Another week has passed, and another 5 quizzes! How have they gone? Well, it's been tough, that's the one-word summation. Of course, I like a challenge, and it's not my place to decide what sort of challenge the QM's should set. So let's look at the week in more detail. I said I wanted a win this week; did I get it?
Monday's Quiz
The King's Arms has two QM's, whom I'll abbreviate as A & K. They have different styles of quizzes, and usually alternate week by week. Last week, it was A's quiz, three of the next four, including last week, this week's and the Christmas quiz on the 19th, will be by K.
As it happened, I was back with Big Tam's, as their other couple had not yet returned. That was a good start. We resolved, after last week's problems, to play instinctively, and only go against a first answer with extremely good reason. On general knowledge, this saved us from talking ourselves out of two correct guesses - that would be the right strategy, then! 16/20 felt comfortable, and eased us into the quiz.
Much of the quiz went similarly, and while we got things wrong, it wasn't stupid mistakes we should have gotten right. I overcomplicated my thinking on a food & drink question, but compared with my errors last week, I wasn't beating myself up over it. Particularly impressive was a film round where we had 20 of them, and a list of colours missing from the titles. We worked through it methodically, taking out the ones we knew for a certainty, then the ones we knew after certain others had been eliminated, and finally worked out the remaining ones. There were a couple we weren't certain on, but even those we could be reasonably confident, and we got the full 20.
I'll admit to an ethical question here, as I saw the subject on the QM's list as he was taking the entry fees. It wasn't explicitly announced (as they are sometimes), but knowing it meant we could think of all the films we could with colours in the titles. I could understand people objecting somewhat to this, though of course I utterly abhor cheating and would never do that. There was no material gain from it, merely a subject name (and even that wasn't a guarantee of anything), plus others could have seen the clipboard the QM was making no effort to conceal. But I feel obliged to mention it all the same.
After 5 rounds we were sitting on 71/80 and sensed a tight finish, with the final played music round deciding all. Unfortunately, that wasn't done this time. In it's place, a Family Fortunes round, whereby we had 15 questions and needed to work out the top answer (who the 100 people were...not a clue). A potential 45 points on offer, descending 3-2-1 for the top, 2nd and 3rd answers. I've got to be honest here, I'm not a fan of such rounds in a quiz. To me - and I emphasise that it is my personal preference - it's a party game, and could have affected the outcome of a tight quiz. The 45 points on offer against the 80 from the previous rounds was also a factor.
As it happened, we got 36, and won. Nonetheless, despite the fact we'd have likely not won after the music, it seemed a better way to end the night. I can't say why it wasn't done though, perhaps the player wasn't working, and in any case, I say again that I'm talking about my preferences and not judging the quiz or its master. We got our win anyway and I'm certainly not arguing with that.
Result: 109/125 (87.2%), 1st place
Tuesday's Quiz
After Monday, I was feeling confident here, though less so when I realised that once again, we'd be depleted in numbers at the Ship Inn. One couple was absent last week, and it was the other couple this week. Their strengths differ, but overall they're all four very good so materially I didn't feel the team was weaker than last week - though we do benefit from our combined knowledge as a five-man team. The first round assured that the quiz was going to be...interesting, at least.
By "interesting", I mean ridiculously hard. Of the 8 teams present, capable of scoring 80 points between us on general knowledge, only 2 of us actually scored at all - and at that, it was 3 in total. Two came from me, and I'd learn the next day that the other team got their point the same way I did, from a question previously asked at the Granary.
We were certain that our "lead" would not survive, especially as the ever-disastrous sport only gave us 1 (better than our 0 last week!) and the usually-reliable TV & Film only yielded 2. Yet on 5/30 after 3 rounds, we were amazingly still in the lead, with the 8 teams sitting on a combined total of 19/240. One team was still on 0.
Honestly, this was the hardest quiz I've ever done. It was very fun, especially as every team suffered together (0 on general knowledge is honestly something I never expected to see from any of the teams present), though I'm hoping the difficulty will be lowered slightly next time!
Fortunately, things improved slightly after the first half, and we were in the lead until the last round, though the difference in knowledge of 70s music between us and our rival the Newbridge Caravan Park decided the result in the end. They got 19.5/20, we got 6 - enough said. We still came third though, and a podium finish at that quiz is respectable. Especially after last week's catastrophe. Just need to see what this week brings us!
Result: 29.5/63 (46.83%), 3rd place
Wednesday's Quiz
If one thing was assured, going into the Granary's quiz, it was that things could not possibly by any harder than the night before. Okay so we'd never won, but we did very well last week and sooner or later were surely going to get our hands on the winner's prize, right? Well, I have a degree in risk management, and should therefore know better than most that it can always, always get worse.
As per usual I was only with one other person, though she's generally pretty strong on music. 90's music looked hopeless for me then, especially as a double-round, and unfortunately it proved so for my friend as well. This was thanks in part to the emphasis on the early years of the decade, which we both freely admit to being before we got into music properly - there was nothing at all from 98 or 99. We got 3/20, which was exactly where I was at this time the night before. Surely not again?
