had 21 teams, 16 of whom made the playoffs. That means only the bottom quarter of the league lost their chance at a championship. In the 1987-88 season, the Toronto Maple Leafs made the playoffs with a record of 21 wins, 49 losses, and 10 ties. This was the worst playoff-worthy record of the period, but not by much. Thankfully, such teams were too blowful to make it very far into the playoffs.
 * Even today (2010 season), the Canadian Football League playoffs allow six of the league's eight teams a shot at the championship.
 * There is a slight advantage to having the second leg of a home-and-away game at home; extra time will be at home, so you could play 90 minutes away and 120 minutes at home, which helps.
 * The post-season selection process in American college sports. In football, poll voters give more weight to late-season results than early season-ones. In other sports, which have impartial committees to select teams for the national championship tournament, the committees freely acknowledge that they prefer teams who are playing well at the end of the regular season. Ergo, late-season games are more important than early-season ones. What makes this so bewildering is that, in the sports that matter, the latter-half of the Regular Season is almost completely devoted to Conference Play! Meaning that if you're not in an Auto-Qualifier in Football or one of the Powers in Basketball, you're practically screwed unless you carry a (near- in basketball) Perfect Non-Conference record and then have to get through your Conference schedule trying to avoid a Bankrupt.
 * Worse than that, teams that have undefeated seasons can not even place in bowl games, on the single matter that their schools aren't big enough to rate television coverage against the big names schools (Notre Dame, any Pac 10) and therefore somehow don't count. Coaches themselves have been on record as saying they don't (or, subvertedly, do) go against unnamed schools, on the fact that games with them don't count.
 * The NCAA "March Madness" Basketball tournament can act like this, because of automatic bids. A team that wins its conference tournament automatically gets entered into the big dance. Every team in a conference gets to play in its tournament. In theory, a team can lose every single regular season game and still win the National Championship. Conversely, the Power Conferences (about 1/4th of the Conferences) usually take several At-Large bids per Conference, so the Conference Tournament is either an afterthought for the best teams, or a chance for one of the lesser schools to steal a bid from the lesser conferences. Inversely, the other 3/4ths are lucky to even get multiple At-Large bids between all of them, making the Conference Tournament a must win even if you're (otherwise) perfect in-conference!
 * In boxing, matches are often won on points (sometimes with some controversy). But one way to unambiguously win (and make all the points in the previous rounds meaningless) is to give your opponent a concus... er, get a knock-out.
 * Likewise, the UFC is scored after three rounds (Five if a championship is on the line), but if you score a TKO, a KO or get a submission you win right there. Everyone in the UFC tells the fighters to not leave the decision on who wins to the judges.
 * Though to be fair, this is a case of Truth in Television. Because if you're in a fight and knock your opponent out (or in the case of MMA, are able to just beat on your opponent without them even being able to offer a decent defense), you win.
 * In the 1916 VFL season, due to World War I, there were only four teams competing. Consequently, every team made the Final Four, including Fitzroy, who had won only two games in the regular season. Fitzroy then managed to win all of its games in the finals and take the premiership.
 * Kim Jong Il's scoring system for basketball gives eight (!) points for scoring in the last three seconds. Still, that does double as both making those last few minutes really exciting, as well as giving you good reason to watch all the way to the end.
 * The NHL All Stars skills competition has events that are worth three to five points each, until the Elimination Shootout- during which twelve players per side each try to score against an opponent's goalie in a penalty shot for one point, and those who score get to shoot again in the once all other players have shot. Of course, this doesn't render the previous rounds completely worthless, as even though no lead is insurmountable, you still need to score the goals in order to make up that ground, so the larger the lead, the more difficult to overcome it.
