New Scaratings

Okay, I realize Buzztime ought to be ramping up the difficulty for Smartest Bar, since it's a rather important promotion (allegedly), but there's a boundary between reasonably difficult and obtusely arcane. A third rail which I (and several of R. van Rijn's crew) believe BT wantonly pissed on tonight

For those who missed it: "Match the year to Olympian Meb Keflezighi's place of finish in the New York City Marathon"

Year to NYCM winner, I would be fine with. Fiendishly difficult, to be sure, but historical winners of any major, established race counts as fair game in my books (there was a Nobel laureate to year match, incidentally). But to ask about one guy's accomplishments in the race, even though he was the first American in 27 years to win? Far too much WAG factor IMO considering the available prizes, and how SIX is built with those round bonuses. Cripes, why not ask us to match a calendar date to the location of the Tim Hortons washroom Terry Fox took a leak in during his Marathon of Hope?


That vented, the rest of the game was not too bad. I'm still hurting a little over the borrowing of Einstein from Immortal Words and calling it Science for the final round, but it was (I grudgingly admit) a familiar enough quote to eventually find the right answer. I'm over it

No bar managed 60k in the rankings we saw, so obviously the struggles weren't confined to that one damnable question. I didn't catch actual scores for the leading sites, so I dunno if Mezzanine hung on or what, but there's been some impressive play this month from many of the sites that qualified

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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?

Yeah that question was completely ridiculous. Strategically speaking, at the Mezz we were happy to see it, as it probably ruined the bonus for basically every team (we had already lost ours).

Regarding the final standings, we saw ourselves 3rd with a 59K and change with no one breaking 60. Assuming no one was late reporting (i.e. Clancy's or BWW Arlington VA) I think we held on.

Tough final game.

That question was just nasty! One of our most astute sports minds attempted a stab at the answers, and I followed suit with his guesses and was happy to get two out of the four.

At Plantsville, our biggest problem was the boxes. I tried to play two boxes, but with the batteries dying on me, wound up playing five. My RWM box missed two matching round questions due to a dead battery but somehow finished 5th in the bar. Other people in our group had similar problems, so this damaged our bar ranking, although this week we were still 12th.

My biggest complaint about the September Smartest Bar was that the questions in general were too easy for a championship-level tournament, but adding a ridiculously hard question that only one with highly specialized sports knowledge could get did not help matters. The random distractors also did not sit very well, as it adds too much of a chance factor into the competition.

In spite of these gripes, we all look forward to the next Smartest Bar.

-- 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...."

this was a good game to finish the tournament with. the matching round gave us fits as west park station. congratulations to the mezz for another fine tournament. you guys are the best. also, nice work to bww crystal city and to clancy's. there is no shame in finishing behind you three teams.

I refer to crap questions like this as, "even the guy who did it doesn't know the answer." Actually, I would put money that he would miss the question.

We had a terrible tourney, what annoyed me the most was, for the most part there were very few separator questions. We had other issues amongst the team, but that is what it is. I won't be playing Buzztime on Monday, as the new game sounds like shit. I may stop playing on Fridays as well, it is very boring playing against 5s of people anytime I could play.

I still hate you nitwits at Buzztime.

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Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.