New Scaratings

The promos on the network for the Smartest Bar has started and is sticking with Mondays as the day it will be on. They need to have the final day of the 1st round on the 1st Monday of June to cover Memorial Day.

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Mitch (MTCHWF/WLFFLY)

Co-Home Bar: Buffalo Wild Wings Edwardsville, IL and Time Out in St Louis, MO

I'm now looking at an email sent from BT today saying:

"Is Your Bar The Smartest?
How will your bar stack up in Buzztime's Smartest Bar competition? Each of the ten regions will compete for a trophy and prizes in special games of SIX at 9pmET/ 6pmPT on Mondays in May, with the finals in July!"

So, because of our feedback, they recognize the problem with putting the finals in September, opposite NFL/QB1? Then why does the BT website still have two qualifying rounds, and the finals in September?

Incompetency, thy other name is Buzztime.

Brooke/AARDVK

Yeah, but if you click on the button that says "More Info" you get a page that says the semi-finals are in May and July and the finals are in September.

I dug into my e-trash, and you're right, Brooke. Now, due to some Flash or Java problem, the BT site won't load on my home computer, so I clicked the Facebook logo to shortcut over to their blog, see what it says, if anything

That created a pending wall post to share, which states in part



Nothing like misinforming your friends with last year's details, right? I doubt many Facebookers would stop to thoroughly read such a post after already reading the email and deciding to pass it on (notwithstanding the fact not many Facebookers would receive, read, or share a BT email)

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/°v°\ • Every time Linux boots, a penguin gets its wings
I'm a solipsistic conspiracy theorist. I'm sure I must be up to something, and I won't stop until I find out what
Why not downgrade Plutonium to a dwarf element?

The thing is that I really don't know what is the truth, especially given that the "finals in July" language is original. It could be they've changed their minds, and that is what is real--or someone just really screwed up the email.

Either way--incompetency.

Brooke/AARDVK

They screwed up the email. BT's reply in Brookes facebook thread:

"Hey guys, there was a typo in the email - we will clarify in the next email that is sent out. Semi-finals are in May and July, with the finals in September."

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liljol, still residing in a humble lil abode in Buzztime's Backyard, San Diego County, in The Horribly Site-Poor Golden State, California...

<--805 NTN Buzztime sites visited as of 11/13/2018...

F CUBS!!!!! FBOSOX!!!!!

FPDRES!!!!! FCHGRS!!!!!

I guess I don't understand all your bitching. Simply don't play the Monday game, no one is forcing you to get in the tournament... I know I do my share of complaining, but shouldn't we pick and choose our battles a little closer.

I look forward to a SIX tournament after Sports IQ, if Monday is a bad night for you, don't get in the tournament....Geez...

Clark, we're bitching about the fact BT has done a poor job of organizing this tournament, the fact Smartest Bar was done on Wednesdays in a standard SIX time slot last year, the fact they split the network in the first place, and the fact they've got the final directly at odds with QB1 thanks to said split. If ONLY it were so simple a matter as a new, one-off promo that people could play or ignore as they saw fit. I expect Mezzanine wants to defend, and I know every flightless waterfowl-monikered player at Rembrandts wants to have another crack at them

I'm personally convinced somebody on the board thinks the NFL and ESPN will postpone Monday Night Football for an hour expressly to accommodate Smartest Bar, if only they're asked with a nice enough "Please?"

Anyway, the reason I came in to post: the corrected email just got sent out, and it seems Buzztime has their cats herded in an approximate line. Semis in May and July, finals in September, games on Mondays at 6P/9E

_________________
/°v°\ • Every time Linux boots, a penguin gets its wings
I'm a solipsistic conspiracy theorist. I'm sure I must be up to something, and I won't stop until I find out what
Why not downgrade Plutonium to a dwarf element?

Let's flip this around for a minute, let's assume there's going to be a big Playback tournament with thousands of dollars in prizes that requires at least 8 weeks of participation. This tournament will be held on Wednesdays at 2pm eastern/11am pacific. Good luck.

It's not that Brooke and Jim won't be able to participate, it's that BT had a very successful tournament last year, but this year they have chosen perhaps the worst possible day to hold it. It's simply awful planning and foresight.

BO

I received one email in the morning.

Later in the afternoon, I received a correction.

I'm not sure what was corrected.