 * The Mario Kart example in the Video Games section below is not as unrealistic as it looks. In many forms of racing, slipstreaming is a huge factor, to the extent that, in the most extreme circumstances, only the final section of the race can matter
 * The most glaring example would be professional cycling. On a flat stage of the Tour de France, the race will almost inevitably follow a certain pattern. A small group of nobodies attacks at the start of the stage, the peloton lets them go and conserves energy, managing the gap. As the stage draws to an end, the peloton draws closer, and eventually catches the exhausted breakaway (the breakaway is often unable to even stay with the peloton once they get overtaken.) Then the sprinters, who have done almost no work all day, attack in the last few hundred metres and win the stage. Of course, in less flat stages the breakaway can succeed, and on the toughest mountain stages, the peloton doesn't exist by the end.
 * Slipstreaming can be a huge factor in motor racing too. NASCAR has its two "restrictor plate" tracks (Daytona and Talladega), tracks so long and fast that they have to slow the cars down to race safely; the effect of this is that the cars race around in a pack of 40 cars within 5 seconds of each other, trying to get somewhere near the front for the final few laps of the race. Unsurprisingly when something goes wrong, carnage tends to ensue.
 * For a couple of years, they reduced the effect of the restrictor plates; due to bump-drafting, the races essentially became races between not single cars, but pairs of bump-drafting cars. It was very odd, and because the pair at the front was always slower than the pairs in their slipstream, it was far more entertaining than just watching a vague pack roaring around.
 * Similar pack racing to this can occur at some of the fastest Indy Car ovals; but generally it is considered too dangerous for open-cockpit, open-wheeled cars to race under these conditions. These fears were realised when Dan Wheldon was killed in a 15-car pileup after being launched into the air, over the wall and tragically cockpit-first into the catch fence.
 * Similar to NASCAR's restrictor plate, Champ Car used to use the "Hanford Device" in order to slow cars down on its fastest tracks. The result was some incredible slingshot-style slipstreaming duels such as this one.
 * There used to be a small number of Formula One races that could descend into slipstreaming duels. The most famous were the races at Monza before they slowed the circuit down with chicanes; particularly in 1971 where, after 300 km of slipstreaming and overtaking, Peter Gethin went from 4th at the start of the final lap to win by a full 0.01 seconds.
 * Modern F1 has actually has effectively an anti-slipstream: driving close behind an opponent through corners slows you down, because of turbulent (dirty) air affecting aerodynamics. This has made races often very processional; however from 2011 the DRS rule essentially created an artificial slipstream if you get within a second of an opponent, cancelling out the dirty air effect and allowing some stupidly easy overtaking.
 * Almost all forms of car racing, and many forms of motorcycle racing too, now use safety cars, where the race is neutralised because of (say) a crash, bunching the field up. What was originally a rare event has become steadily commonplace; endurance races such as the Daytona 24 hour and the Bathurst 1000 that used to be won by margins of laps can now be won by a car length due to repeated safety cars.
 * Slipstreaming has a major effect in motorcycle racing, and even when it's not a major factor, riders can often form groups on the track because of a vaguely game-theoretic sort of thing where if one guy tries to go faster, the others do too, and everyone is more likely to crash, so they might as well not bother till the end of the race when there's less to lose and you don't have to hold on for so long.
 * MotoGP rider Valentino Rossi was famed for his tactics in one-on-one duels. He would sit comfortably behind his rival, conserving his tyres, and then launch a killer attack on the last few laps. In his prime, he hardly ever lost when he got into a race like this. Sadly, Rossi isn't quite the force he was, and there are fewer races in MotoGP like this any more, for reasons including electronic aids and Rossi's bikes not being very good any more.
 * In golf tournaments the actual number of strokes is apparently irrelevant. It's what the score card says. If the golfer signs a score card with more strokes than he actually took, that's his score and if it causes him to lose - tough! I assume this doesn't count if the caddy put down less strokes than the golfer took.
 * If the caddy puts down less strokes and the golfer signs for it, the golfer is Disqualified. A golfer's honesty is Serious Business.
 * Who hasn't played a sports game recreationally where after a long period of forgetting to keep score, someone suggests "next point wins"?

