Friday 3 November 2017

Weekly Roundup, W/E 20/10/2017

Two more weekly roundups to do and I'll finally be up to date! Last week was exciting, as not only did I appear on TV, but I finally moved house! Very awesome, though not massively conducive to productivity either. Still, I'm getting there, and by the end of the day, these should hopefully be finished. So let's get on with it, shall we?

Quiz #182 - Sunday 15th October, Turf Tavern, Carlisle


Strategic Overview

As per usual, it was myself and Jack alone, and as usual we had JDCS for opposition, along with that other team who still remain frustratingly nameless. Only 4 teams were present for this quiz, the lowest for a long time, at least so far as I remember.

The Quiz

Let's get the obvious out of the way - we sucked on the picture round. 3 points, 4 we couldn't even guess at. Current events was a little better with 5, but that's still only 8/20 to start the quiz which is nothing to be pleased with. The first list was to do with X Factor male judges; we got the obvious three, I could remember a choreographer who did a spell but couldn't get the name, and we had no clue on the last. The second list needed the longest UK rivers, and rivers are a notorious blackhole in my geography knowledge so again we did no better than 3.

So far, this was not going at all well, and we didn't need the actual scores to tell us that. Alpha Links was all the more important, then, so it was good that we got the sequence right away. Answers kept on coming, and before long, we had all 10! A good time for a full house. We couldn't follow that up on the connections round though, the link being Carry On films. Yeah, two only came to us.

So the Wipeout was going to be crucial to avoid a total disaster, and it was fortunate that we knew the first 5. The 6th question we had no chance at all on, and while we knew the 7th, it was one we'd worked out and I was too edgy to want to take the risk. Would have been right but thems the breaks I suppose! As it happened, we had the other 3, for a very valuable and score-salvaging 8 points.

Outcome

Ultimately those 8 points did no more than save us from last place, but they certainly made our score look a heck of a lot better than it would have otherwise. We only had 1 point more last week! The quiz did feel like a disaster for the most part, with 2 solid rounds saving us. Sometimes that happens, and ultimately I'm not complaining. JDCS beat us easily with 41, the other team getting 45. In fairness, the 4th team got 26 so we were well clear of last place.

Result: 34/55 (61.82%),  3rd/4


Quiz #183 - Wednesday 18th October, Granary, Dumfries

Strategic Overview

Storm Ophelia meant I wasn't able to make it to Dalbeattie this week, and a musical specialist round + no certainty of a team meant I skipped the Ship Inn too. So my next quiz after Sunday was the Granary, where Jack, L and M were with me. The regular host was on holiday, so he had someone else hosting in his stead. This guy wasn't the usual, awful, replacement host but someone else, who had shadowed the main QM last week. I was prepared to accept teething issues, as this is not an easy quiz to host, especially for the first time, but as it turned out the only slight concern was a bit of a delay in starting, and that's no problem at all.

As for the opposition, the Roofrax were absent I think, as were Sporting Quizbon, but Universally Challenged were around.

The Quiz

In keeping with the usual format, there was a handout round to begin with, the first of 3 rounds in total. It was advertising slogans, and we did pretty well, here, with 20. A couple of our guesses must have come off, as we definitely didn't know them all and were surprised to get that total.

Round 2 was Sport, and to be honest, I'n happy with 7. We can thank Jack for that, though he was kicking himself about a couple he missed. In fact, last night, a fortnight hence, he was still apologising for that! That left GK, 20 questions, only 13 gained. My turn to apologise, though I'm not too bothered, as there wasn't a lot that I should have gotten but didn't. It happens.

Outcome

A mixup with the marking left us placed far further down than we ought to have been, as we were accidentally given 2 for our combined rounds 2 and 3 scores instead of 20. Ultimately, I was able to confirm the truth for my own stats, and it meant that we placed far better than we would have otherwise - 3rd! Jack's self-deprecation was in part because we could have come 2nd, finishing as we did just 1 point adrift. The winners, with 45, were UC! An excellent win for them, surely their best ever score, and it shows how far they've come since they started playing a couple of years ago. Great result for us both really, 40 is truly fantastic!

Result: 40/50 (80%), 3rd/17


Quiz #184 - Thursday 19th October, Masonic Arms, Kirkcudbright

Strategic Overview

I knew going into this quiz that it was potentially my last of the year, due to the Anchor quiz in Kippford starting up again the following week (unconfirmed at the time of doing the quiz, though later proven true). I hoped, then, to able to go out on a high. I joined a couple of local regulars I've teamed up with before for the occasion, the team Canny Minds. I'm generally unfamiliar with the opposition, aside from knowing that the standard is fairly high, but a couple of the Tourists of Dalbeattie go here, as do a couple of those from the Haugh of Urr quiz.

The Quiz

We started with the bonus round, which was an A-Z GK round. Our shared knowledge did us well here, though knowing the first letter of every answer naturally helped. We got 24/26, missing only a cathedral and a question about the largest member of the weasel family. Which actually is a weasel, as it happens. The outcome I'll reveal later. Feel free to skip ahead if the suspense is too much for you.