Maybe when we get to the point where Monday Six conflicts with QB1, they'll have one of those screens that lets players choose which game they want to play. It still scares me to think about the time when they did that on a Tuesday. What our bar wants to know is: are they going to have PastTimes and Lexitopia on Mondays after Six?

Clark, I gather from your comment about Sports IQ that you're already out playing on Mondays, so clearly havng the tournament then is convenient for you. But please have a little empathy for the people who have built Wednesday night SIX into their schedule. I know people who work certain nights but not others as they want to be free to play a particular game. You think many employers are going to accommodate a worker who says, "No, take me off Mondays, but only for a month, then put me back on Mondays for a month, then take me off again for the month, and then if I do well, I'll have to take Mondays off for yet another month, after which I need to go back to working Mondays"?
A person we were recruiting to join our Wednesday SIX team won't be able to participate in the Monday tournament because he does something with his wife then. Back when my daughter was a minor, the joint custody agreement I had with my ex-husband had him taking her on the evenings I played NTN--which evenings were specified in the agreement.

And even if you can't empathize with people who don't have your flexibilty to play on Monday, do you really think this is a good move for NTN to maximize tournament participation? That superimposing a SIX game on a Sports IQ/QB1/major-sports-event-at-location scenario is going to yield more players than if NTN had left the tournament on Wednesdays and put everyone back on the old full-network schedule for the tournament months? Because unless you think that Monday participation will beat last year's tournament participation--and this year's current SIX Wednesday participation--then the Monday move is a stupid one for NTN, even if it's advantageous to you.

Brooke/AARDVK

The second email had the finals (correctly, presumably) listed as being in September instead of July as stated in the first email.

Of course, no asterisk or anything mentioning that the previous email had an error, making the correction obvious. So now people are just annoyed at having another email sent to them and have no idea what was being corrected in the first place.

And neither email communicated the most important piece of information it could have: SMARTEST BAR COMPETITION MOVES TO MONDAYS THIS MAY so that someone who looked at the subject line would be put on notice of the shift. I expect many people who play every Wednesday will see the message, think "Oh, that's starting up again," feel that they don't need the particulars at this stage, and delete the message without opening it.

Brooke/AARDVK

But without fail, another email detailing my badge triumphs, telling me I'm "a Badge-tastic trivia player!" and that "It's almost unfair how smart you are. Keep destroying the competition!" I can't decide if that is a joke, or if they legitimately think comments like that will make me feel good about myself and want to keep playing.

I believe there's two categories of trivia players: the ones BT wishes they had (who are all young, demographically and otherwise attractive, and who play the games but not seriously enough to ever be maddened or frustrated by anything BT does or fails to do)--and the ones they actually have who keep the system in place at their locations. So while they think they're patting the former group on the head and making those people feel smarter, they're just annoying the latter group who get our positive reinforcement in our game scores and rankings, not via badges themselves, and not via emails about badges.

Brooke/AARDVK

Young, attractive and carefree OR YOU; I think I'm with Buzztime.

I don't mind the badges. I can delete emails about them as easily as I delete other spam. I'm not going to obsess about what badges I do or don't have, nor does having a special game to get badges (as apparently will happen on Tuesdays) attract me. But if Buzztime thinks it will draw in more players, let them do it.
XT

Wow, an out-of-the-blue ad hominem attack. Do you really think this is a good way to advance a constructive discussion of the Smartest Bar competition? And while we're at it, to quote Taylor Swift, "Why you gotta be so mean?"

Brooke/AARDVK

I'll be there at 2PM for eight weeks, how many thousands are we talking about??

I agree with what everyone said IF the Monday SIX is keeping a Wednesday SIX tournament from happening.. However just to complain about a SIX tournament because one can't play in it seems childish to me...By the way a couple of years ago we got into a SIX tournament with 14 regions. We finished 2nd in the whole tournament, but also 2nd in our region, so we won nothing. I blame WONK and his crew, and I"m going to pour beer over his head if he comes to the next bash...

Obviously BT is not having the Smartest Bar competition on both Monday and Wednesday, so clearly Monday SIX is keeping a Wednesday SIX Smartest Bar competition from happening.

And let's reflect for a moment what "Smartest Bar" means when the tournament has been moved to a night when even one of last year's top teams can't compete. The case of Adam's Mill is set forth in the BT blog on the competition: between the fact that the location doesn't open on Monday holidays and that most of their players work Mondays because they keep Wednesdays clear, Adam's Mill says it will not be participating. So the competition is already diluted by loss of one of last year's Wild Card qualifiers to the finals.

