Some exquisite weather set the backdrop for Wednesday night Pour House Trivia, as we once again welcomed a new venue to the PHT family.  Top Golf in Alexandria kicked off the start of trivia night with a slew of new teams in the mix.  Tonight’s game asked us the age-old question: What do a renaissance painter and a former NFL placekicker have in common?  Quite a lot apparently.  OK, maybe that’s not an age-old question.  Anyway, on to the recaps!

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

–> Highest Overall Score: The Fan Club (The Tavern) with 172

–> Highest Score after Round 4: Bam (The Tavern) with 164

–> Highest First Half Score: The Fan Club with 90

–> Perfect 21 (correct on all wagers and final): Dusty Baker School of Management

–> A theme of World Leaders and Celebrity Couples on the halftime page played to an average of 15.9, with about 10% of our teams scoring 20 points.

–> Likewise, about 10% of our teams earned six points on the 6-4-2 question by knowing that the fashion line EleVen (note the capital V) was established by Venus Williams.

TONIGHT’S FINAL QUESTION (22.9% success rate):

–> Among the 17 people who are namesakes for Elements of the Periodic Table, who is by far the oldest, passing away more than 300 years before the next person on the list?  (you’ll find the answer later in this blog)

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Valley Grill in Middletown, MD

I have to say that I am greatly appreciative of all of you fine folks at Valley Grill Sports Bar in Middletown, we consistently average fifteen teams here, and it is your dedication that makes it all possible.  I am going to have a quick recap tonight just to break things up a bit, so here we go…  Round one’s first category was about a 50/50 toss-up unless you were fairly familiar with mortgage securities.  Freddie Mac was the answer, but Fannie Mae was thrown around just as much in the news so it is understandable if you missed this one.  The rest of round one was fairly standard with a Disney Princess, a broken collarbone, President James Madison, and Billy Joe Armstrong shown here “Simpsons” style:

Round two went rather quickly and without too much difficulty.  Players did well identifying some TV sitcoms, using the Swiss Franc over the Euro, differentiating between indoor and outdoor volleyball, and the name August used in a non-calendar sense.  The toughest question of this round was one asking about this fuel station, which used to be a truck stop here in Frederick back in the day:

The third round featured scoring opportunities with former child star Joey Lawrence, when your meal is considered your entree and when it is not, and Atlanta, Albuquerque, and Anchorage being the largest cities in their respective states to start with “A”.  A Greek Renaissance painter threw a few teams for a loop, and missing this band by far was the biggest surprise of the game:

Our final round trucked right along with the majority of the teams scoring big on Oscar winning actresses under thirty years of age, and the catfish, which I don’t care how you prepare it, it is the most disgusting tasting fish in the humble hosts’s opinion. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find “The Lost World”, but it did take his author, and about one third of the team’s knew Cuba was once a U.S. territory. Tonight biggest whiff went to this former U.S. President and his fiance’, the only two people to tie the knot in The White House:

Only two teams nailed Copernicus for the final question tonight, and we had to have a Venus Williams tiebreaker to settle second and third place.  Here are the results:

First Place:  Fat Kids are Hard to Kidnap

Second Place:  Areola Grande

Third Place:  Team Second Place

Next week’s first category:  “Father Ted”

~ Ronnie

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The Tavern in Olney, MD

We had a GREAT game of trivia at The Tavern in Olney on Wednesday!  The teams that play here really know how to compete and make the game exciting to score, and I even got a Final Question first place flip flop as the cherry on top!  One team held first place all the way through the halftime puzzle page, but by the time I re-read the scores after the 6-4-2 bonus question someone else had overtaken them.  That new leader was still in first by four points before the final question was asked, and both teams went the full 12-point wager.  Only two teams answered the final correctly, and one of them was the team who lost their first place lead after the puzzle page!

Finishing in third place tonight was Olney the Lonely, dropping to second place after the final was the always dangerous Bam!, and having a real up and down game but thankfully finishing on the “up” was The Masters Week Fan Club!