Tabletop Games

 * Vampire: Prince Of The City (a board game based on Vampire: The Requiem) has a rule stating that it is impossible to win the game while one's character is in torpor. This basically means that if you play well and rack up a nice, big points lead, the rest of the players will gang up on you and send you into torpor in the last round, effectively handing victory to whoever is in second place at the time.
 * Munchkin gamers will usually gang up on whoever is highest, especially when that player is trying to score their tenth level (thus winning the game). For this reason, it's preferred to face off against a really weak enemy, so you can win even after everyone else has thrown everything they have to stop you. However, if that player is stopped, the next player trying to score the tenth level will usually win due to everyone else having run out of curses and monster-boosting cards.
 * In the adventure Samurai Steel from the 7th issue of Dungeon the players need to convince a lord of a concubine's treachery. A table to work out the percentage of a verdict in their favor is given, but unless the party is full of priests it is unlikely they'll hit even a 1 in 3 chance of convincing the lord without evidence and only 50% with weaker evidence. The two most blatant pieces of evidence give +75% and +90%, so either one on their own would be sufficient to put the chance of success at 100% if the party isn't full of known criminals who can't engage in polite conversation so the table winds up a waste of space.
 * The game of Black Maria or Hearts employs this trope twice. Each heart obtained in a trick is worth one point (points are bad), but the queen of spades is worth 13, meaning the player that ends up with it is almost guaranteed to end up with the most points for that hand. However, the second actually subverts the first. If a player "shoots the moon" and gets every heart plus the queen of spades, they get no points added and everyone else gets 26.
 * If you play with the optional "shoot the sun" rule (take every trick to get a doubled version of "shooting the moon"), you have the most potent version of this; while it's possible to recover from watching another player "shoot the moon" early, it's almost impossible to come back should an opponent "shoot the sun" (unless you're playing to a score other than the traditional 100).
 * Magic: The Gathering has a few. Some cards, such as Coalition Victory or Battle of Wits, cause you to win the game instantly, no matter how far behind you were. Notably, this game also has Critical Existence Failure, meaning that you can be knocked down to a single life or otherwise be arbitrarily close to a losing condition, but as long as you don't actually reach that position, you can stage a comeback. Many aggro vs combo games have the aggressive player knocking the combo player down to a precariously low life total, then the combo player assembling their winning combination of cards and reducing their completely untouched foe from full life to 0 in a single turn.
 * Due to poor wording, a playtest version of the card Time Walk was interpreted this way. What they intended was for the player to get an Extra Turn; what the card said was "Opponent loses next turn". This was fixed for release ("Target player takes an extra turn after this one").
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! games have cards that lets you win for completing some of their requirements. Like the Exodia cards when all five cards are collected in the players hand they instantly win the game. Then there's the FINAL cards which are a magic/trap variant of Exodia, when all the cards of FINAL are put into play the player wins. Of course fulfilling these conditions can be difficult and the opponent can prevent the player from acquiring those cards, and finish of the player the old fashion way.

Video Games

 * Mario Kart can also be the same way. Some players purposely play horrible and then suddenly blow into the lead in the final lap. How? The game grants losing players better items. This may cause some people to think skill means nothing while others say the strategy is perfectly fair. In fact, people would purposely slow down when approaching item boxes while near another player so that they could get a chance at getting a Star or the like. The technique was called sandbagging and was fairly common online in the DS and Wii version.
 * In Mario Kart Wii, the last stretch of the final lap is often the deciding factor, and especially on the last track of the grand prix. Specifically, if you're in the lead, the deciding factor is how many items you get hit by in a row. It's awfully suspicious how often the Blue Shell hits either right before the finish line or on the final jump of the course, if there is one. This is even worse since even if you play perfectly on the first three courses, a Blue Shell at the last second of the final track can rob you of a star rank, thus making the star-rank requirements for certain unlocks an aneurysm waiting to happen.
