Tavern trivia

Wednesday night Rod called and invited me to join him, Ed and a couple other people for a night of trivia at a different bar (the Riviera Lounge) than I usually go to in Minot.  This trivia contest is part of a nationwide trivia contest run under http://www.worldtaverntrivia.com/

Each contest is a series of six parts of ten questions each for a total of 60 questions. Each question is worth ten points. For rounds four, five or six you can "double down" meaning if you feel good about your answers you can have the points earned in that round doubled. It can be a bit of strategy as to when to "double down" as you don't know what the questions will be in the next round and how well you could do.  The game starts with a 20 point bonus question so the total possible for the night was 720 points.  Our final score was 650 points and we won first place by 90 points.  Our prize for the night were two $20 drink certificates for future use at the bar.

Each person on our team (Funky Monks) is good at trivia and we have differing areas of expertize. Ed knows music, Randy is an EMT and knows medical stuff, Rod is good with music, literature and stuff one learned in school, and I know useless things, such as "Pennyworth" is Batman's butler's last name.  The other guy - whose name I already forgot - looked like he could be a member of the Hell's Angels and he knew that blood was thicker than water... in fact, he also knew it is six times thicker.  And we could play off one another as I remembered the author of the novel "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" also wrote "The Great Gatsby".  But I forgot the author's name (you know me and remembering names).  Rod knew the author's name is F. Scott Fitzgerald and we were the only team to get that answer correct.  We all were bad with 1980s TV trivia.  Who knew that Tom Hanks guest starred on "Family Ties" as an alcoholic uncle?  See the video here.

Darrel and Marvin from my SOL team of Monday nights were also there as another team and they were our main competition.  We were one question ahead of them until the fifth round when we got nine answers correct and we had selected this as our double point round.  We felt good about our answers and didn't want to risk doubling on the sixth round.  That was a good decision as the SOL team also doubled on the fifth round and they had got three questions wrong.

The sixth round was to name the top ten cities in the world based on population in 2006.  We only got 4 cities right and the top team that round only got six cities right.  The SOL team also only got four cities correct.  Cities we were sure were in the top ten, such as Tokyo and Mexico City, were not.  Our correct guesses were Shanghai, Beijing, Moscow and Sao Paulo, Brazil.    I would link to the list of the top ten but it seems to vary based on years and criteria (city itself or the metro area).  It seems as if the trivia question called for the city itself as this list comes closest to the top ten we were told: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762524.html   A city metro list can be found at http://www.worldatlas.com/citypops.htm  so you can see how we thought Tokyo and Mexico City should be on the list.   On our team I argued for Shanghai, Beijing and Moscow as the other team members were not for them.  I was surprised to learn that Seoul, South Korea are on the lists.

North Dakota still allows smoking in bars, and while the bar was nowhere near full, my clothes reeked of smoke by night's end.  Yuck.