Our winners have chosen Films Based on the Works of Phillip K. Dick for next week’s winners choice category, so study up, and come join us for a fun game of trivia at The Tavern on Wednesday!!

~ Jon J

 

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Belles’ Sports Bar in Frederick, MD

It was a great Wednesday night of Pour House Trivia here at Belles’ Sports Bar in Frederick.  We had six teams of regulars battling it out while our newest trainee was learning the ropes.

After cruising through the first round, the audio question was easy for most of you guys, with a lot of teams knowing all three TV shows featured in the clip: “Bewitched”, “Roseanne”, and “The Office”.  Later in the round, only one team earned a two-point bonus by correctly guessing both of the landlocked European countries that still use a currency called the Franc: Lichtenstein and Switzerland.  (We’d like to remind team Flight Level Awesome that Africa is not a country in Europe.)

Flight Level Awesome killed it on the half-time sheet, scoring all 20 points.  Going into the second half, teams Kobe Buffalo Meat (85 pts) and Formal Protest (84 pts) were neck and neck.  Players were “Cold” guessing the answer to question three in the third round, or maybe they just “Don’t Wanna Know”, that these songs are by Maroon 5.  But everyone did know that an entree is the main course on most restaurant menus in the U.S. (though not in France apparently).

We had a super close game before the final, but only one team – Kobe Buffalo Meat – scored points on this elemental question, leaving the rest of the competition in the dust.  Here are your top teams tonight:

First Place:  Kobe Buffalo Meat

Second Place:  Globogym Purple Cobras

Third Place:  Flight Level Awesome

Next week’s first category:  NASCAR (rev your engines!)

~ Allison

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Bennigan’s in Frederick, MD

Another Wednesday night means another night of abuse at the hands of the trivia teams here at Bennigan’s in Frederick, in our usual rowdy game of Pour House Trivia!

Highlights of the Night:

In “The-Award-For-Most-Teams-Not-Even-Attempting-A-Two-Point-Bonus: Goes to the Word in Common question from Round 2 tonight; 80% of the teams tonight weren’t even sure about the month, let alone three of the four items I described.  Best response I got when I asked if they had any guesses? “Do I look like I know anything about any of these things??” I mean, I guess not?

In “Could-You-Repeat-That-Again”: Domenikos Theotokopoulos. I wanna say I spelled that seven times and repeated the whole question four times.  I’m fairly certain the entire two minutes of that question was filled with me talking.  That’s far too much talking.  Hearing it for the umpteenth time is only gonna do so much guys…asking for the accents though, that took the cake.

In “Heartbreak-Of-The-Night”: Heartbreak of the Night goes to my only team to correctly answer the final question tonight.  After being the only team to correctly identify three of the August titles.  After never having been in the top spots before.  If they had wagered aggressively tonight, they’d have taken first place.  It physically hurt me to not be able to give them first prize tonight.  Next time, I’m sure they’re gonna get it!

In third place tonight, a nice little cap to the festivities for Happy Birthday Keirsten!

In second place tonight, my underdogs, the team I was rooting for all night, who couldn’t quite get there, Big Jefe!

In first place tonight, Momentary Lapse of Reason!

Great game tonight guys!  Next week we’ll see Big Jefe take it down 😉 when we start the game off with a question on the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes”!  Study up, and we’ll see you next time!

Until then,

~ Ian

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Woodside Deli in Gaithersburg, MD

Woodside Deli was a three team race the entire night!

In round 1, High Water Mark started strong with a perfect round while The Fellowship and Contribution went four for five.  The key to the round was the Fibonacci series!  The Fibonacci series cost The Fellowship their two-point bonus and the entire wager for Contribution while High Water Mark nailed it.  After round 1, High Water Mark had a 3-point lead over The Fellowship and a seven point lead over Contribution.

Round 2 did not provide much excitement in terms of the game because the top three teams were on point with 14 out of 15 questions being successfully answered and only a single regular point was missed! The gas station question was tough for The Fellowship likely because of the young median age of the team and the lack of 76 gas stations in the area!  The puzzle page is where Contribution made their move as they made up four points on the field!

