Bracket Busting at Monday Trivia!

We hit the triple digits once again on Monday, as Pour House Trivia brought in a total of 106 teams to nine area venues.

FIRST ROUND:

The trivia madness began with questions on NSYNC‘s song It’s Gonna Be Me, a Three Parts format about the lily flower, and The Weather Channel, which just celebrated its 40th anniversary on Monday. Surprisingly enough, the round ended with the hardest bonus question of the night. While an overwhelming majority of teams identified Spider-Man for wagering points, only four teams knew the character made his debut in the comic Amazing Fantasy. Three of those teams — Socrates Nuts (Il Forno), Pink Cows (Cushwa), and Taco Belles (Rockwell) — were the only ones able to earn a perfect first-round score.

SECOND ROUND:

A heavenly audio question tasked our teams with identifying three songs with the word angel somewhere in the title. From there, things got tough with topics such as The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes found in France, the book series Sweet Valley High, and the toughest wagering question of the first half:

• While Super Bowl I was played in the L.A. Coliseum, the next two Super Bowls were played in which east coast stadium? This marked the first (and last) time the game was played at the same site in consecutive years.

Even with it being the Facebook hint of the day, only 34% of teams successfully named Miami’s Orange Bowl as the site of Super Bowls II and III. After a question about Judd Apatow’s pair of movies with the number 40 in them (This is 40 and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, to be exact), the round ended with the only perfect score coming from The Dorothy Zbornak Experience (Rockwell).

HALFTIME:

Topics for Monday’s halftime page included famous people with automotive names and terms with the letters FRO in them. While the average score was a fantastic 18.3 points, only eight teams were able to hit the full 20-point perfecto. After halftime, these were the leaders on the scoreboard:

• Gong Gong and the Butt Demons (Cushwa): 89
• Desert Dwellers (William Jeffrey’s): 88
• You Don’t Know Jack (Rockwell): 88
• Legalized Gambling (DRP): 86
• Ten Thousand Dugongs (Ragtime): 86
• Bought Twitter (Ragtime): 86

THIRD ROUND:

We marched on into the second half of play with a three-parter on 50th-birthday boy Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, followed by a query about his WWE superstar cousin and current Universal Champion Roman Reigns. After that, we threw a roadblock at our teams, giving them back-to-back questions with low correct-answer rates. First, we went to the arcade:

• Taking its alliterative name from an auto racing term and allowing players to control a Formula One racecar, what was the most popular coin-operated arcade game of 1983?

A game-low 33% of the field knew that game was Pole Position, while about 21% of teams added a pair of bonus points by naming Namco as its developer. If that wasn’t enough, teams might have wanted to bang their heads on the next question, possibly on their tables:

• The 2015 album “Bad Magic” is the final studio album released by which band? Its founder and lead singer, Lemmy Kilmister, passed away just a few months after its release.

Roughly 36% of teams knew it was time to play the game and answer Motorhead for their wagering points. The field did rebound well to end the round on a question about states that border Idaho. In all, six teams came through the third-round gauntlet with perfect scores.

FOURTH ROUND:

A 6-4-2 on the number 7 proved lucky for the 24 teams that hit it after one clue for the maximum points. Going into the fourth, teams started with topics like actor Tim Curry and the Swedish term smorgasbord before hitting onto the hardest wagering question in the round:

• This element with a single-letter symbol is essential for all life and is used widely in biomechanical processes. In addition, most likely due to Biblical writings, it was once referred to as ‘Brimstone.’ What is that element?

While a lot of teams incorrectly guessed carbon as that element, 35% of Monday’s teams knew it to be sulfur. Bonus points for knowing its atomic number of 16 within one number either way were earned by 15 of those teams. The remainder of the round went to questions on former U.S. President Gerald Ford (born Leslie Lynch King, Jr.) and three words that end with the letter X. Just like in the third, a half-dozen teams had perfect scores in this round. With the final question looming, this was the top of the leaderboard:

• Legalized Gambling (DRP): 160
• George Washington’s Camel (DRP): 160
• Desert Dwellers (William Jeffrey’s): 156
• Bought Twitter (Ragtime): 156
• Wagering Pi (Cushwa): 156
• That’s So Clavin (Cushwa): 156

FINAL QUESTION (1.9% success rate):

• The origin of which phrase can be traced to a 1939 essay written by an Illinois High School sports official named Henry Porter, who stated that it may complement and contribute to sanity and help keep society on an even keel?

…Oh boy. That Porter essay was the origin of the phrase March Madness, but almost the entire Monday field got stuffed on their final dunk attempt. We have to applaud the two teams that got the final question right: Legalized Gambling (DRP) and MC (Il Forno). That was the nail in the coffin for the vast majority of Perfect 21 tries, as no team correctly answered every wagering question. Unsurprisingly, you can find the two aforementioned teams atop the final Monday standings:

• Legalized Gambling (DRP): 172
• MC (Il Forno): 156
• Bird Person (DRP): 154
• Bought Twitter (Ragtime): 152
• Desert Dwellers (William Jeffrey’s): 150
• George Washington’s Camel (DRP): 148
• Hipster Fashion Consultants (DRP): 147
• Wagering Pi (Cushwa): 144
• That’s So Clavin (Cushwa): 144
• Cobra Kai (DRP): 144

MONDAY’S WINNERS:

Cushwa Brewing in Williamsport, MD: That’s So Clavin  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Ted Lasso)

DRP in Alexandria, VA: Legalized Gambling  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: The Sopranos)

Bushwaller’s in Frederick, MD: Team Holt  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Cheese)

Rockwell Brewery in Frederick, MD: Three Clues, One Cup  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Girls — TV show)

Mark’s Pub in Falls Church, VA: Cheddar Biscuits  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Everything Everywhere All at Once)

William Jeffrey’s Tavern in Arlington, VA: Desert Dwellers  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: WWE)

Ragtime in Arlington, VA: Bought Twitter  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: U.S. Diplomatic History)

Aslin Beer Co in Herndon, VA: Beer Haus Arrest  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Top Gun)

Il Forno Pizzeria in Frederick, MD: MC  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Oscar-Winning Actors)