The Summer Fling Season is off and running!

MONDAY’S STATS AND FACTS (46 teams across seven venues):

Highest Overall Score: Killer Snails (Hershey’s) with 176

Highest Score After Round 4: Killer Snails with 164

Highest First-Half Score: Killer Snails with 89

Perfect 21 (correct on all wagering questions): Killer Snails, Cavs in 5 (Il Forno), Dire Wolves (il Forno)

–> Monday’s halftime page featured pictures of fruits and “body part” phrases.  Though the average score was a respectable 16.3, only three teams (Uncle Jack, Dire Wolves, Walking Talking Stephen Hawking) scored a perfect 20 points.

–> Our 6-4-2 question drew in many wrong answers after the first clue.  We were looking for the country that was the first to host both the Summer Olympics and the FIFA World Cup.  While many teams could narrow it down to a few choices, only ONE team (Who R Those Guys) delivered the correct response of France.

MONDAY’S FINAL QUESTION (64.5% success rate):

–> Which novel contains the following passage: “Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t; but if he was sane, he had to fly them.  If he flew them, he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to, he was sane and had to.”? (you’ll find the answer later in this blog)

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DRP in Alexandria, VA

Tonight was Opening Night, meaning that we are starting our Summer Fling Season of 2017.  Because we’re playing a truncated season, teams will be competing to be the champions of their region instead of their venue.  And here at DRP, we are part of the NoVa constituency.  We’ve got other very competitive venues in this constituency, so our teams had to put in extra effort to make sure they’re standing atop the standings.  So, who got the first “W” for the season?

Round 1 commenced with a question on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, a pretty difficult subject if you aren’t a big fan of the show.  But, all the teams got off the mark with questions on famous Dianas.  Round 2 was the start of some creative spelling when we asked about a Dominican baseball player who got his 600th home run recently.  Luckily, no one accidentally spelled an obscenity.  Then, a question on tuberculosis in fiction had everyone racking their brains between literature, opera, theatre, and film.  Our halftime sheet had everyone think Nickelback still had a career in the late 2000s rather than the Canadian band Finger Eleven.  Also, teams constantly mixed up the papaya with the quince.  You know, some scholars believe it was a quince that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden rather than an apple.  You think we would recognize it better then.

Round 3 had a question on the origin of the “stuff that dreams are made of”, the Maltese falcon, which one team had a member who had visited Malta prior.  Our biggest trap was the origin of the word “blog”, which many teams thought was a shortening of “biographical” rather than “web”.  It turned out more difficult than our question on Sun Yat-Sen.  Our 6-4-2 question had three teams go for six points, but unfortunately they all missed, so people picked up the four instead.  And Round 4 had Beatles fan identify the double A-side of “Strawberry Fields Forever” with “Penny Lane” and identifying the CAD in CAD engineering software.

Our final question tonight was on the easier side, as most teams recognized the quote we gave as the example Yossarian gives for the unofficial military rule of “Catch-22”.  And because of that, we had to whip out the tiebreaker on the peak position of “Strawberry Fields Forever”.  In a very “Price is Right” manner, one team guessed Position 4, while one said Position 5.  So, who emerged victorious?

First Place:  HR Puff ‘n’ Stuff

Second Place:  Worst-Case Ontario

Third Place:  DRD

Next week’s first category: CrossFit

Until next time,

~ Chris

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Greene Turtle in Hagerstown, MD

Next week’s first category:  2017 Pittsburgh Penguins

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Morgan Inn in Woodbine, MD

Coming soon…

Hershey’s Restaurant in Gaithersburg, MD

We got to see a great game of trivia on Monday evening at Hershey’s Restaurant in Gaithersburg.  There wasn’t much of a battle for first place tonight, because there was one team that had it sown up by the time we finished the halftime puzzle page!  What I wanted to see was if that team was going to tie or even BREAK the all time high score for a game!

Our top team came close to a perfect game, but unfortunately only scored 17 out of 20 on the halftime puzzle page, and then missed one question and a two-point bonus in the second half.  With a clear lead, they could afford to bet the full 12 points on the final question with no fear of losing out on first place.  That’s one hell of a game!

After the final question was asked and answered, the first game of the Summer Fling ended like this…  In third place we had I’m Just Making This Up As I Go Along, while taking second place was Cuba Libre!  Our first place team just finished World Series XV in fifth place, which is rather impressive when you consider that they played Sunday’s game as a duo.  But they added a couple of new players and changed their name for the Summer Fling, with an amazing 176 points: our first winner of the season was Killer Snails!!

Their pick for next Monday’s opening category will be Triple 50-50: Iowa or Nebraska, so study up and I’ll see everyone next week at Hershey’s!!

~ Jon J

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Uno Pizzeria in Frederick, MD

Summer is heating up and so was the game of Pour House Trivia here at Uno Pizzeria in Frederick!  The way things are going it could get very interesting around here!

Highlights of the Night:

In “Hilarious-But-Incorrect”: I’m feeling like we need a “what’s acceptable” refresher guys; Albert Pujols is not the same thing as “That one Dominican dude that plays baseball”.  Adding two letters to the three I already gave you is not enough to get credit.  And as amusing as Biographical Monologue would be as the origination of ‘blog’, it’s just a hair too long.