 * For that matter, Sandbagging works in every competitive weaponised racer. Stick around in second place waiting for a good homing weapon (you have three laps to bide your time), then blow up the number one with two seconds to spare and win the game. Somewhat averted in games with powerful backwards firing weapons.
 * Multistage Payload Race maps in Team Fortress 2 (including Pipeline and Nightfall) work this way; if a team wins both of the first two rounds, they can still lose the third round and the game. While they are given a significant edge (their bomb stops up further in the last round), whether this is worth the effort to win those first two rounds is debatable.
 * Parodied somewhat in Mother 3, when the player has to compete in three games in order to continue. As the third game begins, the host alerts you that the third game is worth enough to win everything, but the point of the whole thing is to just barely lose all the games to stroke the ego of the villain, so this fact is irrelevant.
 * In the video game version of Scene It?, the final round is completely broken. Some versions have the final round set to where getting a wrong answer takes away points from your score, and most recent versions have the point multiplier, which doubles the amount of points you get each time for repeatedly answering correctly (2x, 4x, 8x, etc.)
 * In Elite Beat Agents, a player receives 50, 100 or 300 points for successfully tapping "hit markers" in time with the beat of a song, with more points for a more timely hit. However, you then get a multiplier to that score that depends on the number of markers you've hit in a row, which can get up to hundreds of times the original score. So markers early in a song are mainly only good for raising your combo numbers, and the actual score only makes a difference later on. Except for one thing - on higher difficulty levels, 50s and 100s give you next to no life, so you need 300s.
 * The spinners, typically placed at the very ends of levels, are especially big offenders. With them, it's possible to rack up bonuses of 20,000 - multiplied by your combo bonus. Running a perfect mission means you can net five million points just on one spinner. In fact, the high-scores of most pro-players are massively lower on ABC than any other - because ABC has no spinners.
 * This has the side effect of missing a note in mid-song much, much more detrimental to your score than missing in the beginning or the end.
 * Which is why spinners were so ridiculously hard to work in the original Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. And made easier - slightly - in Elite Beat Agents.
 * Uh, apparently a lot of people have not done the research. Spinner bonuses are unaffected by the multiplier; only the final spinner score, which is based on how much of the spinner meter you were able to fill and uses the normal scoring system, is affected. Not that it makes them any less annoying, but it has far less of an impact on score than people think.
 * Racing games with catchup somewhat fall into this trope. You can screw up big time early on, and you stand as much of a chance of winning as you would if you didn't, provided you don't commit any more serious mistakes.
 * Left 4 Dead in VS mode is sort of like this. Both teams when playing as survivors gain points based on distance traveled, survivors left, health remaining, and then the map bonus multiplier. If the whole team dies, they only get distance and map bonus and the points gained for distance is very small since it only maxes out at 100 points. The map bonus multiplier starts of as x1 but can reach as high as x2 or x4 near the end. A team who has been losing for a bit can suddenly sweep victory under the other team's nose if they do exceptionally well in the end. This is assuming that the losing team is only down by a few points and not lagging badly like 3000 points behind.
 * The scoring system in VS mode heavily relied on number of survivors that made it to the safe room, how much health everyone had when they made it, and the map multiplier. This could often cause one team of very skilled players to dominate by 1000 points or more while the team that can't reach the safe room several times would never have a chance to get ahead. The sequel cuts down on this and the trope by changing the scoring where only the distance counts as the major factor of scoring and anyone that did happen to make it to the safe room would just get 25 more points per person that is alive. Tied scores in a round are dealt with by awarding the team that did the most damage as the infected in that round extra points.
 * The quiz game Buzz ends with an eliminator round: Every time you answer a question correctly, your opponents' scores tick down, and anyone whose score gets reduced to zero loses. Therefore, it's possible to catch up and win even if you were lousy in all of the other rounds.
 * Bubble Bobble is also like this: no matter how good you are, if there is only one player alive when you defeat the Big Bad on level 100, you're told "never forget your friend" and thrown back into the game. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to defeat this: just get the Big Bad bubbled, then just before you kill him press the Player 2 Start. Bingo! Instead of being thrown back, you'll get the False Ending or the True Ending, depending on whether you're playing the Normal Game or Super Game respectively.
