Trivia win

Monday night I had joined Rod, his in-laws, and Alan at the Landing Bar to play trivia. I has missed playing trivia the previous Monday as I was working on my brother's computer virus problem. (The cold air temperature, 40 mph wind and snow, and sub-zero wind chill hadn't persuaded me to take a break from virus hunting.) The rest of the group had attended last week's trivia contest and did well though they came in second in each game. Last week Rod's sister-in-law won one of the "quarter in the bucket" trivia games and won some alcohol.

There were more people at the bar this night to play trivia. More people meant more smokers. We had a different waitress so I wasn't distracted by any tattoos.

The first trivia game was hard. We left many of the answers blank on our first pass at answering the questions. Do you know which U.S. state is named after a Greek island, or which wedding anniversary is the crystal anniversary?

Eventually we came up with answers to all 20 questions. We didn't do so good as we only got 9 out of 20 right. We would have had an easy question right if we left the answer as "pigeons" instead of "pigeons/skeet" to the question as to what the clay targets are called in trap shooting.

The winning group - at 16 correct answers - was the team with the 6 lawyers and one judge.

The second contest went better as we felt the questions were easier - or at least we had an idea about the answers. When the final results were tallied the lawyer/judge team won again with 17 correct, but as they won earlier they could not win again. Second place was tied at 14 correct answers between another team that is usually pretty good, and our team (called "5 below" because we were five people and the outside temperature was below zero).

It was down to a sudden death answer. The questioner took an answer we both got wrong (How many layers of a tobacco leaf are used to wrap a cigar?) and we had to provide another answer. Our initial answer of four was wrong. I didn't know the answer but pushed for an even number. We decided to go with 6 and not 8.

The correct answer was 3 (so much for my 'even' theory!); but as our answer of 6 was closer than their answer of 7, we won. What we won was a $20 certificate good for drinks next week. Yes!

Rod was slightly disappointed in our win as we hadn't scored higher but I felt we did good as we won in sudden death and came up with a good answer under pressure.

Based on my two contest appearances it seems as if the questioner likes to ask about London cathedrals (St. Andrews this week), phobias, and islands. Rod thought he may ask again this night about European rivers so he studied them. Alas, no European river questions. So I am not sure if it would be worthwhile to study phobias for next week's contest.