Wednesday Night Trivia with Magic Beans!

We offered a full slate of 15 trivia games on Wednesday night, as we near the halfway point of the Summer Fling season.  After three teams topped the immortal 180-point plateau earlier this month, would anyone else add their name to the PHT Wall of Fame?  A total of 117 teams had their chance as they joined in on tonight’s game of Pour House Trivia:

ROUND 1:

We began the night by visiting the Old West, specifically these two legendary figures:

Virtually every team knew that Billy the Kid (a.k.a. William Bonney / a.k.a. Henry McCarty) was the victim of an untimely death at age 21, but a very impressive number of teams also knew that lawman Pat Garrett was the one who gunned him down.  We continued with our nightly Three Clues question, which referenced this forgettable movie sequel:

The teams that earned a two-point bonus on this question probably were more familiar with the second clue of the question, which asked for the name of the Honey Nut Cheerios advertising mascot.  We continued the round by reciting some lyrics from this Latin heartthrob:

We closed the round with a little Olympic history, asking about the woman who scored the first Perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics.  Most of our teams earned bonus points by knowing both Nadia Comaneci and her home country of Romania.  With few surprises in the opening stanza, nine teams swept the round with 36 points.

ROUND 2:

Apparently, we were on a bit of a Latin music kick tonight, as we began the second round by featuring a Grammy-winning Latina in our audio question.  About half of our teams earned bonus points here by recognizing the theme song to the classic TV sitcom “One Day at a Time“, as well as the voice of this songstress, who sings the theme for the current Netflix re-make version:

The second round gave us our most difficult wagering question of the first half, in the rather unpopular category of U.S. Geography:

–> Which Great Lake is the world’s largest lake by surface area that is contained completely within a single country?

Despite the intricate wording of this question, the answer was actually much less complicated than at first glance, as Lake Michigan is the only one of the five Great Lakes which does NOT straddle the U.S. / Canadian border:

(Image courtesy of www.freeworldmaps.net)

Across the board, only 44% of our teams answered this question correctly.  We concluded the second round with a crossword-style question on cholera.  While most of our teams earned their wager, this proved to be the most difficult bonus question of the first half, as only 12% of our teams did not need the crossword-style hint in order to come up with the correct response.  Three teams swept the second round with a perfect score of 36 points: Fat Kids Are Hard to Kidnap (Valley Grill), Handshoes and Horse Grenades (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg), and Dusty Baker School of Management (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg).

HALFTIME:

Tonight’s halftime page dealt with pictures of ‘Junior’ celebrities, as well as matching notable dogs to their respective breed.  Our teams performed very well here, with 24% of the field notching a perfect score, and the overall average coming in 18.2 points.  Here are Wednesday’s top scores after the first half:

• Dusty Baker School of Management (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  92
• Handshoes and Horse Grenades (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  90
• Donner Party (Nido’s):  90
• Back to the Future Reference (Barefoot Bernie’s):  90
• Fat Kids Are Hard to Kidnap (Valley Grill):  89
• Oneders (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  89

ROUND 3:

With many teams riding a wave of confidence after the first half, that quickly ended with the third round, as our most difficult round featured questions on Cambodia and Dutch author Isak Dinesen (best known for her memoir “Out of Africa”).  These questions quickly separated the leaders from the rest of the pack, as only about one-third of our teams earned their wagers on either of these questions.  The first question of the round gave us our funniest wrong answer of the night: when asked to name the temple which appears on the national flag of Cambodia, Brewsual Suspects from Barefoot Bernie’s offered up the answer of Temple of Doom.  Good try, but we were looking for Angkor Wat:

After the rough start, some teams “rebounded” nicely with a question on this NBA legend, who is now the namesake for the NBA Finals MVP Award:

No teams swept the third round on Wednesday night with a perfect score.  Even with the bonus questions excluded, only six teams answered all five wagering questions correctly.

ROUND 4:

The final round did not begin well for many teams in the category of Musical Instruments:

–> What instrument is not only the largest found within a traditional string quartet, but also has the lowest pitch?

Many of our teams did not know that a traditional string quartet contains TWO violins, leaving the other two chairs for the viola and the correct response of the cello:

We saw a few nine-point wagers missed here, as only 48% of our teams earned points.  This question also gave us our most difficult bonus question of the night, as we asked for the Austrian composer who developed the modern version of the string quartet.  Only ONE TEAM (Southpaw Fish at Valley Grill) snagged those two bonus points by knowing that it was not Mozart, but Joseph Haydn.  Needless to say, no team swept the final round with a perfect score of 36 points.  Here are Wednesday’s top overall scores after the fourth round:

• Dusty Baker School of Management (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  167
• Deaf Squirrels (Memories):  158
• The Fan Club (The Tavern):  155
• Handshoes and Horse Grenades (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  154
• Donner Party (Nido’s):  153

FINAL QUESTION (13.8% success rate):

–> The first stage version of this English fairy tale is thought to have been written by Charles Dibdin.  During its first performance in 1819, it was subtitled “Harlequin and the Ogre”.  Name this fairy tale.

Most of our teams might not have realized it at the time, but nearly every well-known fairy tale is actually NOT of English origin.  Authors such as the Brothers Grimm (German), Charles Perrault (French), and Hans Christian Andersen (Danish) are each responsible for numerous fairy tales.  Eliminating the works of these writers helped those few teams that eventually came up with the correct response of “Jack and the Beanstalk”.  Thanks to tonight’s difficult final question, no team scored the Perfect 21 tonight.  Here are Wednesday’s top overall scores:

• Dusty Baker School of Management (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  167
• Donner Party (Nido’s):  163
• Witiots (Nido’s):  162
• Deaf Squirrels (Memories):  156
• Fat Kids Are Hard to Kidnap (Valley Grill):  150
• The Fan Club (The Tavern):  149
• Poovey Farms (Bennigan’s – Frederick):  147
• Handshoes and Horse Grenades (Bennigan’s – Clarksburg):  147
• Southpaw Fish (Valley Grill):  143
• Back to the Future Reference (Barefoot Bernie’s):  143

TONIGHT’S WINNERS:

Valley Grill in Middletown, MD:  Fat Kids Are Hard to Kidnap  (Next week’s first category: Billy Joel Lyrics)