Tuesday night is always the busiest night for Pour House Trivia, with 14 venues and more than 100 teams testing their knowledge.  Tonight’s game featured a final question that flipped the standings at many of our venues, and with a number of big winning streaks on the line, it proved to be quite a finish.  Let’s get right to the recaps:

TUESDAY’S STATS AND FACTS (99 teams across 14 venues):

–> Highest Overall Score: Capitol City Goofballs (Capitol City Brewing) with 168

–> Highest Score after Round 4: The Fan Club (Senor Tequila’s) with 164

–> Highest First Half Score: The Fan Club with 94

–> Perfect 21 (correct on all wagers and final): Capitol City Goofballs

–> Our halftime page featured fast food advertisements and famous “Day”s.  Across the field, the average score was 16.8, with seven teams scoring 20 points.

–> The 6-4-2 was certainly difficult, as only ONE TEAM (Light It Up Blue) scored six points by knowing the World Wife Carrying Championships are held in Finland.

TUESDAY’S FINAL QUESTION (21.3% success rate):

–> Which word coined in the 1990s was derived as a combination of Japanese words meaning ‘picture’ and ‘character’?  (you’ll find the answer later in this blog)

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Whole Foods Market in Ashburn, VA

At Whole Foods Market in Ashburn, we hosted a fun quaint game today with an enjoyable audience who stopped by at random times during the game!  Trogdor ran away with the game from beginning to end with a robust performance in all four rounds.  Team Blue started strong and tapered off in the final half to finish second.  Team Just Stopping By did just that with a bit of a late start but had a strong finish to make it into 3rd place.

Highlights included:

1st round The Beatles question – Trogdor nailed this question almost immediately while Just Blue thought long and hard before the answer struck them at the last minute. Then Just Blue had the “Oh” moment when the answers were read.

2nd round Bible Books – Just Blue pulled themselves back into the game on this question when they nailed the question for the full 9 and Trogdor had an uncharacteristic miss for a high value 7!

3rd round questions 3 & 5 – Trogdor pulled away from the field during this round with questions 3 (NCAA) and question 5 (actresses and their roles) stumped the field.

4th round – Just Stopping By was able to make up ground on the leaders late in the game but by this point Trogdor and Team Blue has built up to big a lead for Just Stopping By to make up ground on the top 2.

Next month’s first question is: One Hit Wonders!

~ Scott

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Capitol City Brewing in Arlington, VA

Spring is in full swing in the ????region this week, with ???? floating in the ???? and outdoor patios packed with happy couples sipping????and???? .  But the real action at Cap City (or should I say ????????) is inside the restaurant, where ten ???????? squads faced off to flex their trivia ???? for another mind-bending ???? of trivia!

Round One set the tone for the night, with questions both surprising and entertaining about some ???? show titles with a common ⏹ bond, the world-renowned home of ????, and a hardworking but historically ???? ⚾ team.  Biggest stumper in this Round was a 2-point bonus: the world’s bestselling brand of tire is ????stone – who knew?  (Team Thinken Kraken, that’s who – Tip of the ????!)

In Round Two, we covered ???????? hits with a compass theme (unfortunately, my personal hero Kanye West was somehow left out), recalled an eccentric ???? political outsider from an era more decent than our own, and shared predictable (but fun!) double entendres about the longest ???? in an adult ???? body.  ???? and ⛪-goers in the crowd were able to show off their ???? of the ???? by remembering the Book of ????.  And after our halftime page made us all hungry for ????????????????????, the Capitol City Goofballs were on top, closely followed by ALL CAPS and Show Me on the ????.

Round 3 was a real ????, with challenging questions that tested whether we could find the ???? sign on our ???? without looking, and our knowledge of NCAA ???? in past decades.  And we all learned that Thomas Kinkade is not the only famous “???? of ????” – the Goofballs extended their lead by being the only team to know J.M.W. Turner before I read the multiple choice.  Another Tip of the ????!

Wow, How Do You Know This: The 6-4-2 started off with a pretty bizarre first clue about the location of the World ????????????.  Only one team, Light It Up Blue, got the correct answer for 6 points, and without any hesitation.  This happy ???? just shrugged and said, “we’re training!”  ????????????