High Water Mark pulled ahead in round 3 by doing all the little things right – grabbing the two point bonuses, going 5 for 5 in the round, and hitting the 2-4-6 at 4 points. Both Contribution and The Fellowship faltered only a little bit. The Fellowship missed a couple of two point bonuses and a single point on the regular questions while Contribution went with the gutsy 6 point guess on the 2-4-6 (guessing V is for Victoria Beckham) but ultimately having their gamble not pay off when V was for Venus Williams.

Contribution went perfect in the fourth round while The Fellowship missed the small value questions (a 1 and a 3) for Contribution to pull solidly into 2nd. The fourth round, however, was all about High Water Mark and by the end of the night they had wrapped up a 21 for 21 for the evening, a large enough lead on the final to play it safe, and their choice for the first category next week which is the Stanley Cup!

Both Contribution and The Fellowship missed their final to keep their positions the same, 2nd for Contribution and 3rd for The Fellowship.

~ Scott

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Nido’s Ristorante in Frederick, MD

Coming soon…

Next week’s first category:  U.S. Presidents

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Top Golf in Alexandria, VA

A few days ago, we had MLB’s Opening Day.  But today, we had our own Opening Night with Pour House Trivia’s premiere at TopGolf Alexandria.  Now, you may think that golf and trivia may be an odd combination, but what better way to relax in the evening exercising your brain after exercising your swing?  And on our premiere night, five teams seemed to agree with us and became our first teams at TopGolf.

Round 1 started off, of course, with a question on golf.  It was a piece of cake for many, but when asked who the defending champion of the Masters tournament was, that was when we started having a real competition.  We then moved on to Round 2 where we started off with the first audio question on TV sitcoms.  It was a fun question that allowed many of our teams to pick up two-point bonuses.  Round 2 also had our first trap as we asked for Green Day’s best-selling studio album.  Only one team figured out “Dookie”, while everyone else thought “American Idiot”.

The halftime puzzle sheet was a nice mix of academic and pop culture questions that let many of our teams show off their general knowledge.  Only one team could identify Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, while a different team were the only ones that knew that Johnny Depp recently divorced from Amber Heard.  That resulted in a lead change.  And another lead change occurred when one team picked up the bonus on a question of the Cascades’ tallest peak, having actually climbed it.  And then another lead change happened when teams answered our 6-4-2 question.  For some teams, the risk paid off, while for others, not so much.

At the end, we had our final question on the origin of the quotation, “Remember the Alamo!”, and two teams remembered well enough to grab the first and second place spots.  In fact, our first place team was a single player at the bar, so more kudos to him for finishing on top.  And because tonight was our Opening Night, we threw in an extra $50 cash bonus for the champions.  So, our winner got all $50 for himself!  Here was our medal table for tonight:

First Place:  Big Pat

Second Place:  Team Monica

Third Place:  Team Squad

Big Pat then got the honor of picking TopGolf’s first category of the week and he chose: Premiere League Soccer.

Join us for trivia every Wednesday at 7.00pm.  Hope to see you then!

~ Chris

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Bennigan’s in Clarksburg, MD

Dusty Baker School of Management was back in action tonight after taking a week off here at Bennigan’s in Clarksburg, though they were missing one of their players.  Most of you already know that Dusty Baker is a three-man squad.  They’ve finished #1 and #2 respectively at our last two World Series Tournaments, and they did it with that all-star trio they’ve got virtually every week.  When they play as two, they’re good but losing 33.33333% of your team is a big deal.  It’s not like a seven-man squad dropping to six; going from three to two is rough.  Tonight they were without one of their three, and it was quite the struggle.