 * Good thing this gameplay mechanic has been removed from its sequels.
 * A game called TV Show King Quiz Party or something along those lines, has you(r Miis) playing for money. On the final round, the 2 best players will compete against each other to in that final round. The prize money is always enough to beat the opposing team, even if they have a $700,000 lead.
 * A variety of RTS games that feature a special character/king/commander (ie: Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Dawn of War) have game modes where an alternate instant win mechanism is to assassinate the enemy leader. Regardless of resources, scores or armies, if the leader is taken out by an unlucky series of events then it's an immediate game end.
 * The Orzammar chapter in Dragon Age involves the player selecting one of two candidates vying for the throne. You'll do a couple of tasks meant to improve their bid for kingship, but ultimately, the last quest, which involves  is the only one that will definitively secure the position without question. So important is it, that you can easily switch candidates at the last minute.
 * In the sequel, in the Mage-Templar conflict, you can side with either side for much of Act III, but you have one last chance to make a decision after . None of your previous decisions in that act affect the outcome after you make that decision.
 * Final Fantasy IX has the Festival of the Hunt in Lindblum, itself a Take That of the "running of the bulls" in Spain. Instead of bulls, monsters commonly fought in Random Encounters pepper the city, but the (appropriately golden-brown) Zaghnol is worth five times the points of any of them.
 * Somewhat justified in that the Zaghnol was an fairly powerful and extremely vicious monster that the organizers didn't expect anyone to beat. Not to mention that the player can only find it after going to every area at least once, so you'll be pretty low on time and hard-pressed to beat it before time expires.
 * The arcade game Let's Go Jungle: Lost On The Island Of Spice and its sequel Let's Go Island have many Press X to Not Die sequences. In order to get the good ending, you have to do one of these, and it's very tough.
 * League of Legends and its spiritual predecessors. Dying before creeps spawn is demotivating, but the enemy only gets 400 gold. Dying in lane is slightly worse, but you can still play it safe and come back. Dying while defending a tower will cause you to lose that tower. Finally, dying for any reason after 45 minutes or so is almost guaranteed to lose you the game because the enemy will be able to kill baron uncontested with their numerical advantage and the baron buff will give them an edge even when you respawn. Not to mention the respawn timer only gets longer and longer until you are out of commission for a whole minute.
 * When a team loses the deciding fight just barely, people tend to look for the player who made the fatal mistake and bombard him with insults, even if better play by the rest of the team could have wrapped up the game twenty minutes earlier. After all, when your Taric stuns the tank instead of the rampaging carry everyone sees just what an idiot he is, while the team's endemic failure to stop said carry from free farming and becoming unstoppable in the first place is much harder to notice unless you compare postgame stats about creeps killed and gold income.
 * City of Heroes has the Praetorian origin, in which the player spends the first 20 levels defining their character through a series of moral choices. Whether the character becomes a hero or villain upon leaving Praetoria, however, is decided only by their actions in the final mission.
 * In Spellcasting 301, it doesn't really matter how well the Pharts do in the challenges. Whether they stomped the Yus, got stomped or ran a close competition, at the end of the final scheduled challenge, the Judge will declare that since the scores are so close (Which they might not be), there will be one last challenge, which will earn the frat to complete it enough points to guarantee a win..
 * In Wallace and Gromit : The Bogey Man, Wallace is competing against Duncan McBiscuit for chairmanship of the Prickly Thicket Country Club, and is rather absurdly behind (167 to 83, according to the scoreboard). After the 16th hole, in order to humor his totally outmatched opponent, Duncan offers to ignore the stroke count and declare Wallace if the winner if he can complete the course before Duncan does, meaning that despite Wallace having completed the course in twice as many strokes as his opponent, he still wins the game (Mainly because Duncan couldn't find the 18th hole).
