I'm going to try and make this a regular feature of this blog - a summation of how I've gotten on in my weekly quizzes. I'll also try and make another post about other things at some point during the week.
To establish some guidelines, it is not my intention to ever name any individual who has not given my their explicit permission to do so. I will name venues and locations. This blog is public and may be linked anywhere by anyone. I'm a straight talker but you will not see me unfairly criticise anyone or anything, especially publicly. The contents of this blog may overlap somewhat with my Twitter account, which is public, though probably not my Facebook account, which is not. Anyone who asks may have my Twitter details, but not those for Facebook unless I know you. Right, enough disclaimers.
Monday's Quiz
Monday at the Kings Arms in Dalbeattie was perhaps the last time for a while I'll be teaming up with Big Tam's Appreciation Society, a team of two couples whom I often join if one couple is absent. This has been the case for the last few months, so I've had consistent teammates. It's been fun, and it will be interesting to see if I will routinely join other teams, or if I'll go back to mostly doing the quiz alone going forwards.
We hoped for a good night to end the run, but I never quite felt settled in the quiz. We were scoring relatively well by neutral standards, but that can mean either "superhumanly" or "disastrously" depending on the quiz; dynamics of different quizzes is a subject for a future blog post. In this case, every point counts, as it's usually a high scoring night. Two things specifically determine the winners here: not getting the easy questions (that everyone will usually get) wrong, and being the only team to get the fiendishly difficult ones right.
The former is why we were unsettled; the first question, I rushed into and the other didn't pick up on my having chosen an excessively obvious answer, and we got 7 on Geography. Two 10/10 scores (including on the critical last round) didn't change that we incorrectly doubted our own accurate instincts twice more. Ultimately we finished 2nd with 50/60, surprising ourselves, but I stick by not having truly settled from the start. The fact that we'd have won without those mistakes justifies this feeling, I think. Such is the nature of the hobby, even with a score I'd kill for at certain other quizzes.
Result: 50/60 (83.3%), 2nd place
Tuesday's Quiz
The Ship Inn in Dumfries is a quiz we of the team with no fixed name (there's a prize here for the best team name, so we change it every week in an attempt to win it) have been relatively dominant of late. It has, however, become a little more difficult recently, which has lowered the scores all around. It also saw us end a "5 wins in 6 quizzes, the other being a 3rd place finish" run with a crash to barely off the bottom for two weeks, before scraping a win from nowhere last week. Could we repeat last week's effort? No, we could not. Admittedly we weren't helped by two of our number being absent, putting us on the back foot from the start. Fair play to our rivals, the Newbridge Caravan Park; they were there in force, so we knew we were up against it.
The first 3 rounds at this one are my usual hunting grounds, as two of the other three are pictures and music - my usual car crashes. Bad weaknesses for a mercenary quizzer to have, but that's a matter for another post. Round 1 is always general knowledge, and a score of 0 last week by one team didn't stop them finishing 3rd, so it evidences nothing, necessarily. Still, we hoped for better than 4.5. Yet this was infinitely better than Scottish Rivers and Sport, which gave us just two between them - both on the former. We weren't the only strugglers, however, as just two teams had double figure scores at this stage, sitting as they were on 15 and 10.
See what I mean about differing dynamics? The night before, I lamented the loss of 3 points, whereas this night we could barely string that together.
The picture round was fine, the chosen specialist subject (picked by the last placed team the week before) gave us a respectable 5 on the city of Nagasaki, and the played music was a struggle despite my team being good on the subject. There's more points on offer for pictures and music, so lost ground earlier can at least be made up, and that kept us well clear of the bottom. Ultimately we finished with 37.5, in the middle of the pack, but far behind the NCP who won comfortably. Well done to them, though we'll be back with a vengeance this coming week!
Result: 37.5/85 (44.12%), 5th place.
Wednesday's Quiz
Wednesday at the Granary, Dumfries is a quiz I've never won in over 2 years of trying. There's no limit on the team size, and I'm usually only doing it with one other person. We call ourselves "Two's Company", a shortening of our "Three's Company" when we're three people, a name which stuck after we used it and won a substantial sum on the Killer Question. The first subject being the dreaded sport (a notoriously difficult subject at this quiz) didn't bode well for our quest for a first win, but we scored 6, and could have had 9! Amazingly, three 50-50s went the wrong way in that round. Before we started, we'd have definitely taken 6, but we wanted more after the fact.
Fortunately a Star Wars round gave us the full 15 on offer; film is one of my better subjects, so this was appreciated. Back down to earth we came with a round on pubs; this time three guesses came off, though they were the only answers we got at all. Another film round gave us 8, and Disney a respectable 6 to finish. We ended up 3rd, a great result all things considered. We could have gotten 2nd, but first was well beyond us - with a team of 12 taking the win, there's no shame in that. Next week, perhaps... (as I've said every week for over 100!)
Result: 38/55 (69.09%), 3rd place.
Thursday's Quiz
My week ended with its longest journey, to the Anchor in Kippford. The Motley Crew's lineup changes a fair bit, and this time I went knowing most of the regulars wouldn't be there. Two were though, as was the father of one, so we still had a strong-looking lineup. The subjects didn't look too inviting at first, with two TV rounds, music and food & drink. The others were confident on the last of these for our joker, and I wasn't confident enough on any to make an impassioned case for it. I did however think I might have been good on the TV theme tunes round; hindsight is a wonderful thing, it turns out.
That I was taking a note of the scores already indicated to the father in my team that I was a serious quizzer and I proved it early with several good general knowledge answers. As feared, the first TV round was hopeless for me, but the theme tunes one gave us a full 8/8. Before it started, I told the team two questions that I was sure would come up in one form or another - "I'll Be There For You" by the Rembrandts as the theme to Friends, and "Approaching Menace" as the theme to Mastermind. Both are classic questions and both featured. I should have pushed for it as the joker!
We struggled after that, with our joker sadly being our worst round of the night, with just 3.5. We ended up finishing third in a close contest - and as with Monday, a couple of untrusted guesses we should have made would have seen us comfortably win. Twice in a week? I must learn from that. Not bad overall though, and the team retains its record of winning money in each quiz so far this season.
Result: 36/56 (64.29%), 3rd place
Overall, despite the high placings, it's been an average week, disappointing in some ways. I could have started and ended the week with a win, and we're much better than our score in the Tuesday quiz. On Wednesday, we could have done little more and I've no complaints about another great quiz there. I'm doing five quizzes this week, and I'm hoping for at least one win between them. We shall see!
Overall Result: 161.5/256 (65.21%)
Best answer given:
There's a few candidates for this one, but I'm going with knowing that Approaching Menace is the Mastermind theme, especially since I correctly predicted the question before the round started. It was a guess, but picking "Britain's smallest pub" as the significance of The Nutshell pub, based on the name, was a good one too.
Worst answer given:
The first question of the week, of all things: Brussels as the location of the EU parliament. It's Strasbourg, and I knew full well both cities are well associated with EU, but stupidly went for the obvious former instead of remembering that it's the EU Commission based there. Unfortunately, as noted above, my teammates failed to spot the error and went with it. To be clear, I don't hold them accountable for that one. I'm trying to improve my answering speed, but there was no excuse for me not thinking about that for a moment longer.
Most interesting new fact learned:
The one that sticks in my head is the axilla as the scientific name for the armpit, even though that's not particularly interesting to me. Potentially useful, however, so I'll stick with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment