Did anyone who reads General Buzztime participate tonight (April 24) in what might be the lowest scoring Showdown in living memory? Four of our six qualifying playmakers at the Tailgate flatlined on Final Showdown, and we finished 21st. I don't believe there was a single site above 45K, and fewer than ten sites above 30K - confirmation or correction to appear on Buzztime's website in only a few hours.
Of late there has been a lot of unhappiness in my corner of the Buzztime community. From the several stories at my fingertips, I'll relate only one.
Among the several BWW corporate stores in Minnesota to have relinquished Buzztime, BWW-Roseville has been on my radar the last couple years. The Tuesday group that played there has had, until very recently, much better results playing Showdown than Brainbuster. My hunch was that they were googling their Showdown answers, but I never brought the subject up, neither to you folks on New Scaratings nor to any other public forum. Nor did I take a Tuesday off from the Tailgate to peer in on the Roseville players.
If they were googling answers, that would not have marked the end of their folly. Last Tuesday, a week ago, they appeared en masse at the Tailgate, a few minutes in advent of Brainbuster. The 4th and 5th players in my group were cut out, and we eventually hosted eight. I went to their table to remonstrate, and thought to flatter them by identifying their former site. At first they denied being Roseville players, and then asked which site in Roseville I might be alluding to (there are only two). My only purpose in approaching them was to point out that the Tailgate, which hosts only ten playmakers, and enjoys so little traffic that the saloon couldn't possibly recoup its investment in additional playmakers, could not accommodate two competing groups. I begged them to seek elsewhere.
The Tailgate isn't A-list, but Don Denton has us ranked somewhere between 4th and 9th, depending on the metric. I've been playing with BETH for more than ten years, the last seven at the Tailgate. Neither longevity nor excellence of play entitles me to droit de signeur, and playmakers are dished out, first come, first served. But the advent of the Roseville players was genuinely startling. In the past they've cracked the top ten in Showdown (without any of them carrying a 10K average in Brainbuster), but they must surely have been aware that there was an established group at the Tailgate. You always observe the teams who have finished ahead of you, especially local competition. In 2017, we would have finished ahead of Roseville no fewer than 46 tries out of 52.
If our circumstances had been reversed - if the Tailgate had quit presenting Buzztime, and BWW-Roseville had retained it, and any of us favored Roseville as a replacement site - I would have gone there alone, taken a single tablet, asked whether I could join their group; and if accepted, sounded them out regarding the availability of tablets amd the reliability of the equipment. If everything was a go, I would ask whether they would consider merging our two groups together.
Although the Roseville players might easily have verified that the Tailgate hosts only ten playmakers and typically ten or more players on Tuesday evenings, the possibility that they were intruding seems not to have registered with them. So when I approached them, I was self-deprecating, but I was blunt.
A few minutes later, the manager at the Tailgate came to our table and asked, "Did any of you accost the other table of trivia players?"
So I had.
"Don't do that. They have as much right to be here as you. If you have any problem with any of my customers, do not approach them. Talk to me, and I'll resolve the problem."
"I'll take your feelings into consideration," I replied.
Generally speaking, I'm reluctant to accept advice in questions of etiquette from women who are half my age, and whose manners have been refined in so delicate a workplace as a sports bar. There may be a reader of this post who believes the preceding sentence is sexist. Please take it on faith that no man would express himself to me with such effrontery. Miranda, much to her credit, has sized me up, and realizes that while I'm not her type, flattery in kind will get her nowhere. But more to the point, she knows nothing about Buzztime, and still less about the courtesy among its players.
"I don't believe you're listening to me. Do you understand me, Sir?"
"This place cannot accommodate two large groups simultaneously," I replied, as calmly as I could while bitching up Question 13 in Brainbuster. "You can't get your money out by acquiring more of these blue boxes. Let's just stick to the facts."
"YOU'RE NOT LISTENING TO ME. IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM, SEE ME. I WILL TAKE CARE OF IT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, SIR?"
I had grown weary of repeating myself. The cream of the joke, from my perspective, is that BETH took Miranda's side of the argument.
"Really? You went over there and spoke to them?" she asked. "You had no business doing that!"
Well, shame on me. I thought the most polite and worthwhile Buzztime players were collaborative.
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