In “Someone’s-A-Sadist”: The puzzle page tonight was what I like to call hardmode; without color, even with a word bank it wasn’t gonna be easy. So imagine my astonishment that, after repeated calls for teams to come up and look at the color version on my laptop, one team flat refused to come use the tool at their disposal. You don’t have to prove anything guys!

In “I-Clearly-Can’t-Gauge-A-Crowd”: Answer I thought people would miss: Diana Spencer.  Answer people missed: Diana Prince.  Answer I thought people would miss: David Simon.  Answer people missed: Joss Whedon. Not to mention the third round was murderous.  The teams were staggering across the finish line; I was worried we wouldn’t make it!

Despite being winded, the teams took on the final as best as they could.

In third place tonight, The B-Team!

In second place tonight, Coco!

In first place tonight, Tequila Mockingbird!

Great game tonight guys!  Next week we’ll kick things off with a question in the category of Auxillary Percussion Instruments!  It should be banging!  *rimshot*  OK, I’ll stop.  See you next time!

Until then,

Basic Burger in Arlington, VA

Happy Monday and happy start of the Summer Fling Season, everybody!  Five teams joined us on this warm summer night at Basic Burger – and so did Three Notch’d Brewery!  Thanks for the samples and swag!  Round 1 proved to be a cinch tonight, including the Winner’s Choice question.  It seems everyone knew “The Donald” had a small role in “Home Alone 2”.  Not only that question, but on EVERY question in Round 1 teams, our earned their wager (though a few missed some two-point bonuses).  Naturally, it was a tight race heading into the second round.

Round 2 turned me into a 12-year old when reading the answer to “which American League slugger born in the Dominican Republic recently became the ninth player in major league history to hit 600 career home runs?”  Believe me, I really DO appreciate when the quiz masters give us phonetically spelled names, but writing Pujols as “Poo-holes” really left me snickering.  Also getting me into a tizzy was something i learned from our TV Game Shows category – “Candy Crush” is going to be a live action game show?  I’ll tune in…once…just to see how they can turn it into group entertainment.

The halftime puzzle left many questioning the nutrition in their diets when naming fruits from the pictures given.  Only Walking Talking Stephen Hawking scored a perfect 20 points on this quiz.  The toughest question of the night came in Round 3, as we asked a three-parter with answers starting with ‘sun’.  Only Kitten Mittens knew all three to earn their wager AND a two-point bonus, while no other team even earned their wager on that question.  Only two teams earned their five-point category bonus in Round 3, which really caused the scores to spread.  The 6-4-2 question also left teams reeling, after some guessed Germany from the six-point clue, which asked for the first nation to have hosted both the Summer Olympics and the FIFA World Cup.  The last two teams were able to correctly answer ‘France’ after the fourppoint clue about the infamous head butting incident of 2006.  The toughest question of Round 4 came when trying to identify the acronym CAD: some were very close, but the D is not for Drawing – instead Computer Aided DESIGN is what we were looking for.

On the final question all but one team were quick to answer, and in the end, the ranking stayed where they were by the end of Round 3.  Your winners were:

First Place:  Kitten Mittens

Second Place:  Walking Talking Stephen Hawking

Third Place:  Giant Meteor 2017

Next week’s first category:  American Ninja Warrior

~ Cheers!

~ Kate

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Il Forno in Frederick, MD

We began the Summer Fling season tonight and we saw a big group coming out to begin their quest! Not a ton of new team names considering this was the time to try something if you wanted to BUT most teams just stuck with their roots and continued to terrorize with their existing monikers!  One team name we did see what The Jeff King Experience (runners up at yesterday’s World Series), pulling that name and playing under the ironic Cavs in Five.  Who knows if they’ll stick with it!

Last night’s NBA game was a massacre, Warriors leading for most of the 2nd half, but the PHT game was not nearly as lopsided. We had three teams that were always within a point or two of each other at any given moment! Going into the second half, Cavs in Five were tied in third place at 83 points with Much More Deeper, while Dire Wolves and Hydro Gel Screen Printers were tied in the lead at 85 points a piece.  Just two points separating four teams, it was sure to be a good finish if the teams kept this up!

A challenging third round saw a lot of the teams fall off, but our top three kept it close!  Hydro Gel, Cavs in Five, and Dire Wolves all within a single point of each other going into the 6-4-2 question!  Dire Wolves elected to go for six points, but a MISS there set them back.  A strong fourth round brought them back into the mix, but it was Cavs in Five who were able to slightly edge out the field, leading by a point on BOTH Dire Wolves and Hydro Gel, after Hydro Gel mis-wagers on the CAD acronym question!

A very roller coaster-esque finish, but Cavs in Five led by a single point with Dire Wolves and Hydro Gel tied in second place going into the final question!  The final question played relatively easy, so there were no surprises here tonight, as Cavs in Five take this by a point to win the opening game of the Summer season!  Great comeback and a close call!  Second place went to Hydro Gel after they barely won a tiebreaker, edging out Dire Wolves, who take third.

Summer is HOT, we’re here every week! Hope to see you all back!

~ Bill

Next week’s first category:  Tony Awards