Dusty Baker was off to a fine start but missed a few bonus points here and there, meaning they were actually NOT in the top spot after the first two rounds!  I honestly would’ve expected them to be my lone team to get bonus points on the “August” question tonight, but no team able to pick up three of those titles.  Each individual title (“August Rush”, “Light in August”, “August: Osage County”, and August Wilson) was answered by different teams, but no one coming up with three for the bonus there.  I guess that obscure movies, old literature, and semi-famous playwrights were not in the cards for our teams.  I’ll keep that in mind next time heheh… Dusty Baker’s non-lead-going-into-halftime is a rare occurrence as they’ve won every game this season save for last week when they didn’t show up and another game a few weeks back when it was just two of them.  Tonight they looked to overcome the adversity and take down a W with two guys.

The third round seemed to favor them a bit more as most teams struggled with the set of five questions.  The Add a Letter question was the most popular bonus category tonight; but nearly EVERY team missed it.  We already knew it was gonna be bad when the first part of the Add a Letter was a Renaissance painter… High culture never goes over well haha… I’ve gotten much hate from writing opera, art, and old theatre questions; tonight was no different.  We wanted El Greco and we needed to add a letter to get to former NFL kicker (Al) Del Greco.  Well, two teams picked it up: Cash Me Outside and Dusty Baker.  Rhymes with Orange was leading going into the third round, but they bonused this question and brainfarted, thinking it was CHANGE a Letter, going with “El Greco” and “Al Greco”… Which FEELS right, but they didn’t fulfill the need to ADD a Letter and it cost them.

Rhymes with Orange still looked like they wanted the win, but they’d need some luck, as they trailed by about ten points going into the final question, holding up the third place spot.  Cash Me Outside was down by six points to Dusty Baker, playing from the second place spot most of the night (Cash, that is..).  Dusty Baker bet the appropriate seven points to cover the second place team’s potential 12-point bet, but their bet was nearly meaningless as they got the final correct and secured the victory!  A two-man team, still very strong.  A solid 158 going into the final is NOT a score to be upset by.  It’s decent.  Second place went to Rhymes with Orange, who leapfrogged Cash Me Outside after they missed the final.  Third place went to Matt Damon who got the final correct and jumped up three spots!  Good finish for some teams but no chance to beat the powerhouse of Dusty Baker tonight!

What a game guys! Glad to see you all coming out, we’re back next time with an opening category of Paul Newman, courtesy of your winners! I’ll see you guys then!

~ Bill

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Memories in Mount Airy, MD

On a beautiful Spring day, teams stayed inside and played through our highly competitive game this week at Memories Charcoal House in Mount Air.  With some challenging two-point bonuses keeping everyone within reach of first place, it was time to see who really knows the most.

In a tight first half, perennial favorites Sexual Chocolate crept out to an early lead by securing the only perfect score on the halftime puzzle page, which included the team recognizing the President of Liberia.  LOWL kept it close with a respectable score of 19 points, and trailed by just three points at the break.

One team did run into a surprising problem, which happens to every trivia team eventually. A word of advice: Always double check that the answer you wrote down IS the answer you want to submit. It happens to everyone, which makes, “Trust, but Verify” a pretty good rule of thumb.

Except me. Don’t verify my outlandish statements, just trust that I’m always right.

Sexual Chocolate maintained its lead in the second half after scoring six points on our difficult 6-4-2 question (once again, the only team to do so), but the rest of the field slowly caught up, with LOWL finally breaking through to take a one-point lead, thanks to nailing the final two-point bonus of the game!  It really could have been anyone’s game, but with a tough final ahead, who came out on top this week?

Third Place: In Last Place

Second Place: Sexual Chocolate

First Place: LOWL

LOWL taking it down tonight, betting everything on the final and coming up with the right answer.  They selected 1980s Thrash Metal as the first category for next week’s game, so bang your heads and I’ll see you next week!

~ Nick

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Furnace Bar and Grill in Thurmont, MD

Tonight at the Furnace Bar and Grill in Thurmont, we hosted a great game of Pour House Trivia, getting some competition from some new teams that played for the first time.  With the exception of one question in the first round, our first ten questions did not pose many problems for our highly motivtaed field of teams.  At the halftime, puzzle page, We Need An Adult overtook the lead from Breakfast For Dinner by securing an impressive score of 19 points.  They must really know their world leaders (and celebrity couples)!