As to the quiz itself, there were 12 rounds so I'll be quick. We started averagely with 3 on GK, and immediately used our Joker for Capital Cities of the EU. Apparently, the week before there was such a round for another part of the world, so signs were good that it was indeed just "name the capital of the given country". I know almost all World capitals and certainly all in Europe so this was no problem for me. Boom, 10 points, effectively free! Two more full houses followed, on Food & Drink and world geography.

Then followed a bit of controversy on a multiple choice round that we got 4/5 on. One of the questions gave 4 subjects and asked which one didn't have a Nobel Prize. Two of them were Mathematics and Music - neither of which has such an award. The answer given was music, but we put mathematics. I thought that the QM had mistaken Bob Dylan's Literature prize for a music one. What actually happened was that the Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize in mathematics, was mistaken for a real one. I pointed this out, she checked and stuck to her guns. Considering that this not the first time such an issue has happend at this quiz, I was very much annoyed by it.

Moving on, we completed the first half with a disastrous 1 point on History. Not good. The 2nd half began on a much brighter note, with 5 points on a UK geography round. 3 on the subject in one quiz! Spelling came next, and naturally no one was prepared to play a joker. Thankfully after a bit of debating over one or two of them, we got another perfect score! That's very impressive on that subject.

The full houses kept coming, with a round themed around darkness, "the natural world" and the 1980s all failing to yield a single mistake. GK started the quiz and so it also ended it, though unfortunately we made our only mistake of the 2nd half of the quiz on the very last question for 4. Still, that was extremely impressive!

Outcome

In the bonus round, our superb score saw us edge a victory, 24-23 - very very happy about that! In the main quiz, we aggravatingly tied for first, though to be fair we weren't the only one who made the Nobel Prize error and we did fall apart on history. Which wouldn't be so bad had we actually won the tiebreaker, but no, we lost and were thus 2nd. That is extremely frustrating, though it's still a fantastic score and we did very well to get it. So it wasn't all bad.

Result: 57/65 (87.69%, main quiz, 2nd/unknown after tiebreaker),  24/26 (92.31%, bonus round, 1st/unknown), 81/91 (89.01%, combined score)

Quiz #185 - Friday 20th October, The Grapes, Springholm

Strategic Overview

So to the Grapes I returned, and a quiz that sadly still doesn't come close to its predecessor. It's just not got the same atmosphere, and I don't sense the same passion and enthusiasm from the current owners as the last. I will, I'm afraid, me prioritising the Haugh of Urr quiz going forward. 

It was a quiet night, and we divided into 4 teams. I had M from the KPD on my side, another KPD guy D joined one of the Teddy Bears, and another of the Teddy Bears recruited a regular who doesn't normally play. The most dangerous non-Damned United couple, T & R of the KPD, were absent, as was L. The Damned United themselves have not been since the revival of the quiz. The last team was a family who split in two.

The Quiz

There were only two rounds in the quiz, one of 41 questions and the other of 56 once bonuses were taken into consideration. There's not a not to say, really. We imposed ourselves from the start - or rather, I did, since by M's own admission it was me doing most of the work. After the first round, we led 29-21-16-16, though I was annoyed at some of my own mistakes. The 2nd round scores were, respectively, 27, 24, 27, 21. There's no suspense to be had about the outcome.

Outcome

The only problem I have with the outcome is that it wasn't comprehensive enough a victory for my own standards. It was a decent enough mix of questions, some of which fell far better for me than others, though the difficulty was inconsistent generally. The 2nd half score was frustratingly poor, so I've definitely got things to work on, but ultimately it says a lot about this quiz that I can make such quibbles! There's an opportunity there for a solo victory, I think, at least provided T & R are absent. I'm missing tonight's quiz there as it's the first of the month, but next time, I reckon I'll try on my own. At the very least I should be able to compete, especially if the "all general knowledge" format remains. Still, a win's a win's a win, and I'll not be complaining about one of those, ever!

Result: 56/97 (57.73%), 1st/4


Week In Summation

It's never such a bad week when I finish on the podium every time out of 4, plus I got a win, which is always appreciated! It's been a bit of a strange week, really, as our best performances were on Wednesday and Thursday where we didn't win, and the actual victory on Friday was gained very easily. Sunday was a quiz of two halves, where our actual score looked a lot better than it was seemingly going to for most of the night.

I suppose that means I need to look beyond the surface for meaningful conclusions. There's certainly disappointments to be seen there, like the history score on Thursday and the missed questions in the 2nd half of Friday, but I'm not interested in doing so today. My 2 weeks off work is nearly over and I'd rather focus on positives. Ultimately, superficial though it may sound, the results speak to plenty of those, and that's what I'm choosing to take from the week. I'll deal with my denial at the same time as I deal with my procrastination issues - tomorrow.

Total Result: 211/293 (72.01%)

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