Our teams finished the night in good form, facing Round 4’s questions about a new hit ???? (????????), medieval philosophy, and our  ????’s surprising wealth in various “World Capitals” of pork, insurance, etc.  Going into the Final, the Goofballs led the field by ???? points, with ALL CAPS, Menace 2 Sobriety, and the Valley ???? all in position to contend.  Word Origins Finals are always a lot of ???? but also ????????, and this was no exception.  Just ☝ team figured out the right answer, allowing them to ???? down the win!  ????????????  Your top three: ????

First Place:  Capitol City Goofballs

Second Place:  ALL CAPS

Third Place:  Valley Girls

Next week’s first category:  Scientists and their Units ????

~ Austin

Next week’s first category:  Scientists and Their Units

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Champion Billiards in Frederick, MD

Coming soon…

 

 

 

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Cugini’s Restaurant in Poolesville, MD

Thanks to you all for the wonderful sentiments for my return to Cugini’s after missing last game due to illness.  It’s still kind of up in air as to what it is I am dealing with, but x-rays are all clear and the meds seem to have me back to near 100%.  Kudos to Jon Jeffries for covering for me last week, and I shall certainly pass on all of the positive feedback on the great job he did.  We had nine teams participate tonight, and it turned out to be one hell of a game. Our first round covered the hit TV series “Criminal Minds”, some Cleveland Indians baseball, Bridgestone tires, Spongebob, and this recent addition to the UNESCO World Heritage sites:

Round two featured a “directional” audio clue featuring the likes of Will Smith and Miranda Lambert. We immediately followed up with a pair of ancient censuses as chronicled in the Old Testament book of Numbers, and remembered billionaire H. Ross Perot and his affect on the 1992 Presidential election.  Most of the teams picked our biology category as their second round bonus, and scored big on the longest bone in the human body.  Lastly our three clues for one word category finished off the round with this memorable scene from a popular 1981 Bill Murray film:

The first question in the third round seemed to be the most daunting of the night as we only had three of our nine teams answer correctly, and only one of the three managing to pull of the two point bonus.  What can I say, 19th century Romantic landscape painters is certainly a subject befitting the toughest of Jeopardy tournaments.  The rest of the round moved right along, and the scores climbed with some simple arithmetic, neighboring rivals in NCAA Basketball, and actress Glenn Close’s remarkable early career. We also talked about the effects of too much sugar intake, as shown by Mini Me here:

Our final round is where the scores really started to tighten up with some quick (and correct) answers on The Weeknd’s 2016 album “Starboy”, former V.P. Joe Biden’s Senate seat, and the American multinational publishing company who has made sure over the years that we have had plenty of family friendly reading to enjoy.  Teams did very well identifying the “Rubber Capital of the World”, as well as a couple of other well known “capital of the world” cities.  It was also nice to see the return of our last word/first word category, and it was doubly nice with a little Star Trek reference sprinkled in.  A zero strategic wager ensured third place for one of our teams tonight, as we had only one team, tonight’s winners, nail the final question.  Here are the results:

First Place:  No Clue

Second Place:  What Could Go Wrong?

Third Place:  Never Mind

Next week’s first category:  The Washington Nationals

~ Ronnie

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Orioles Nest in Frederick, MD

Coming soon…

Next week’s first category:  “The Shawshank Redemption”

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Senor Tequila’s in Germantown, MD

It’s Tuesday night, which means it must be time for another rousing game of Teams make fun of Ian – sorry, I mean Pour House Trivia, here at Senor Tequilas!

What? I’m a delicate flower, ok?!

Highlights of the Night:

In “Oh-Yeah-I-Forgot”: It’s never a good start to the night when you remember five minutes before the game is supposed to start that you have to sing for the teams.  I totally forgot that Ian Sings British New Wave was our first category tonight.  Thankfully, as it turns out, I know the words to a song that qualifies as British New Wave, so I didn’t have to stress TOO much practicing before show time.  Still, I hope you all enjoyed your “Dance, monkey, dance,” moment.  *sniff*

In “OK-I-Get-It-I’m-Working-On-It”: Message received, Fan Club.  I will work on changing up my music for you all. No need to get shady with that team name of yours. *sniffle*

In “All-of-You-Are-Children”: All I had to say was “19 inches in men” and every single one of my teams dissolved into a fit of giggles.  I didn’t even have to make a joke, they all, every one of them just lost it. Is that what it takes to get a laugh from you all?  Low brow?  Cause god help me I’ll go low brow if it’ll get the energy up in here!

The final was a rather interesting question, but a total whiff from our loyal teams meant that defensive wagering made a difference.

In third place tonight, Axl’s Doghouse!

In second place tonight, Beer Pressure!

In first place tonight, the Fan Club!

Good game everyone! Next week we’ll kick things off with MLB Geography! Study up, and we’ll see you next time!

Until then,

~ Ian

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FireFlies in Alexandria, VA

It looks like the sunshine has lured some folks away from trivia tonight.  What’s so great about the outdoors, huh?  All the fun is INSIDE with FRIENDS and BEER and TRIVIA, and don’t forget BEER 😉  Three tried and true teams joined me tonight at Fireflies, so they literally all went home winners tonight.  To start, while I think two teams were completely guessing, ALL teams were able to correctly answer our first question of the night – a triple 50/50 identifying songs of either Butthole Surfers or Nada Surf.  Honestly, the 12-year old in me just had fun saying “butthole” multiple times on the microphone.  A two-point bonus question was the toughest part of Round 1 – while all the teams knew that half the rubber used in the world is for tires, not a one could name best selling company – the oh-so-Japanese sounding Bridgestone.  The second round question about a famous billionaire had us all putting out our best Ross Perot impressions – “Can I finish?  Can.  I.  Finish?”  And of course we all got a laugh at the question about the biggest bone – the one in men that can measure 19 inches?  Get your minds out of the gutter, you know its the femur.

Round 3 was rolling along rather well for our teams until the last question about actresses and their roles.  Teams were aghast to learn an actress had earned Oscar nominations for each of her FIRST three films.  Only one correctly named Glenn Close, but nobody had even heard of “Albert Nobbs”, the movie that earned her her latest nomination.  A woman playing a man in order to escape oppression?  Sound like an easy Oscar win!

The 6-4-2 question left many scratching their heads about wife-carrying competitions, but they realized by the four-point clue that if you want to carry your wife, the best place to do it is in Finland.  The final round stumper came when identifying a philosophy and publishing company that shared the same name.  Our true scholars quickly named Scholastic, leaving the other two teams in the dust.  After the fourth round, everyone seemed securely in the top three spots.  But it seems a little friendly competition was happening on the side, and teams encouraged each other to go big or go home (or go big and THEN go home).  As a result, the second place Gone-zaga team was the only team to get it right propelling them to 1st place. Placings in order:

First Place:  Gone-zaga

Second Place:  Einhorn is Finkel, Finkel is Einhorn

Third Place:  Menace 2 Sobriety

Next week’s first category:  “The Dukes of Hazzard”

Hope to see MORE of you next Tuesday!!!

~ Kate

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Shuckin’ Shack in Frederick, MD

Let me just start this little weekly ritual by expressing my undying appreciation and infinite love for Mrs. Chief, who always has my back. We like to say “we are a team”, but honestly, Mrs. Chief is the “team” and I’m just the equipment manager. Were it not for her selflessness tonight, our trivia experience would have been drastically different.  A 1300 appointment at Georgetown University Hospital to remove my cast (after 17 weeks) ran so long that I was ensnared by the evening rush on I-270. I think most of you understand what kind of hell that is. Consequently, Mrs. Chief had to print puzzles and scoresheets, and generally get the laptop setup — all before I could arrive at precisely 7PM to start hosting. She did this in priority of her own weighty responsibilities: grades are due tomorrow morning at 0700. Most of you know she’s a teacher; hell, some of YOU are teachers and have griped about grades being due tomorrow.

Nonetheless. We got the game off to a great start and actually managed to finish semi-on-time. Thank you, customers and players of PHT at Shuckin’ Shack, for your patience, forgiveness, and general affection. And thank YOU, Mrs. Chief. Tonight would have been a disaster without your help.

Moving on to the game:

Observations: Team Mojito Lime has an excuse (being slightly hammered) for their performance in the second half.  I’m glad you stayed through the end.  Commitment means something, even if you might be seeing two Chiefs by the Final Final Final Question.

Turd Ferguson?  Aside from having my favorite team name of the night, well… you were consistent.  A bit behind, a bit ahead, you played your cards close to your chest and managed to secure a high finish despite a less-than ideal first half.  Well done.

Mother Shuckers. Remember when I said that if someone had served on the military they shouldn’t get “Stripe(s)” wrong. Somehow despite having a NSW warrior on your team, you hit the limbo bar and promptly crashed into the Budweiser crate.  On the Final Question, I distinctly heard, “Oh, she’s got this”. Smiles were abound as you submitted your answer… your incorrect answer.  But I love you all. We give each other hell all game, and it gives me energy and inspiration. Thanks for being great sports.

Enough bloviating. Here are this week’s finishers:

First Place:  Donner Party (all this time, and every member shows up each week. I suspect they aren’t eating each other.)

Second Place:  This guy:

Third Place:  Scared Money Don’t Make Money

Next week’s AWESOME first category:  “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

Until next Tuesday,

Fair Winds and Following Seas, you miscreants,

~ Chief

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Top Golf in Ashburn, VA

We hosted a great game of Pour House Trivia tonight at Top Golf in Ashburn!  While a few teams got off to a tough start with our winner’s choice category of Stephen King novels, the rest of the first two rounds were close, with Kelly’s Heroes, Taco Tuesday, and the 2x4s  (I’M NOT SAYING THAT WHOLE NAME GUYS! :P) not far from each other at the top of the leaderboard.  The scores on the halftime puzzle page were high too, with no team scoring below 14 points, and Colin’ Allright topped the field with 19 points.

As expected, the next two rounds offered more difficult questions.  Team Pi was the only team to earn all five wagers in the third round, while only two teams scored points on our question on Actresses and Their Roles.  The most surprising moment of the second half was that only one team made a joke with the human body question! And you know who you are…

Pi started to edge the gap towards the end of the game, with our leaders Kelly’s Heroes and Taco Tuesday only separated by a few points.  They happened to be the only three teams that answered our final question correctly, so the final standings looked like this:

First Place:  Kelly’s Heroes

Second Place:  Taco Tuesday

Third Place:  Pi

Next week’s first category: “The Princess Bride”!

See you then!

~ Zach

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Primanti Brothers in Hagerstown, MD

We had a beautiful night of trivia on the open patio of Primanti Brothers at the Valley Mall out in Hagerstown on Tuesday night.  Our crowd included four regular teams and a few new faces out to have a good time.

As our overall leaders in the regular season standings, Give Us Your Beer Money took a commanding lead early on thanks to ten correct wagering answers in the first round and the high score on the halftime round.  Our leaders did miss a few questions in the second half, but they were able to hold the lead for the entire game.  I hope this give our other teams such as Lone Stranger and We Don’t Even Know incentive to find some more competitors to team up with!  Diversity is certainly a key to victory.

Our two underdogs fought tooth and nail, but stayed tied for second for almost the entire game. With a strategic wager of one point, Lone Stranger swung and whiffed on the finale.  But We Don’t Even Know came up from behind with a full 12 point wager to reclaim their tie.  It came down to the tie breaker to claim second place: what is the population of Finland?  The closest answer was given by We Don’t Even Know, which left left Lone Stanger (and his wife and daughter) in third.  Give Me You Beer Money couldn’t be caught tonight and took home another first.

I’ll be back next week for another exciting game!  We’ll begin next week’s game with the winner’s choice category of the Washington Nationals.

~ Sean

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Blue Parrott in St. Petersburg, FL

We had a great first trivia for April at the Blue Parrott in St. Petersburg tonight!  Lots of newcomers and familiar faces were scattered in our ranks, and they had a wonderful time playing.  We started out the evening strongly, with most of our teams earning a two-point bonus guessing three TV shows that feature the word “Square” (The only one I could get right was SpongeBob Square Pants). Other subjects in the first round included rubber, the 1948 World Series and France.

Our second round took a different direction with our first question, we had to listen to 3 songs with a compass direction in the title (East, West, etc) only a handful of our teams missed this one, and that powered us through round 2, one of our strongest rounds. Next up was bible trivia, political/pop culture trivia (Who could forget that Dana Carvey’s Ross Perot on SNL!?)

You could cut the tension with a knife as we started the second half.  Each team scored well with the puzzle sheet, and considering the first question was about fried chicken, ALL of our teams wagered nine and got it right!  WHat a great way to start off a round, right?  The other subjects we covered in this round include men’s basketball, and the chemical that your brain releases when you eat large amounts of sugar, ironically read by my lovely co-host Brittany as we ate donuts given to us by team Quizknows, and drank blue parrot’s signature root beer floats.  We won’t give any extra points for giving us food, but it definitely doesn’t hurt morale!

Brittany and I entered the last round sugar-filled and ready to go.  It was a close game, with Parrotheads and Quizknows tied most of the round.  An impressive amount of you got our first word/last word question right, and we ended our round 4 with topics such as grocery stores, The Weeknd, and “Capitals of the World” As usual, there was a huge swing for our final category, for the word in Japanese meaning “picture” or “character”.  Many guessed Anime, but the answer was actually Emoji! ????

Thank you so much to everyone who played, and C.J. for letting me borrow her trivia family this week.  A huge congrats to our winners:

First Place:  Parrotheads

Second Place:  Memphis Blues

Third Place:  Quiz Knows

~ Melissa

Next week’s first category:  “The Big Bang Theory”

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Monkey La La in Frederick, MD

Coming soon…

 

 

 

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Quincy’s South in Rockville, MD

Most of the teams joining us tonight at Quincy’s South were our regulars, and because of this, we had a very competitive game!  Nearly every team had a shot at winning the game tonight.  With lots of teams making little mistakes, it was the consistent ones who rose to the top!  Among those nearly mistake-free teams was Uncle Jack. They led at the half, sporting a score of 90 points, but they were trailed very closely by the Adventuresses and Sofa King Smart who looked to close the gap in the 3rd round.

Round 3 started off with a doozy. We asked about the 19th century English romantic painter, given the names James Mallord William, who was commonly known as “the Painter of Light”.  A few teams getting this before the choices came out but a pair of teams went early (and big) with Thomas Kinkade.  Kinkade took the name “Painter of Light” from J.M.W. Turner and even trademarked the moniker, though it was a title originally given to Mr. Turner.  Plus, Kinkade died in 2012 so for him to be the man we were asking about, he’d have to have been nearly 300 years old. Despite the facts, some teams still decided to go for it early and it cost them.

Wingardium Triviosa was one of the few teams who picked up the two-point bonus on the art question but they fell behind, missing a big wager on the science question. With a bunch of our competitive teams falling behind, it was Uncle Jack who remained unscathed going into the final question, leading by a single point with the Adventuresses behind them at 156 points. Final question really messed things up tonight, a wild finish!

So we asked the final question and we had two teams turn it in right away, Screaming Death Monkey and Balls Out. Neither of these teams were in the top three and because they answered so quickly, I assumed everyone was gonna get the final correct. Then the time ticked on and we weren’t getting any new responses in.  Then I began to get a flood of wrong answers: manga, emoticon, anime, Pokemon, etc.  Maybe these two responses would be the only correct ones?  Well, Smartinis came in late with a correct get too, but they were too far out already to make the top three.

Correct gets from SDM and Balls Out moved them up quite a bit.  A lot, actually.  Uncle Jack missed the final, finishing them in third place after leading all night.  Second place went to Screaming Death Monkey, who’s correct response moved them up five places!  An amazing finish after being behind all game!  The winner’s tonight, coming up with a correct response on the final, a first time win for Balls Out! Against all odds, they got some stuff to go their way, stuck it out, nailed the final and they have their first win to show for it!  Great finish!  I’ll be be back in a week with an opening question on 1980’s Movies, courtesy of your winners Balls Out!  Until then guys, thanks!

~ Bill

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Black Eyed Suzie’s in Bel Air, MD

The weather was so nice tonight that everyone decided to come out to Black Eyed Suzie’s in Bel Air and play some Pour House Trivia!  It was our second at this fantastic venue, and tonight’s game featured a number of returning teams ready to do battle.  We also featured a few teams, including the aptly name Quiz Lord.

Our teams fared very well in the first half, with Team Dammit scoring a number of two-point bonuses to take a commanding lead with 80 points at the break.  They also turned in the high score on the halftime puzzle round with a very impressive 18 points.  A new team, I’ll Have Another, followed closely behind by just a few points, with Backstreet Boyz in third.

Dammit extended their lead in the second half, and despite missing tonight’s final question, they were able to hang on for the victory!  Here are your top teams tonight:

First Place:  Dammit

Second Place:  Backstreet Boyz

Third Place:  I’ll Have Another

We are getting things going here at Black Eyed Suzie’s and it’s getting hot!  Next week we will be singing along to the Fab Four, when we open our game with the first category of The Beatles!  See you then!

~ Natalie