Breakfast For Dinner wouldn’t go down without a fight as they were going for nine straight victories. Going into the final round, Breakfast For Dinner was still down by two points, but a difficult question on Cuba meant that BFD trailed by ten points by the end of the fourth round.  Breakfast For Dinner was forced to go for it all on the final question, as We Need An Adult only needed to wager three points for its ‘lock-out’ bet.  Breakfast For Dinner was able to answer Copernicus correctly on the final question.  As they waited for the final scores to be announced they were hoping to come out on top, however We Need An Adult was able to prevail and take home the win, knocking Breakfast For Dinner and their impressive winning streak.  A shout out to them for a great run this season.

Rounding out the top three on the night was Wolfpack!

Next week’s first round category is an audio question on Guitar Hero 1 Playlist.

Until next time

~ Devan

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Barefoot Bernie’s in Hagerstown, MD

May showers bring April storms, and April storms sometimes keep trivia teams away.  But that was not the case tonight at Barefoot Bernie’s on the Dual Highway in good old Hagerstown, as we hosted a sizable crowd of veteran teams playing some hard hitting trivia.  In addition to our regular teams, we have a new contender: the Cats, who made their debut tonight in respectable fashion. Welcome and we hope to see you back next week!

It was an extremely tight game in the first half.  Alternative Answers led the game for the first two rounds and had the high score of 19 points on the halftime puzzle page, but the third round saw calamity as they missed their bonus chip and fell into third.  The final round saw Alternative Answers fighting against the new leaders, Pen Island for every point.  The Sad Fat Dragons took a dive on last question in Round 4 and let Alternative Answer climb into the second spot, with only three points to go to catch Pen Island.

But our heroes brought it back when they pulled out the only correct answer of the evening for the final question! Pen Island took second, and the Sad Fat Dragons had a third place showing.

Next week, we’re going have to binge watch Season 1 of “Samurai Jack” from Cartoon Network, because that will be our first category for next week.  We’ll see you then at Barefoot Bernie’s!

~ Sean

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Applebee’s in Waynesboro, PA

As always, we hosted an epic game of Pour House Trivia here tonight at Applebee’s in Waynesboro, with eight teams battling it out in a tough match that had several different lead changes over the course of the evening.  We started off the night asking what countries were referenced in the first line of the Marine Corps Hymn, and followed that up with a Disney question where we learned that the Prince in Sleeping Beauty was named Phillip (not just “Prince Charming”).  Round one ended with Bees? and Not Your Team tied for first, but the rest of the pack was not far behind…

Round two shook up the leaderboard as Mischief Managed turned in a very strong round, along with one of the top scores on the puzzle page, to take over the lead at the half.  Round three was a little bit tougher, with only a few teams getting our question about the group who recently released the song “Cold” (Maroon 5).  Thanks in part to being one of these teams, Wingin’ It ended the round in the lead.

We began round four asking about Best Actress Oscar Winners under the age of 30, and finished it up with one of our famous “Three Clues” questions where, among other clues, we asked about which country hosts the Bacardi distillery, which was Cuba.  We HATE Groot scored a near perfect round, which gave them the lead going into the final question.  However, here’s where wagering becomes important as We HATE Groot had a six-point lead over Wingin’ It, but wagered seven for the final.  The final was a TOUGH one, asking about the oldest scientist who is the namesake for a chemical element (it was Copernicus).  Wingin’ It strategically bet zero, so with We HATE Groot unable to come up with the answer, Wingin’ It took home the victory by ONE point!!  It was an awesome finish to a great night, and thanks again to all of the teams for coming out.  Here are your top three teams:

First Place:  Wingin’ It

Second Place:  We HATE Groot

Third Place:  Not Your Team

Next week’s winner’s choice category is Game of Thrones, so get to reading those books and watching those episodes and we’ll see you next week!

~ Kyle

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