New Scaratings

Congratulations to Pengwn and Rembrandt's for their stellar showing last night and #1 individual and bar rankings.

The Tallahassee Traveling Trivia Team is at Varsity Grill for the month of May. After an unexpected early exit from the Smartest Hooter's in America Tournament last Thursday and a less than auspicious number 10 ranking in the EST4 region after last Monday we're ready to recapture our teamwork and lightning in a bottle in addition to the Icehouse, etc.

Two or three questions in the matching (Macthing) Round tripped us up with flip-flops and the Marathon Round went smoothly except for one question I don't recall at the moment. We're averaging 36K going into the final Round and hoping for a 60K+ bar score to pull us up. Buzztime takes it easy on us it seems except for the last question. Richard (TPG), Kim (Scots), and I quickly decide "Calico Joe", a John Grisham book, is about a baseball player and we're correct but the whole team doesn't agree. We go from #66 last week to #15 last night and from #10 to #3 in the EST4 region.

See everyone again next Monday.

we were literally ~1k off max having only bled on two marathon Qs but struck out not only on grisham but on myanmar as well . went from looking for 64k+ back down to 56.8

gavv

Thanks, Hunk, but I'm reasonably sure I was merely the best button-pusher at the table. SIGGY and JONES were our stars last night, especially on anything to do with literature (she manages a bookstore, he works for the public library). SIGGY's score was only 20 points off perfect, just some hairline hesitation. I was all over matching the Weddell Sea to Antarctica, though!

Given that next Monday is Victoria Day, and several people (including myself) will be away, we'll probably let someone else win next week

_________________
/°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?

Grats on the win. We were perfect at the Mezz until the Great Slave Lake question. It threw us because we were expecting NW Territories to be the answer (to my knowledge that is the province/territory in which it is located). Seems like a screwy question given that but whatever. We only got three boxes with full points on that q. Slight bleed on Gilbert in the final science question in Marathon, but the Canada question was the killer for us. May or may not have been the difference cause y'all had a helluva score. The rest of the game was pretty easy from our standpoint.

I wouldn't blame you or any other Mezz'er one bit for being peeved about that question, slotek. Buzztime had the wrong Slave Lake, plain and simple

I tend to skim the questions for key words, and didn't read much beyond Province and Slave Lake initially. Given that today is the anniversary of Slave Lake's decimation by forest fire, it's a very strong association for any Albertan. It wasn't until I had plugged my answer for the next question that the presence of "Great" in the wording dawned on me

However, I have no sympathy for anybody that failed to interpret the "Calgary" clue to save their bonus

_________________
/°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?

We were able to get most of the points on the Great Slave Lake question. I knew that Lesser Slave Lake was in Alberta, so we went there, but this was clearly a major BT error.

Later, I blew the Myanmar/Burma question in what was a major Zog error. The worst part about that was the I jumped to the remaining plausible answer in what should have been enough time to get some points, but took a zero on both boxes. I might have just pressed the wrong button or didn't press the right one firmly enough. The rest of our team (we played at Sliders in Plantsville, CT) scored some points on that question.

-- RWM

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"...It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED...."

Monday is the one night that a bunch of us cannot play:( Our site is closed Monday Memorial day so already one night cancelled right off, so I e-mailed Buzztime about why they put this tourney on Monday night from last years Wed. night! This was their reply:(

Dear Rich,



Thank you for being a Buzztime fan. We appreciate your support!



We received your email regarding the World’s Smartest Bar Competition, and I’d be happy to help you with this request. Unfortunately this cannot be changed. What you can do is play at a different location, or you can be sure to play all the other days because we only take 3 out of the 4 location scores. Sorry for the inconvenience, but these are the two ways around it.



Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help!



Make it a Buzztime Night!



Joe

Buzztime Customer Service

We were disappointed as we wanted to try and win another trophy

How would playing at a different location help?

Typical Buzztme bullshit.

I'm waiting for the dumbest bar competition.

