A Rock-Solid Night of Monday Night Trivia!

August 29, 2017

Monday night began the final week of the Summer Fling season, as we welcomed 68 teams across eight venues.  We added another entry to the PHT Wall of Fame tonight, as a familiar name shot to the top of the overall leaderboard with an amazing performance.  Don’t forget to check out the end of today’s blog entry to see if your Monday night venue is on for next week:

ROUND 1:

Our opening round provided very few surprises for our stellar field of teams.  We opened with a question on the martial arts weapon of the nunchuks, with about half of our teams earning a two-point bonus by knowing which member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles brandished this weapon:

TMNT

Sorry, I guess they all look alike… it’s Michelangelo.  Moving on, we tossed a Triple 50/50 question at our teams on the subject of bodies of water, asking whether or not the Strait of Magellan, the Dead Sea, and the Aral Sea lie in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere.  Once again, the bonus rate was just over 50%:

World Map

After finishing up the round with a question on The Preakness Stakes, we saw 16 teams finish the opening stanza with a perfect score.

ROUND 2:

Our audio question dealt with these three Bruce Willis films:

Bruce Willis

While most teams were able to earn their wagers by naming any of these three films, only 14% of the field earned a two-point bonus by naming all three: “Armageddon”, “Pulp Fiction”, and “Sin City”.  The pop culture questions then took a turn towards the younger audience, as we discussed the former Disney Channel series “That’s So Raven”, as well as this pop superstar, who is the only performer in Billboard history to record five #1 albums before turning 19 years old:

Bieber

This question provided our most difficult two-point bonus of the entire night, as we asked for the title of Justin Bieber‘s debut studio album.  Only five teams earned that bonus with “My World 2.0”.  As a result, we did not see any perfect scores in the second half.

HALFTIME:

Monday’s halftime page quizzed our teams on “Q” brands and film re-makes.  The average score reached 17.8 points, with seven teams earning a perfect score of 20 points.  Here are Monday’s top overall scores at the halftime break:

ROUND 3:

The second half began with a our nightly Three Clues question, with tonight’s version asking about a foreign country:

CLUE 1: Among the independent nations which are former Soviet republics, it is the second-smallest in terms of land area.

CLUE 2: Its capital is Chișinău.

We know there are certain players who LOVE questions on world capitals, and even though Chișinău is obscure, there were a few folks who earned their teams a two-point bonus by knowing that it is the capital of Moldova.  Eight of our teams earned a two-point bonus, but only 34% of our teams earned their wager even after hearing the third clue, which stated that Moldova only borders only two other countries: Romania and Ukraine:

Europe Map

Map courtesy of (www.nationsonline.org)

With the Three Clues question always garnering a high number of votes for the bonus category, this question had a profound impact on many of our games.  The third stanza continued with a question on the Rhodes Scholarship (of which Bill Clinton is the only U.S. President to have received), before moving on to what would be our most difficult wagering question of the night:

–> Set for release this September, “The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye” will be the second release by David Lagercrantz, revolving around this character originally created by Stieg Larsson.  What is the NAME of this character?

Sure, almost everybody knew we were talking about “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, but only 23% of our teams remembered her name was Lisbeth Salander.  The perfect scores in the third round were largely dictated by the first question, as six teams emerged with 36 points in this round.

6-4-2 QUESTION:

Our six-point clue featured a rather difficult question which touched on the not-so-common topic of Economics:

–> In regards to this economics event, Richard Thaler proposed the idea of the “Winner’s Curse”, in which incomplete information will always cause the winner to pay more than market value.

This first clue did not entice many guesses, as only seven teams earned the full six points with the answer of an auction.

ROUND 4:

We opened up the comic books to begin the final round, asking about the Marvel villain originally known as Wilson Fisk.  Just over half of our teams earned points by knowing that he is commonly known as Kingpin, with another nine teams earning two bonus points by remembering that former “Law & Order” star Vincent D’Onofrio currently portrays Kingpin on the Netflix series “Daredevil”:

Kingpin

The final round also included this question on musical instruments:

–> The virginal and the spinet are variations on this instrument.  Though it is similar in appearance to a piano, its strings are plucked rather than struck.  Name this instrument played by Johann Sebastian Bach.

While Bach was also an expert on the pipe organ, most of our teams knew that the “plucked” instrument we were referring to was the harpsichord.  Our final round continued with our always-popular Last Word / First Word category, but this question was no cake walk:

–> What name would you have if a particular Arthurian enchantress also portrayed the female lead in the 1933 film “King Kong”?

This was a rather deep cut for either answer, evidenced by the fact that only 33% of our teams arrived at the correct response of Morgan Le Fay Wray:

Morgan Le Fay Wray

Thanks to an in-depth knowledge of comic books and classic films, only three teams swept the final round with a perfect score of 36 points: Dusty Baker School of Management (Hershey’s), Westward Ho! (Morgan Inn), and Kitten Mittens (Cheesetique).  Here are your top Monday scores after the final round:

FINAL QUESTION (71.1% success rate):

–> The name of which territory is derived from the combination of two words: Jabal which means ‘mountain’ in Arabic, and Tariq, the name of a Moorish general of the 8th century?

Gibraltar

Just over two-thirds of our teams answered correctly with Gibraltar (sound it out…  Jabal-Tariq).  Congratulations to Dusty Baker School of Management (Hershey’s), Kitten Mittens (Cheesetique), and Giant Meteor 2017 (Cheesetique), as the only teams to score the Perfect 21 tonight.

A special congratulations to Dusty Baker School of Management, who reached the elusive 180-point plateau for the second time this summer, earning yet another notch on the PHT Wall of Fame!  Unfortunately, the defending World Series champions fell two points shy of a perfect game thanks to a gaping lack of knowledge in the incredibly important academic topic of Justin Bieber album titles.  Considering that every member of the team owns Bieber’s debut album**, it’s a real surprise that they missed those two points.

** – this fact has not yet been verified

Here are your top overall scores:

TONIGHT’S WINNERS:

DRP in Alexandria, VA:  Band Meeting  (NO GAME NEXT WEEK – First category on September 11: Intellectual Property)

Greene Turtle in Hagerstown, MD:  Charging Our Fireballs  (Next week’s first category: “Murder by Death”)

Morgan Inn in Woodbine, MD:  Westward Ho!  (NO GAME NEXT WEEK – First category on September 11: 1980s Pro Wrestling)

Hershey’s Restaurant in Gaithersburg, MD:  Dusty Baker’s School of Management  (NO GAME NEXT WEEK – First category on September 11: We Share a First and Last Name)

Uno Pizzeria in Frederick, MD:  Who R Those Guys?  (Next week’s first category: WWE)

Cheesetique in Arlington, VA:  Kitten Mittens  (Next week’s first category: “Outlander”)

Adam & Eve Gastropub in Frederick, MD:  Kazoo Lord 9000  (Next week’s first category: “The Devil in the White City”)

Il Forno in Frederick, MD:  We Don’t Have Monkey Brains  (Next week’s first category: “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”)

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