 * The tactical nuke in Modern Warfare 2, earned by getting a streak of twenty-five kills. It is, literally, an "I win" button for your team—even if your team was three thousand points behind your opponents, and they were just a couple of kills away from winning, your use of the tactical nuke is an automatic, no-questions-asked victory.
 * In an act of brazenness, there's a special XP award for calling in a tactical nuke when your team is losing - which is almost impossible to get unless the team that got the twenty-five kill streak decides to throw the match until the other team catches up.
 * Not necessarily, sometimes teams disregard main objectives to collect kill-streaks. Other times, team-members will throw their lives on the line to protect their star player.
 * In Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron, there is a skirmish mode. It consists of three rounds. The first and the second have no effect on the final victory. They just provide offensive and defensive bonuses in round 3, which decides whether or not the game is won.
 * Banjo-Kazooie's "Grunty's Furnace Fun". It is a Mario Party-like game board where you work your way from the start to the finish, answering questions as you go. Get one wrong, and you lose one HP. But... there is a type of space which becomes MUCH more common the farther you go... where a wrong answer means instant death. One of these is, in fact, at the very end, so missing the final question will force you to start over, even if you performed flawlessly up to that point.
 * Played with in Beatmania IIDX: On one hand, every note is worth the same maximum of 2 points to your EX Score. On the other hand, most songs tend to have a Difficulty Spike at the very end where the note density suddenly skyrockets. The clear/fail judgment is a straight example, since your Life Meter must be at 80% or higher at the end of the song or else you fail, making the endings much more important.
 * Earlier installments of Dance Dance Revolution would multiply the value of each step by the number of steps so far (so for example, if a Perfect on the first step is worth X, then a Perfect on the second step is worth 2X, third step 3X, and so on), making the last step worth well over a hundred times more than the first. In addition, it would calculate X to make the maximum possible score come out to a round number (which depends on the version and difficulty) but then round down X to a multiple of 10, essentially salami-slicing your score. To keep the maximum possible score at that round number, the salami-sliced points are added onto your score if you get a Perfect on the final step. For example, in MaxX Unlimited on Heavy difficulty, the first step is worth 530 points, the final jump is worth 323,300 points (530 base x 610th step), and holding that jump until the Freeze Arrow finishes is worth another 1,231,850 points (530 base x 611th step + 908,020 points salami-sliced previously). This system was finally changed in DDR SuperNOVA so that every step is worth the same and no salami-slicing occurs.
 * The Nintendo World Championship 1990 was a gauntlet of three NES games: Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer, and Tetris. Players were given six minutes and 21 seconds to complete three objectives: get 50 coins in SMB, finish a specially-made course in Rad Racer, then use the remaining time to score as many points as possible in Tetris. The scores were added up when time expires, but the Rad Racer score is multiplied by 10, and the Tetris score was multiplied by 25. The contest therefore was determined largely by whoever got the most time saved for Tetris as well as optimal strategy for that.

Web Comics
"Gimli: You mean that after all we've been through, this campaign comes down to the roll of a single d20? DM: Well... With special modifiers... Gimli: ***Eye Take*** Legolas: Actually, that sounds intense. Roll it, man. Let's see what we get."
 * DM of the Rings, like its source material, essentially ends with the entire fate of the campaign resting on one single die roll for whether or not Frodo manages to cast the ring into Mt. Doom.
 * It should be noted that, at that point, Frodo isn't even a player character. He's an NPC.


 * In this Sluggy Freelance non-canon parody of Harry Potter, the final event of a competition is worth four billion points. The leader after the previous events had all of fifteen points. This is lampshaded as "Standard wizard procedure of completely unbalancing all games".
 * In an earlier parody, the Golden Snitch in their take on Quidditch is basically the Instant Win Condition. Torg innocently picks it up to look at it during the rules explanation and wins the game for his team.

