New Scaratings

Because no one else has started one and even thought I didn't play last night, I'm going to get the ball rolling by congratulating Jilly's for the narrow win last night. Looking at the top scores, I'm going to assume that the final question was difficult to borg.

Well, the final was to name the atonal "song cycle" that Arnold Schoenberg composed in 1912 in which the Sprechstimme technique was used. (The answer was Pierrot Lunaire.) I don't recall the other choices, but I believe that three of them were definitely not by Schoenberg.

The group here (Aces & Eights) just doesn't know how to do it (Borg), "Schoenberg 1912 Sprechstimme." Would have given you the answer before the choices appeared. But then again, the group that does it here is dumber than a box of rocks.

lew, you don't need to include the "1912" in your search.

I was emailing with my teammates and one of them knew the answer immediately. As the cones of silence were deployed, he failed to share with the others

Personally, I wouldn't be able to identify any work by Schoenberg. Classical music is a black hole for me

"Schoenberg" is a German word, I believe... The closest translation is "Unlistenable".

Some of his oeuvre is tough, but try listening to "Verklärte Nacht" one of these days. Beautiful piece.

I missed it. I had no idea on my only logic was that he sounded German and the correct answer sounded French, so I avoided it.


I've been very anti-borging so far but it gets frustrating at times. I rank in or near the top 100 for most games but I'm not even in the top 1000 for Showdown. I know there are many top players who don't borg but I wonder what percentage of the top 1000 do.

Honestly, it has very little to do with the players who use references. SD and BB are different animals, the questions delve very deep into various subjects unlike the general trivia games.

Your SD average is less than 28k, that's less than half the possible points. Part of that is due to missing the final question, but you still can't expect to have a decent rank relatively speaking when that happens. The same goes for BB.

SD and BB are tough games, some people are better at them than others. Plus those two games rarely have repeat questions.

BO

references or borging aren't as much of a factor as regular ordinary sharing of answers. don't need a big group, just 1 or 2 other people whose skill sets and interests are different.

an extra pyramid question every week and 1 extra final answer per month would go a long way towards improving an average.

For example, if MARTIN and LOWFI at The Three Monkeys shared answers for just the Pyramid round instead of playing solo, we'd both increase our game averages close to 7,500 points. We both often get 4 of 5 in pyramid but usually miss different questions.

There's been discussion on that above, but I imagine we weren't the only place without references that had the reaction of "Whaaa...?" when the question appeared. Classical music is definitely not our strong suit. A couple of us ended up getting it by pure luck; the rest of us went down hard.

No, what we noticed was the seemingly larger-than-usual number of books and authors questions. It got to the point where one of our players remarked that BT's question writer for that game was an undergrad majoring in English who, perhaps because of a disinterest in other fields, was simply composing questions based on his or her course material. It may have been these questions that dragged a number of teams down--the sheer number of literature questions meant that you wouldn't be getting very many non-literature questions. And if you're not great at literature (I'd guess that we are just okay at it), then you won't get getting a great score. And so, we were doing okay going into the Final, but then the Final blew most of us away.

That's a sick farking question.

I think Steve is right that it is the team aspect that is more the issue than the borging. There only seem to be a handful of borg teams or so which "chart" regularly--McGillacuddy's, Spectator's, Zack's, Ernie's, Paddy McGuido's, Chicago Loop, and occasionally Aces and Eights or a couple of others--but there are literally hundreds of teams. If you take just the Premier League, the Platinum League, and the top fifty of the Gold League, for example, you have two hundred dedicated teams. If you figure even just an average of six to eight players/boxes per team, you are already at 1200-1600 scores benefiting from sharing answers, which makes it much more difficult for a solo player to crack into the top. This is especially true during tournaments, when teams often "beef up."

So I guess what I am saying is, I suspect the percentage of the top 1000 that is borging is relatively small, but that the vast majority of people there are benefiting from team play.

I'm sorry that I don't recall the exact wording, but I actually thought it was a pretty good question.

-- RWM

I suspect that the kind of people who borg weren't able to type "Schoenberg Sprechstimme" fast enough to make a difference.
XT

Maybe that's what did it. The silicon-enhanced crew seemed to be noticeably affected this week.

Hmm. In the May Showdown Throwdown, Ernies and Paddy McGuido's were first and second in the Platinum league. Anyone know anything about Ram Family Restaurant Puyallup No 16? Any chance there was a Borg podium sweep?

I guess we can feel better about our fourth place finish -- just missed getting a plaque. Not likely we'll ever get one now that we're back in the Premier league

Someone from Ram Family Restaurant said that they "sometimes" use, especially during tournaments. So yes, you should feel better about your fourth-place finish. We actually feel pretty good about our second-place in Premier--McGillicuddy's had two computers, approximately 220 million websites, and untold millions of terabytes of data on the internet at their disposal for six weeks, and yet only managed to get less than 1/4 of 1% more points than we did using our brainpower alone. We felt that if we are running virtually neck-and-neck with the entire internet as a data-retrieval system, that is as good as any plaque we might get.

If you do not speak German or have never taken German as a language requirement in school, you would likely misspell or mistype it. For whatever reason the Borgs struck out and so did we.

I'll say there is only one reason the Aces & Eights BORG struck out on Tuesday, and I quote, "THEY ARE DUMBASSES." No reason needed beyond that, that is the reason.

And just because someone has taken German doesn't make them any less, or for that matter, more likely to misspell the question. I typed the name into google, walla! The problem with Aces & Eights is they have to look up every question, not a few here and there, every single one. They are that stupid. The BORG had absolutely no reason for missing the final question, they did because they don't know how to borg. They tried one day to explain to me how searching for answers and the internet worked. I looked at them and said, "You are out of your minds, you unintelligent twits are trying to explain how this works, to me?" One of these days I will BORG in their bar and wax them silly. The wife and I showed up one week a couple of years ago, they put the computer away and us 2 beat them down. We were 54k ish on our 6 boards, they were 12k. I just laughed at them from the other side of the bar.