Wednesday Trivia Wants to Believe!

Eighteen locations brought in a group of 164 teams on Wednesday for Pour House Trivia. We also welcomed our newest PHT venue, Celtic House in Arlington, VA, which hosted a 15-teamer on its debut night!

FIRST ROUND:

The game began with topics such as John F. Kennedy‘s prediction that the U.S. would go to the moon in the 1960s, the books of Charles Darwin, and the U.S. states that host the headquarters of various companies. The biggest curveball thrown to our teams here came at the end of the round:

• Winning the award with the Nationals and the Phillies, who is the most recent MLB player to win an MVP Award with each of two different teams?

Doing so in 2015 and 2021 respectively, Bryce Harper has that honor; 73% of our teams named him, but only about 10% added bonus points for naming the first MLB player to achieve that feat, A’s and Red Sox star Jimmie Foxx. In this round, nine teams reached a perfect score.

SECOND ROUND:

Three songs with names of major household items were played for the night’s audio question, followed by the most difficult wagering question of the night:

• Though it has nothing to do with telling time, which object found in many British pubs is nicknamed a London Clock?

A circular thing with numbers around it in a bar? That’s a dartboard, which had a correct-answer rate of 32%. Wagering questions for the rest of the round were relatively easy, but we had the two toughest bonus opportunities on Wednesday here. A question about director Judd Apatow saw only nine teams name his most recent movie, the Netflix release The Bubble. Later, we asked about CBS legal drama Bull, where a night-low eight squads knew that Hamilton actor Christopher Jackson starred in that show. With some toughies in this round, there were no perfect scores.

HALFTIME:

Topics at halftime here were solo artists that broke off from their famous musical groups, then matching literary characters to how they met their respective demise. On average, teams scored 16.4 points on this page, while 31 teams earned a perfect score. These teams sat atop the halftime standings:

• Einsteins of Beer (Memories): 86
• Stink Floyd (Belles’): 86
• Archived! (GearHouse): 85
• EIGHT TEAMS TIED WITH 84 POINTS

THIRD ROUND:

Three Clues about the name Madison started things off in the second half; a round-low 20% of teams got it after the first two clues for bonus points. A literary question came next, and ended up being the second half’s hardest query:

• In which satirical 18^th century novel do two nations go to war over a disagreement regarding the correct side to crack an egg?

About 45% of the field knew that to be Gulliver’s Travels. Other topics in this round included President Andrew Jackson, the origins of the phrase cut to the chase, and Jenji Kohan TV shows Weeds and Orange is the New Black. Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters (Belles’) and Just For Fun (T.J. Stone’s) provided the perfect scores in this round.

FOURTH ROUND:

The Sound of Music was Thursday’s 6-4-2 answer, with five teams getting all six points for knowing that title was also the original name for retailer Best Buy. We started the round with subjects like tiny Canadian provinces Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame groups Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. For the most difficult question, we got scientific:

• Represented by the letter H in the initialism LHC, which type of composite particle is made of quarks held together by the strong force?

LHC is the Large Hadron Collider, and 48% of teams had that right answer. There were 13 perfect team scores here. Before the final question, these were the high scores:

• Just For Fun (T.J. Stone’s): 161
• Einsteins of Beer (Memories): 158
• Stink Floyd (Belles’): 158
• Tokyo Sex Whale (Idiom): 156
• Comfortably Dumb (Axes and O’s): 156

FINAL QUESTION (28.7% success rate):

• Introduced in 1993, this character spawned a namesake Effect that led to an increase of women entering careers in science, technology, and medicine. What is this character’s last name?

More than a quarter of the field correctly identified the Scully Effect, named for one of the leads on The X-Files. Stink Floyd (Belles’) and Einsteins of Beer (Memories) each had a Perfect 21 with correct answers to all 21 wagering questions in Wednesday’s game. At the end of the night, these teams topped the leaderboard:

• Stink Floyd (Belles’): 168
• Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters (Belles’): 167
• Einsteins of Beer (Memories): 166
• Just For Fun (T.J. Stone’s): 164
• The Legend of Taylor Heinicke (Axes and O’s): 162
• Alcoholics Unanimous (Belles’): 161
• Power Vacuum (Belles’): 160
• Tokyo Sex Whale (Idiom): 159
• Caleb the Camel (T.J. Stone’s): 159
• Frederick Trivia Team (Idiom): 158

WEDNESDAY’S WINNERS:

Moe’s Peyton Place in Springfield, VA: NO GAME  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Crayola Colors)

Valley Sports Grill in Middletown, MD:  NO GAME

PLEASE NOTE: Valley Grill will begin an immediate an indefinite hiatus.  Please check back for updates next month.

(FIRST CATEGORY UPON RETURN: Pittsburgh Steelers)

Belles’ Sports Bar in Frederick, MD: Stink Floyd  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Famous Bears)

Memories Charcoal House in Mount Airy, MD: Einsteins of Beer  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: World of Warcraft)

Quinn’s in Arlington, VA: NO GAME  (FIRST CATEGORY ON OCT. 19: Famous Karens)

GearHouse Brewing in Chambersburg, PA: Peeping Tom Cruises  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Hocus Pocus)

TGI Fridays in Hagerstown, MD: What the Fork  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Hamilton)

Idiom Brewing in Frederick, MD: Tokyo Sex Whale  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Triple 50/50: World Leader or Adult Film Star?)

Axes and O’s in Sterling, VA: The Legend of Taylor Heinicke  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: IFAB Soccer Rules)

Hops N Shine in Alexandria, VA: Quiz in My Pants  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Cats (animal))

Sully’s Pour House in Herndon, VA: Vapors  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Beer Slogans)

Falling Branch Brewery in Street, MD: Family Affair  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Canada)

T. J. Stone’s in Alexandria, VA: Just For Fun  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Pokemon)

Craftworx Taproom in Gainesville, VA: Bad Misty  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: U.S. Navy Ships)

Barstool Sportsbook in Charles Town, WV: Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Iceland)

Grape Escape in Gaithersburg, MD: Toasty  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure)

Shipgarten in McLean, VA: Rat Funk  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: C Programming Language)

Elysium Axe Bar in Purcellville, VA: No Name  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Cured Meats)

Thick-N-Thin Brewing in Hagerstown, MD: Here for the Beer  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Triple 50/50: Metallica or Megadeth? (audio))

Celtic House in Arlington, VA: Whiskey Business  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Characters)

Mark’s Pub in Falls Church, VA: Fresh Off the U-Haul  (NEXT WEEK’S FIRST CATEGORY: Houston Astros Playoff History)