Western Animation

 * The Captain Planet episode "You Bet Your Planet" had aliens put on a game show between the Planeteers and Ecovillains to decide the fate of the planet. The Ecovillains won the first three rounds, but in the last, a Family Feud-style round, let the heroes get points for every correct answer they got, allowing them to quickly equal the bad guys.
 * In one episode of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Scooby and Shaggy are contestants on a game show that spoofs The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime. After the opposing team passes on the final puzzle, Shaggy gives the correct solution and earns 30,000 points for himself and Scooby, enough to win the game.
 * Played for humor in an episode of Dave the Barbarian. After failing the first two parts of his Rite of Pillage, Dave is able to pass the rite overall because the final test (counting for 75% of his score) is handwriting. The explanation is that the Rite is sponsored by a pen company.
 * The very final race of Oban Star Racers is worth twice as many points as any of the prior races, giving even last placers a shot at the win.
 * An episode of The Simpsons had a contest between bar owners. After two contests, they get to the Drunk Toss, which is worth 98% of the total score, "...Making the last two rounds a complete waste. Oh yeah!"
 * The PJs had this in the episode with the gumbo contest. At least the important event was actually cooking gumbo and the tasting.
 * In Futurama Blernsball, a tethered descendent of baseball, has a target at the very far boundary of the stadium with the words "Hit ball here to win the game". The only possible way to hit the target is to break the tether, thus scoring a traditional "home run".
 * On the other hand, not only is Blernsball supposed to be impossible to understand, but it's not exactly an easy shot to make.
 * Played straight in some episodes of Laff-A-Lympics. Usually by making the last event a "special" 50-pointer.
 * Manipulative Bastard and Jerkass Sociopath game show host Chris from Total Drama Island loves to pull these over on the contestants, as it always guarantees the show will be interesting. He usually gets called out for it, but the episode Up The Creek was one of the few that no one pointed out.
 * In one episode of Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius, Jimmy cheats in a parent-child contest so that he and his father win the earlier rounds. Cindy discovers his ploy, neutralizes it, and then mockingly reminds Jimmy that the one remaining contest is worth the majority of the score.
 * In another episode, the children in Ms. Fowl's class take their final exam, which, according to Ms. Fowl, is worth 95% of their total grade.
 * An episode of ReBoot had Enzo playing in a sports game where only the last race counts whether or not you win. However, the point lead one accumulates determines how much of a lead you have for the last run.
 * In The Legend of Korra, Pro Bending is a best out of three situation. However, if all three members of one team are knocked off the platform in a round, they lose. Thus, all three rounds are always played.

Real Life

 * Truth in Television: this is essentially the way British university degrees used to work, and occasionally still do. Better really revise for those final exams, because they're the only thing that counts!
 * Occasionally true for Canadian universities, too. One of the worst scenarios involved an 80% final and 20% for assignments (no midterm).
 * Universities in general tend to do this; it isn't uncommon for 50% (or more) of the entire grade to rest on a single project or exam, meaning if you screw it up, you fail.
 * The reasoning is to check if the student really understands the material, which is especially important for technical subjects like math and science. Homework, especially in upper division courses, tend to carry <20% of the grade, because it's more useful as a self-check.
 * Also, for Bachelor's degrees (well, at some unis, at least), your first two years don't matter at all so long as you do well enough to get into Honours, which is the only thing that counts towards the final degree.
 * This is still true for many schools and universities in Pakistan. It doesn't matter if you never show up for class, fail all the smaller tests, and never do your homework-so long as you did well on the exams, you passed, as said exams counted for 100% of your final grade.
 * Until recently GCSEs and A-levels came in "finals" variants (now they are generally delivered in modules). This often resulted in the uncomfortable scenario of getting high marks for a given topic but these not counting for anything, and then not being able to remember it in sufficient detail two years on.
 * In Scotland, it varies depending on the subjects and level of exams, but it's not uncommon for either all or the majority of your final grade to come from the final exams. Appeals based on earlier 'prelims' (sat under exam conditions but don't affect the final grade) are possible, and because you sit exams three times, getting progressively harder, you'll quite often have something from earlier years even if you fail the later ones, but an awful lot does depend on your performance in the final exam.
