PHT Season XVI Playoffs and Pub Crawl Recap: Game 2
The second game of the Season XVI triple-header featured games at two Frederick venues: the Tilted Kilt and the Orioles Nest. As the Pub Crawl continued, the talk of this game was the impressive performance displayed by a quartet of trivia giants. Combined, we welcomed 44 teams to these two games:
FIRST HALF:
Unlike the rough start to the first game, the 4:00p game eased up a bit on our teams, as the overall correct answer percentage on wagering questions topped 80%. We covered topics such as the transfer of thermal energy, the works of Salvador Dali, and this recent Netflix release:
A few of our teams were tripped up by our U.S. History question, as they confused the Spanish-American War for the Mexican War, but it was the latter during which Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant fought on the same side. At the end of the first round, seven teams were sporting perfect scores of 36 points. The second round also began with relative ease, until this movie question nearly wiped out our entire field:
–> Expected to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, this was the most profitable film of 2017 in terms of return on investment. Name this film which raked in a quarter of a billion dollars on a budget of less than five million dollars.
The biggest surprise hit of 2017? Only 26% of our teams knew that we were talking about this blockbuster horror film:
Even with the high difficulty level, we offered a two-point bonus to any team that could also name this film’s lead actor. Despite a breakthrough role in the film, Daniel Kaluuya must not yet be a household name, as only ONE TEAM earned that bonus. We closed the first half by asking our teams to name either one of the two foreign countries whose national flags contain at least six horizontal red stripes. Only seven teams earned two bonus points with the two correct answers of Liberia and Malaysia:
After they were the only team to earn bonus points on the film question, Proper Villains became the only team to sweep the second round.
HALFTIME:
The halftime page for today’s second game featured pictures of ten NFL quarterbacks who reached this season’s playoffs. Unfortunately, the face of Jared Goff is still a mystery for most people. After dominating the first half, Proper Villains dominated halftime, turning in the only perfect score in the second game, while the rest of the field notched an average score of 14.8 points. Here are your top scores after the first half of the second game:
- Proper Villains: 92
- Blind Squirrels: 89
- Fat, Drunk, and Stupid: 87
- Fat Kids Are Hard to Kidnap: 85
- Uncle Jack: 84
SECOND HALF:
Topics for the third round included U.S. State Nicknames, the work of Gilbert and Sullivan, and America’s cheapest national airline:
Despite being notorious for its bare bones operating style (they charge for water…), none of our 44 teams managed to snag the two-point bonus on this question, as no team knew that Spirit Airlines uses the stock ticker symbol SAVE. We continued with this question which combined history and literature:
–> This Connecticut tribe lent its name to a colonial war of the 1630s. Thanks to a slight change in spelling, this tribe later became the namesake for a fictional vessel.
Exactly one-quarter of our teams arrived at the correct response of the Native American Pequot tribe (or the “Moby-Dick” ship Pequod). The fourth round began with three separate questions that each could have been the hardest question of the night on a regular game of trivia, but for the playoffs, we laid them out back-to-back-to-back (Tom Emanski style). First up, a question asking our teams to name the current African country which previously existed as a colony known as the Gold Coast. Even with the mention of its bordering neighbors (Togo, Burkina Faso, and Côte D’Ivoire), only 34% of our teams gave us this correct answer:
Next up was this question which tested the mathematics skills of our players:
–> In the Braille system of writing, each character is made up of one to six raised dots arranged in a cell. Since a completely blank cell is NOT used in this system, how many different characters can be represented in Braille?
Since there are six locations in which a raised dot can be placed, the maximum number of combinations can be figured by multiplying two to the sixth power, to arrive at 64. Since six blank spaces is not used in Braille, the correct answer to this question was 63. Only nine teams gave us this correct answer. The third question proved to be the most difficult wagering question of the second game:
–> Though it contained a minor vocal part, this 2013 song is still considered to be an instrumental. Name this song which is the only instrumental song to top the Billboard Hot 100 Chart in the 21st century.
How quickly we forget the “Harlem Shake”:
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV0LHCHf-pE[/embedyt]
In what was quickly becoming a theme for the day, Proper Villains recorded the only perfect score of the final round. Here are the top scores from the second game after the fourth round:
- Proper Villains: 166
- Blind Squirrels: 153
- Fat, Drunk, and Stupid: 148
- Stink Floyd: 145
- Fat Kids Are Hard to Kidnap: 144
FINAL QUESTION (24.8% success rate):
–> Since its first appearance nearly 150 years ago, which chart has been published in over 700 different versions, including Giguère’s Helix, Dufour’s Tree, and Benfey’s Spiral?
Just under one-quarter of our teams answered this final question correctly:
Congratulations to Proper Villains, who notched the only Perfect 21 of the second game. This team also set an all-time PHT record for the highest final score in a post-season game. During a set where the average final score hovered around 115 points, this team notched an unbelievable 178 points! These were your highest scoring teams from the 4:00p games:
- Proper Villains: 178
- Fat Kids Are Hard to Kidnap: 156
- Power Vacuum: 155
- Blind Squirrels: 149
- Comfortably Dum: 146
- Hookers and Blackjack: 145
- The Gang Ruins Trivia: 149
- Quality Guesswork: 139
- Fat, Drunk, and Stupid: 136
- Stink Floyd: 135
WINNER’S GALLERY:
