I don't think you need recursion from this. But from the table you posted you have no way of ordering the rows so you couldn't know that A1 is correct....

Here is another way to handle this. I think this is a lot simpler than creating so many variables to check. The way the sql server engine works is that...

The answers 2 and 3 had me second guessing myself. I knew that only 3 rows would be converted. Took me a second to realize the > condition.