Summer Fling Championship Recap!

The last three months have been building to this day, and what a great day it was! On Saturday afternoon, we spread 88 of our best trivia teams across four Summer Fling Championship Games, and gave away more than $2,500 in cash and prizes. One of our games even came down to an epic tiebreaker! Let’s get right to the recap:

ROUND 1:

We began our game with a three-part question celebrating the 16th season Pour House Trivia. Our topics included the MTV series “My Super Sweet 16”, the Tennessee Ernie Ford song “Sixteen Tons”, and this action thriller featuring Bruce Willis’ mustache:

Later in the opening round, we learned that the largest city named for Alexander the Great is in Egypt, and that Mick Jagger has an extinct ungulate (with large lips) named for him. We closed the round with our Three Clues question, with today’s version focused on a certain name:

CLUE 2: The LAST name of a pair of fictional detectives from the Dashiell Hammett novel “The Thin Man”.

About half of our teams felt confident enough to turn in a response after these two clues had been read, which was largely a successful decision, as 41% of our field earned a two-point bonus with Charles. Most of the remaning teams still earned their wager thanks to a reference to this 1980s sitcom:

After one round of play, eight teams were sporting a perfect score of 36 points.

ROUND 2:

Our audio question threw a curveball at our teams, as we featured a Last Word / First Word question using the names of music groups. Most of our teams had no trouble with Boyz II Men at Work, but the difficulty level increased dramatically from there, with just under half of our teams correctly identifying Simply Red Hot Chili Peppers. The third and final mash-up was by the far the most difficult, but a few teams were able to pull the answer of Ben Folds Five Finger Death Punch. Just under half the field named at least two bands correctly, but only five teams earned a two-point bonus with three correct answers. We continued with a question concerning Baseball Hall of Famers:

–> Which Hall of Fame third baseman led the National League in home runs eight times from 1974 through 1986?

As the most dominant home run hitter of his time, Mike Schmidt was a shoe-in for enshrinement in Cooperstown:

Next up, we asked about these emojis which were introduced as new reactions on Facebook last year:

The first half closed with a question about Voice Roles, asking for either one of the two actresses who respectively voiced the title character in the 1973 and 2006 versions of “Charlotte’s Web”. About half of our teams knew one of the two correct answers, but only eight teams earned a bonus with both of these answers:

Thanks to two tough bonus questions, we did not see any perfect scores in the second round.

HALFTIME:

Our halftime page featured pictures of celebrities whose stage names included a stand alone letter. Some faces included Ice-T, Maggie Q, and Jay-Z, but the most difficult face to place was red-headed singer Vitamin C. As a result, only one team posted a perfect score in the second round: Love in the Time of Cthulhu (Frederick). Here are Saturday’s top scores after the first half:

Love in the Time of Cthulhu (Frederick): 86
Five Sure (Loudoun): 86
Killer Snails (Maryland): 86
Dusty Baker School of Management (Maryland): 86
PC Principals (NoVa): 85

ROUND 3:

Our second half began with a trip to the box office, as we asked for either the highest grossing film starring Woody Allen or the highest grossing film directed by Woody Allen (unadjusted for inflation). Exactly one-quarter of our teams earned bonus points with these two correct answers:

Later, we asked for the two-word title which was shared by a song by The Beatles, an annual music festival in Oslo, and a novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Just over half of our teams answered correctly with this title:

Among the teams earning their wager here, about half earned a two-point bonus by also naming the subtitle of this Beatles song: “This Bird Has Flown”. We closed the third round with the most difficult wagering question of the game:

–> The names of these two Greek letters are derived from the fact that they were ‘small’ and ‘large’ versions of the same sound.

Even with teams only required to name one out of the two letters for credit, we saw only 32% of the field earn their wagers with either Omega or Omicron. A dozen teams knew both answers to snag the final two-point bonus of the round. Our third round featured three teams who notched perfect scores of 36 points: Love in the Time of Cthulhu (Frederick), Bad Hombres (NoVa), and Uncles With Benefits (NoVa).

ROUND 4:

The final round began with a look at the current playoff drought of the Dallas Cowboys, who have just two playoff victories and zero NFC Championship Game appearances in the last 20 years. We learned that John Hancock’s birthday was chosen for the unofficial holiday of National Handwriting Day. Actually, we didn’t learn that, most of you already knew that. Later, we played a word game using the names of foreign countries:

–> At eight letters, what country has the longest name among those whose one-word English name does NOT include ANY of the letters R, S, T, L, N, or E?

We closed the fourth round with the most difficult bonus question of the game:

–> The Nelson family starred on this series which is the longest-running live-action sitcom in U.S. history at 14 seasons. A current TV comedy was recently renewed for a 13th and 14th season, potentially tying this record. Name either one of these series.

It was actually the current series that was much more difficult to name, as only four teams earned a two-point bonus with these two answers:

Across all four venues, only PC Principals (NoVa) was able to post a perfect score in the final round. Here are Saturday’s top scores after the final round:

Love in the Time of Cthulhu (Frederick): 161
PC Principals (NoVa): 161
Dusty Baker School of Management (Maryland): 157
Killer Snails (Maryland): 157
Kitten Mittens (NoVa): 154

SATURDAY’S FINAL QUESTION (63.7% success rate):

–> In Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code”, the character of Bishop Aringarosa is presented for most of the story as if he is at the center of the church’s conspiracies, but is later revealed to have been innocently duped by the true antagonist of the story. Fittingly, Aringarosa’s name can be translated loosely from Italian into what English phrase?

With a rather difficult set of questions, it was a daunting task to pull off the Perfect 21 this afternoon, but PC Principals (NoVa) and Uncles With Benefits (NoVa) attained that that feat by not missing a single wagering question. Here are Saturday’s overall top scores:

Killer Snails (Maryland): 169
Dusty Baker School of Management (Maryland): 169
PC Principals (NoVa): 167
Kitten Mittens (NoVa): 165
Uncles With Benefits (NoVa): 164
Bad Hombres (NoVa): 162
Brother of Menelaus (NoVa): 161
Love in the Time of Cthulhu (Frederick): 161
Slapsgiving (Maryland): 161
Satan’s School for Squirrels (Frederick): 160

Our Maryland game featured a five-question tiebreaker for the ages, as two of our best teams (Killer Snails and Dusty Baker School of Management) went toe-to-toe in a five-question showdown, with our eventual champions correctly answering all five questions to win by a SINGLE POINT!