_________________
Middle age is when a broad mind and a slim waist exchange places.

I guess the person answering your email just didn't read the part about people on your team being unavailable to play on Mondays. And even the second part re: location assumes facts not in evidence: that there is an alternate location: 1) reasonably near the original; 2) open on Memorial Day; 3) actually willing to put the game on a screen rather than tell you they'd just cancelled the system (as Hooter's Northwest did to us when we tried to play in that Six championship), and 4) in possession of sufficient working boxes able to keep a charge for an hour to accommodate a team.

BT doesn't understand that in the real world, people can't change their schedules because BT has to scramble to fix the problems it caused for itself by splitting the network over everyone's objection, and that not everyone has the luxury of choosing among or even between locations.

Brooke/AARDVK

There is no shortage of BT locations near Adams Mill. There is a BWW that opened a few weeks ago that probably isn't a mile away, and a Boston's Gourmet Pizza that's at most two miles away. But if their work schedules don't allow them to play trivia on Monday night's, then that settles it for them. Obviously this is a greup of dedicated trivia players who would compete if it were at all possible.

BT's means of appeasing the Mill seems to be to not have the Traveling Trophy (Showdown) competition in New England this spring (so the Mill retains it by default.) I sent an e-mail asking about that and got a response eerily similar to the one richte09 received regarding Smartest Bar:



So much for customer "service".

-- RWM

_________________
"...It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED...."

The whole point is if you have a team that plays at a dedicated site, you want to play at that site. our team is associated with the Adams Mill, so it only makes sense we want to play there. Plus it is a nice friendly site that doesn't deplete our wallets, (I am not a fan of Bostons, as their quality of trivia boxes has gone significantly gone down hill, and I was never a fan of the loud and crazy BWW), so to make a comment that we try an alternate site for Smartest bar was ridiculous. Then to comment about skipping a night as they drop the lowest score was also ridiculous. The point was moving the damn game to Monday nights, when there are established Wed. & Thurs. night SIX nights, the one night I work late every week. Just crazy And now we are not in travelling trophy, the whole New England region I do not know how this could happen I know the teams are chosen by Reps from the company, I always wondered why we were never in it, and thats how it was explained to me, but I requested our team to be entered and they put us in. Every site should always be able to retain their trophy, but buzztime should mix it up more with new sites having the opportunity to challenge us, but put sites in that actually play on Tues. nights such as AOH!! Buzztime you are driving me CRAZY

Here, Here very well said

NTN/BT Bay 11

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Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

Very good!

_________________
Middle age is when a broad mind and a slim waist exchange places.

We've had the same craziness in Houston. For a while, there was a "West Houston" tournament that always had SRO OT plus any other location NTN/BT deemed to be "west" (very odd, because the Concert Pub was never in it, although it is southwest of SRO OT). So we were able to keep winning because only two locations at most seemed to be aware of the tournament (or at least having enough players to put up a team score). Then NTN/BT changed its mind and SRO OT didn't get included, so we didn't get to defend the trophy.

In the upcoming tournament, both SRO OT and the Concert Pub are on the list, so we'll get another shot at getting the trophy back. But although it's labeled the "Houston Cup," looks like only about a quarter of the locations that could be fairly called Houston area are included; for example, Mezzanine is not. Also although the included locations extend fairly far north of Houston to take in cities such as Humble, they completely excluded anything south, including all locations in and around Webster (and no, there's no separate tournament for that area).

If selecting only certain locations to be participants was accompanied by targeted efforts to get make those locations aware of the tournament and to help them get participants, I can see why limiting the number might make sense. And I can certainly see why not all leagues need to play every single time. But when a league does play, why should NTN/BT care how many locations vie for the trophy? (Seems it would be the more the merrier.) Or if the concept is to exclude the "big dogs" to give other locations a shot (a strategy that if employed to date seems to have backfired, because basically no one was playing in the West Houston league once SRO OT got omitted), then something other than "random" selections should be made.

Brooke/AARDVK