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 Post subject: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 12:12 am 
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1___Stewart's Brewing Co.__Bear, DE_______944,955
2___Sandbar and Grill__Newport News, VA___770,834
3_Giordano's Hall of Fame Sports Bar______769,786
4__Metz Liquors_Daytona Beach Shores, FL__760,394
5_Underdogs Sports Bar_Harrisburg, PA_____632,032
6_O'Brien's Sports Bar__Phoenix, AZ_______516,237
7_Capital City Center Hotel_Victoria, BC__411,784
8__Old Chicago Glendale__Glendale, AZ__324,900
9__Old Chicago Harmony__Fort Collins, CO__92,859

You sent us all to six school. :)


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 4:23 am 
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Thanks, zzupp! I didn't know that anyone else on these boards was involved. Tough Final Six this week, though. Most of us blew 6000 plus the bonus on the Einstein question.


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:22 pm 
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Danny K's used to have a decent Six team, until the players returned to their other lives. :o Now, they're basically a Tuesday team.

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 4:45 pm 
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Gogetem wrote:
Danny K's used to have a decent Six team, until the players returned to their other lives. :o Now, they're basically a Tuesday team.

Opposite happened for us. We never played Tuesdays as a team, but we used to have a couple dozen regular players Tuesdays when we'd compete against each other. The Split and the great dumb-down drove a bunch of them away and they haven't been back. Meanwhile, a team developed for a Wednesday SIX competition quite a few years back and we had so much fun, we've been teaming Wednesdays ever since. SIX is a good team game for us, as it touches on so many subjects, it's much more likely to allow everyone to contribute in some way.

Interestingly, one of my favorite things about teaming SIX is the matching round. While some questions fall obviously into one player's wheelhouse and we let him/her call the answers, we often devolve into a chaos of players talking over each other, including calling one match, eliminating another and discussing the probability of one over the other of two plausible matches, all at the same time. As we've been playing together so long, we've gotten pretty good at assimilating that chaos into correct answers. Having played with other teams, I have seen that they don't approach it the same way and I know that visitors have found it overwhelming, but it works for us.


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 8:02 pm 
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Akbar71 wrote:
While some questions fall obviously into one player's wheelhouse and we let him/her call the answers, we often devolve into a chaos of players talking over each other, including calling one match, eliminating another and discussing the probability of one over the other of two plausible matches, all at the same time. As we've been playing together so long, we've gotten pretty good at assimilating that chaos into correct answers.


Thank you, AKBAR. That's the single best description of team play I've ever seen.

ANON has described his vast and unwieldy Showdown group as a Chaocracy, and there's nothing in my game play history to suggest that he's mistaken.

My best successes in these quizzes have come in groups of 3-5 players, who may or may not know each other outside our common site, but know and appreciate each other as players.

When it comes down to it, is there an optimum number of players? On a full night of sleep? Properly caffeinated?


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:45 pm 
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Quote:
When it comes down to it, is there an optimum number of players?


42


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 10:09 am 
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42? I thought that was just the answer to everything.

Ok, it was a lame question. But I put it out there in the hope someone might improve it.


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 4:05 pm 
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GONE D wrote:
42? I thought that was just the answer to everything.


Yup. Although I remember hearing that back in the day the National Sports Grill in West Covina sometimes hit this number on some Tuesdays. Perhaps that is just a legend, though.

GONE D wrote:
Ok, it was a lame question. But I put it out there in the hope someone might improve it.


I think this is necessarily a relative number based on the preferences and personalities of the people involved. On the one hand, in general the more brains that are there, the better--you never know from what corner the deciding answer will come, and as long as the members of the team trust each other and are willing to be team players, the upper limit can be pretty high. On the other hand, as a team gets larger, the biggest downside I have noticed is difficulty with communication. If on top of sound of teammates conversing there is also other ambient noise, it can be hard from people on one end of the room to hear the people on the other end. This can be mitigated by "rebroadcasting" (e.g., various other people shouting "FRODO says 4!"), but it doesn't always work in time for everyone to get full points. Still, having more brains there generally more than makes up for the points we bleed due to communication issues.

Probably the most optimal number that I can remember for hearing and communication was when we were playing at the old Damon's in Stow back around 2007-2008. We could fit 12-15 around the big "U"-shaped bar, everyone could see and hear everyone else pretty well, and we were a nice, cohesive unit. Of course sometimes other people would be at the bar before we got there, which caused no small amount of annoyance from both parties.