Brooke/AARDVK

When I first discovered and started playing Buzztime in 1996 at Wings #4 (now Baumhower's) in Huntsville, AL, does anyone remember the first two rounds of what was then called "Trivial Pursuit" before it became known as SIX, being played before every premium game during the week and the last two rounds being played after the premium game? Except Wednesdays when all four rounds were played one after the other to comprise that night's premium game. (Decades then followed). This Smartest Bar lineup will be kind of retro for me in that way. Aaahhhh the good old days when the pin would drop as the Sprint sponsored network rankings were revealed as I played with the antenna on my brown playmaker.

Jim, cool the attacks. Last warning.

As predicted, the turnout for the Smartest Bar competition on Monday--even with the West zone getting to play non-Encore, real-time competition with the East--was lower (2776) than last week's Wednesday night SIX combined East/West player count (3443) and Thursday night SIX (3312). It was higher than the East zone "lead-in" Sports IQ (1859), suggesting people were coming out specifically for it, but it will be interesting to see if the Wednesday and Thursday night counts go down because of time/economic considerations or just because will already have had their "SIX" fix for the week.

What of course we will never know is what a second-year, popular tournament held under the same terms as last year (Wednesday night/full network) would have done. At the least, though, it would have been reasonable to expect that all of this year's high-ranked Wednesday SIX teams would have participated. However, when Don Denton's list of Top 20 year-to-date teams in various categories compared with last night's Smartest Bar participants, missing are: Hardtimes (No. 2 Total Score/No. 2 Place Points/No. 4 Average/No. 1 Top 100 Finishers), Buffalo Wild Wings Kent (No. 3 Total Score/No. 3 Place Points/No. 6 Average, No. 1 Top 100 Finishers), Lakewood Bar and Grill (No. 19 Average), Buffalo Wild Wings-Stillwater (No. 19 Place Points, No. 1 Top 100 Finishers, Mr. B's (No. 1 Top 100 Finishers),

Others showed up but with much lower-than-usual low scores, suggesting they weren't able to get their full team together: George Wellington (No. 7 Total Score/No. 9 Place Points/No. 12 Average), Hooters of McKinney (No. 13 Average), Buffalo Wild Wings/Austin (No. 15 Average), Park Bar and Grill (No. 17 Average), Pacific Beach Bar & Grill (No. 6 Place Points/No. 1 Top 100 Finishers/No. 14 Total Score), Rochester Mills (No. 9 Total Score/No. 12 Place Points/No. 1 Top 100 Finishers), Shenanigans (No. 11 Total Score, No. 14 Place Points/No. 1 Top 100 Finishers), Buffalo Wild Wings-Madison (No. 13 Top 100 Finishers), Buffalo Wild Wings-Savoy (No. 13 Top 100 Finishers), and Buffalo Wild Wings-Lancaster (No. 15 Total Score). [As explained below SRO-OT, No. 9 Total Score/No 10 Place Points/No. 20 Average/No. 1 Top 100 Finishers is omitted from this list because we were playing instead at Mike's Place, soon-to-be-renamed JB's Pub.]

Also missing or underperforming (along with various of the other teams listed above) is a number of last week's Wednesday SIX Top 20 finishers in the two zones, including No. 1 Coyote Maverick and Elsa's Cantina from the East zone, and PT's Pub--Las Vegas, Old Chicago-Colorado Springs, Gym Sports Bar, The Frosty Gator, Center Street, and Buffalo Wild Wings-Sierra Vista from the West.

Maybe the loss to competition of all these missing/underperforming teams is offset by new equally or even better-performing teams that can't or don't play on Wednesdays. But that's a lot of historically strong and dedicated SIX locations and current high-performers to go without in any competition that wants to crown the winner "the Smartest" of all.

Anyway, we were planning to sit this one out, and changed our minds at the last minute only because the new owner of JB's Pub (fka Mike's Place) has been so nice to us on Saturday nights that we thought the least we could do is give the location a little extra business (and hopefully some recognition), and maybe meet and get involved some of the regulars whom we didn't know because they don't play on Saturdays. That strategy seems to be working, as one of those regulars said he'd join us next week and get some of his other friends to come as well as we struggle to hang on to our #2 spot in the region (as ever looking up at Mezzanine).

Brooke/AARDVK