Yes, again. I mentioned last night that TV/Film is a strong point, but the TV side is less so. My two worst answers of the week came in this round (see below for details), but it's perhaps understandable that I was rattled after a night and a half of such high difficulty since the end of round 5 on Monday. 4 just wasn't good enough, and we knew we had a lot of work to do even to achieve our own minimum target of 50%.
The last round was another doubler, and it was, again, on music. The quiz is doing a Christmas round ever week until the day itself, which shocked most of us there, myself included, as it was only November at this point. I'm not sure why music was chosen for it this week, as it unbalanced the quiz in favour of that subject, I feel. Again, that's a point of preference, and I do admit to having benefited from biases in favour of film rounds before, but 40/50 questions on one subject felt a little much.
We came up with some decent answers from somewhere to get 8 of them, which nonetheless left us with my 2nd worst performance in a quiz of the entire year, my absolute worst with a team, and we only narrowly avoided the bottom spot. Horrendous. The only saving grace was 3 teams of the 12 finishing below us, and since I pay little heed to other teams except in terms of whether we've won or not, it's not really relevant to anything.
Result: 15/50 (30%), 9th place
Thursday's Quiz
Expectations at the Anchor were understandably lower than my sheer desire to get past the last two disasters, and they weren't helped by the knowledge that a birthday in the team removed at least two of our number. As with last week, we were severely depleted, and again only four of us attended, though a different four (save myself) from last week's reasonable success.
Sadly, it was another awful GK performance to start wth, just 3/8. The many gaps in my knowledge clearly rearing their ugly head, it seems. Film & TV was better this time, and without wishing to boast I had a lot to do with that. 5/8 was still average, however, which about sums up our night. Again we picked the worst round of the night for our joker, which is becoming an annoying habit, and severely restricted our score.
My despair is evident no doubt even in this writing, and our mid-table finish does not, I think, fairly reflect our poor performance. We missed a few key team members who would have known some of the questions, got things wrong we shouldn't have, and in general couldn't bring our A-game along. That's no reflection on the team, I hasten to add, and certainly not on the excellently written quiz itself; I gave some good answers but was culpable on some mistakes too, and we couldn't always agree to go with what turned out to be the right answer.
Alas, etc.
Result: 32/56 (57.14%), 5th place
Friday's Quiz
This left Friday as the sole means of a result to be proud of, and I was happy to be back at The Grapes in Springholm. This fortnightly quiz is very obviously run by a man who loves quizzing itself, and who isn't just doing it to get punters in. The love and respect he has for it shows in the quiz, and I only wish I had a consistent team to bring along. Which again is no disrespect to the teams I usually serve in a mercenary capacity, but as the QM himelf has noted, a consistent team is almost always a stronger team.
I'm not going to go over each of the 9 rounds in detail, but we made a disappointing start to the first 20 questions, getting 12 when we knew others were ahead. Songs from musicals as the second pair's specialist subject gave us a full 10 however, and one of my team was not prepared to let anyone else in the room forget that we got 17 there; normally she adds extra numbers to our score to pretend it was that good!
General knowledge was the subject letting us down, yet again this week, as we always got above 50% on the specialists. The last round, usually harder by design, just epitomised it, and my week really. With all the teams bar one within 4 points of each other, it was all up for grabs on the final 10 questions. We got just 2, leaving us third out of the five of us. The QM noted we'd "thrown it away" at the end, though this surprised me as we couldn't have been leading going into the last round.
The score was a lot more respectable than others this week, so in that respect I was certainly happy. Being that close to ending the week with a second win, however, stung a little. Bookending 3 carcrashes with two impressive victories would have given the week a different overall flavour, I think. Oh well, no luck there!
Result: 57/90 (63.33%), 3rd place
Overall, it was a week to forget, in truth. The win on Monday was solid, but it was largely downhill after that, Friday being a missed opportunity as I noted above. I shouldn't feel too downhearted about Wednesday considering my weakness in music, but at the same time, accepting a weakness means allowing myself to fall victim to it again in the future. So it does and should hurt; I must improve on the subject, and plug those holes in my (usually strong) general knowledge. It was one of the harder weeks of the year, granted, and I gave some impressive answers, but evidently not enough of them.
It's worth adding that the overall result looks decent, but this should be considered in the context of most of the questions falling in the first and last quizzes, which saw the best performance. This shows the problem of such statistics, as that 63% disguises all the mid-week issues.
Hopefully next week will be better - but I've said that before! Time will tell!
Overall Result: 242.5/384 (63.15%)
Best answer given:
Any of the five I got from the first 3 rounds at the Ship Inn would count, though to pick one, I'll say Linda McCartney as the guest star in the Simpsons who got a dedication at the end of the episode U2 guest starred in. It was such a specific question, and yet such is my knowledge of the show, I got the answer. Guessing that Walt Disney's fear - suriphobia - was that of mice was another good one. It made ironic sense for the creator of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
Worst answer missed:
Chris Barrie as the actor who played Rimmer in Red Dwarf, and Craggy Island as the setting for Father Ted. Both shows I know well, but the misses reflected my state of mind by that point in the Wednesday quiz. Criminal nonetheless, however, and we needed every last point there. I even got the former's first name right and couldn't dredge up the last.
Most interesting fact learned:
Matches were known as lucifers when first sold.
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