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 5:58 pm 
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ANON, it is not a legend. In 2001, I visited the National Sports Bar and Grill as part of my vacation to California. I was a little late for Showdown as I had trouble finding the place, but they showed me where their group played and gave me a box and a card that said "3" - the number I had to press if I needed to guess at anything. During the entire game I was in 38th place locally, even though I finished with around 50K points. After the final question, I finished 38th of 53.

-- RWM

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Last edited by zog741 on Sun Feb 18, 2018 12:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 10:36 pm 
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Thanks, Zog! It’s good to hear a first-hand account. It sounds like even with twice as many people, they were better-organized than our chaocracy. How were answers communicated across the room?

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 11:04 pm 
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ANON wrote:
Thanks, Zog! It’s good to hear a first-hand account. It sounds like even with twice as many people, they were better-organized than our chaocracy. How were answers communicated across the room?

Probably via the multiple laptops used to reference answers. :o

And of course many of the players were multi-boxing, so it's not like there were 53 people playing.

In the glory days of QB1, Stadium Cafe would be running 50 boxes during the playoffs manned by perhaps 12-14 players. Some players were entrusted with 1, others entrusted with 8. Since all that mattered was the top 5 boxes, we had manufacturing high scores down to a science.


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 12:03 am 
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ANON wrote:
Thanks, Zog! It’s good to hear a first-hand account. It sounds like even with twice as many people, they were better-organized than our chaocracy. How were answers communicated across the room?

Someone would just yell out the answer. There was no loud music, so everyone would hear the answer pretty well. I don't recall any question where someone didn't know the answer, including the Final Question.

-- RWM

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 12:18 am 
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-BO- wrote:
...
Probably via the multiple laptops used to reference answers. :o

And of course many of the players were multi-boxing, so it's not like there were 53 people playing.

In the glory days of QB1, Stadium Cafe would be running 50 boxes during the playoffs manned by perhaps 12-14 players. Some players were entrusted with 1, others entrusted with 8. Since all that mattered was the top 5 boxes, we had manufacturing high scores down to a science.

I didn't see any laptops when I was there. There may have been multiboxers; I did not really notice. I think National Sports Bar's success was due to (1) the quality of the players there, and (2) the sheer number of players. Handing out cards with the number to guess with is a tactic that would not have worked in any other place I have ever been to.

-- RWM

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 9:26 am 
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akbar describes pretty well how things go for us at west park station for thursday six. we usually have about 4 to 8 with 6 or 7 being the most common numbers. you never can be completely sure where an answer will come from. while some of us have some very strong categories, we have some guys very good at sports and movies for instance. but when the moroccan geography question comes up to match the city with the part of the country and one of your players rattles them off and then says my daughter lived in morocco for awhile and we went to visit her we learned some of the geography.

you don't know who is going to have the life experience to answer a question nobody else knows. when we have a good night it is because everybody at the table contributes something. that makes it fun for all of us.


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 8:53 pm 
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At Walsh's we have 2-4 players playing two boards each.

We have a secret proprietary algorithm based on the intersection of three digit prime and Fibonacci numbers.

Or we drink a lot and hope not to typo too much.

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 10:38 pm 
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Chicago Sam's has three or four core players who play two boxes, plus several frequent players who generally play one box each. We only have 10 boxes total; I wish we had more, but at least all of the boxes work (for now). Our core players cover five of the Six categories; I wish we had a strong Sciences player.

-- RWM

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 9:46 am 
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zog741 wrote:
I didn't see any laptops when I was there. There may have been multiboxers; I did not really notice. I think National Sports Bar's success was due to (1) the quality of the players there, and (2) the sheer number of players. Handing out cards with the number to guess with is a tactic that would not have worked in any other place I have ever been to.

-- RWM


I think it is pretty well established that they had silicon help in those years (in fact, I thought I remember reading that at first they actually brought in s console computer with an Encarta Encyclopedia). Some of the long threads on BadBart back then discuss this ad nauseum.

This is not to say that their organization was not very important to their success, nor the fact they had a lot of very smart people there, too.

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 11:42 am 
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ANON wrote:
zog741 wrote:
I didn't see any laptops when I was there. There may have been multiboxers; I did not really notice. I think National Sports Bar's success was due to (1) the quality of the players there, and (2) the sheer number of players. Handing out cards with the number to guess with is a tactic that would not have worked in any other place I have ever been to.

-- RWM


I think it is pretty well established that they had silicon help in those years (in fact, I thought I remember reading that at first they actually brought in s console computer with an Encarta Encyclopedia). Some of the long threads on BadBart back then discuss this ad nauseum.