 * There are also NABs for some exams - tests which are easier than the actual exam (about C-level questions for most), but which you must pass if you want to sit the final exam. For most subjects, you get a maximum of two resits (officially; you can sit papers under exam conditions which, if you fail, were 'just practice', but were the real thing if you pass - if the teacher's nice), but three fails and you've failed the course. What makes this worse is that for some subjects (maths is the one used here for examples of numbers, but it's not the only one), the NABs are based on a number of outcomes which must be passed individually, and with as few as 8 or 10 marks in some outcomes and a required percentage for each outcome to pass the NAB, you can lose 4 or 5 marks in the whole paper and still fail.
 * The Irish points system is one of the worst scholarly scoring systems there is. All the work done in five or six years of secondary school mean squat; it all comes down to how well you do in eight to ten 3-hour exams crammed into two weeks at the end of the final year. Just the final year.
 * You will note, however, that it's a single exam of the course which determines your final grade, not multiple aspects of the course, one of which is disproportionately graded. A straight example would be some of the courses which examine the student differently, but still disproportionately in favour of the exam: language exams require oral and aural examinations, while some courses require projects to be handed in in advance.
 * The pool game of Nine Ball fits this trope perfectly. Unlike Straight Pool, where the winner needs to pocket 150 balls, or Eight Ball, where the 8 can only be pocketed after several other balls have been pocketed (sinking the 8 before that point results in a loss instead of a win), in Nine Ball, only the 9 ball itself truly matters. It's entirely possible for one player to sink most or all of the other balls, yet lose the game when s/he misses a shot and the other player subsequently pockets the 9 (directly if it's the only non-cue ball left on the table, or with a combination shot if it isn't).
 * ComedySportz games are like this, especially at the high school league, in which the referee will award an arbitrary number of points to whoever wins the last game. Of course, since the entire point of CSz is the improv skills of the actletes and not who actually wins, it doesn't really matter. They lampshade this for all they are worth, acting as though who wins what decides the fate of the world, and even play the theme to Chariots of Fire at the end. The trophy is, of course, known as the Meaningless Trophy.
 * Which takes its lead from both versions of Whose Line Is It Anyway??. The American version even says "Everything's made up and the points don't matter." It's not uncommon for players to get "a billion points" or be awarded with things other than points.
 * In backgammon, the doubling cube can be used to increase the value of a game. It's basically a "double or nothing" offer: A player offered a double can turn it down, at the cost of losing the current game.
 * In politics, this too can be the case. 20 years of hard work will still lose to good advertisement more often than not and charisma is a far better tool than achievements. Plus achievements just before the election period seems to count more than achievements done in the start of the term. Let's avoid any particular examples, 'kay?
 * You can also have the game changers. The ongoing depression is a big one. How well a politician handles it affects people a lot- if the person seems to be saying anything that makes sense, strikes the right tone, people will trust them a lot more, because it's better to show than tell. Your point score before matters a bit, but you might move 10 points up in the votes if you win this final character test.
 * The "October Surprise" is a traditional version of this in American politics, especially presidential races. Elections are at the start of November; incidents and/or new information in the final month often render the entire race before that point moot.
 * In many beauty pageants, one round (in reputable pageants it's generally the interview round, but it can also be the talent round - one imagines that in less reputable pageants it may be the swimsuit round) is worth a disproportionate percentage of contestants' final scores. It isn't quite as bad as the usual Golden Snitch because one contestant acing the important round doesn't prevent the other contestants from acing it too, making the competition hinge on the other rounds; but if one contestant does much better than the others she can win despite doing worse in all the other rounds, and if a contestant bombs in the important round, it doesn't matter if she aced all the others.
 * In U.S. medical schools, grades in the preclinical years (if the school even uses a grading scheme at all) are worth significantly less than clinical year grades and USMLE national exam scores when applying for residency slots after graduation.