This is not to say that their organization was not very important to their success, nor the fact they had a lot of very smart people there, too.


Something that I wasn't aware of. :? And something that, 16+ years after the fact, isn't going to cost me any sleep. I was only there that one time, and they impressed me as being bright enough that they could easily have had a top Showdown team by wetware alone.

-- RWM

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Tue Feb 20, 2018 11:51 am 
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zog741 wrote:

Something that I wasn't aware of. :? And something that, 16+ years after the fact, isn't going to cost me any sleep. I was only there that one time, and they impressed me as being bright enough that they could easily have had a top Showdown team by wetware alone.

-- RWM


From what I’ve heard, I agree.

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 9:03 pm 
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Lord Douchebag (DSHBAG), way too well-connected to embroider fanciful anecdotes, happening to be near West Covina in the late '90's, and wanting to learn what the fuss was about, dropped into The National half an hour before Showdown was scheduled. He was informed that he would not be provided a box, but he was offered this consolation: "You could join the research team." The pecking order apparently didn't make allowance for property lawyers not licensed in California.

Since this conversation has morphed, on what is a Six thread, to Showdown, I might grow terse.

Personally? I don't care how I score, so long as I answer every question I can intuit correctly. I encourage other players to join me.

I was kinda hoping that someone would show up on this thread to say, yes, I'm happiest when I'm playing in a small group, the conversation is general, and we all trust each other. And I wasn't disappointed.

Merkin wrote:
At Walsh's we have 2-4 players playing two boards each.


zog741 wrote:
Chicago Sam's has three or four core players who play two boxes, plus several frequent players who generally play one box each. We only have 10 boxes total; I wish we had more, but at least all of the boxes work (for now). Our core players cover five of the Six categories; I wish we had a strong Sciences player.


In response to ZOG and MERKIN:

You've nailed it.

Best results occur where everyone is comfortable with everyone else. ANON and BLZBUB deserve enormous credit for fostering collegial groups in Showdown.
But I'm an introvert, and it's really difficult to mediate groups where the conversation isn't generally shared. The Fellowship and Ragged Rascals deserve all the credit in the world.

The best groups start out small, with a couple of not very good players, players who enjoy each other's company.

I was good as a tournament bridge player, but it ate me up. I was good as a pool player, but the money was insignificant. I ended up playing Buzztime, because the conversation was so much better.


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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 9:46 am 
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GONE D wrote:

The best groups start out small. . .


I think you are right here, and may also point to how this can be scalable. The Fellowship started out in 2004 with a core group of 5-7 players most weeks. It actually about three years to push that number up to a dozen or so.

Even now, though, although we play as a team, there are usually several subsets which carry on their own conversations at their own tables. LOU and RUNES always sit together at a 2-person table, LEMPKE, DAL, and AUDREY have their own table, RANDM and WIGINS have theirs, TED and JBP have theirs, RABBIT and MEH have theirs, RAMBUC, PSTRJU, OTAKU GREEN and usually DROLL have theirs, ELROND, FRODO, and SPOCK often have theirs, etc. There is also a main center table that usually hosts most of the rest, and there are some "floaters" who will sit wherever depending on space availability and their inclinations on a given evening. It is for this reason that the "Battle Stations!" call and subsequent whooping developed. Some of our visitors have shaken their heads and chuckled at it, our servers just shake their heads at it, and WRATH in particular doesn't like it at all, but it serves a quite utilitarian purpose: On most evenings there are 5-6 different conversations going on between rounds, and only room-wide warning can get us all back on task.

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 2:59 pm 
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We should play some bridge, GONE D. I suspect we could win some tournaments before the inevitable murder/suicide.

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 3:46 pm 
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Merkin wrote:
We should play some bridge, GONE D. I suspect we could win some tournaments before the inevitable murder/suicide.


Count me in! Which bidding convention do you use? If it's Short Club, I'm going to need a short refresher to get back up to speed.

We just need a fourth now...

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 4:37 pm 
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At my father's funeral, I related a story of how, the last time he and I played together, my father responded to my short club opening with six clubs.

As skill and luck would have it, I made all 13 tricks. On hearing the story, my cousin, in the appropriate manner for the occasion, remarked "So you underbid."

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 Post subject: Re: Congrats to Stewart's
PostPosted: Fri Feb 23, 2018 8:54 pm 
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All bridge players are pessimists, but few are as critical as the MERKIN family.

The most neutral bids relay the least information to the opposing pair.


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