Next week is Thanksgiving and for me that means no pub trivia next week. So ahead of a two-week gap, here are our latest (and greatest?) in trivia scores. We won some, we lost some. And we definitely blew some. The key, as always, remains score points before music. Because we do not know music.
So another Wednesday, another pub trivia night. But two weekends ago, I attended the wedding of a good mate of mine down in Austin, Texas. And at his rehearsal/welcome dinner, he and his now wife had a trivia game. How well did their guests know them?
Turns out my friends and I, not so much. And I can prove it, because I documented our score after every round in my sketchbook.
Another week, another Wednesday, another night of pub trivia tonight. So after several weeks of disappointing scores and placement, the last few weeks has seen us triumphantly returning to second place. And so what better way to show that than showing our rank at the end of each night.
More encouragingly, as the line chart shows, we’ve been becoming more competitive. Our number of points behind the first place team has been dropping. Last week, for example, we were only one point off from first place.
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted from my data recording of my Wednesday night’s team trivia pub scores. For the very few of us who know what this means, here you go.
Essentially, our ability to score points on music in the last round remains pretty bad. Hence the general downward trend.
Well, at least over the last three weeks it did. In previous examples of my pub trivia team’s performance, we have had a lacklustre performance. But a few weeks we had an epic collapse. Having been in 4th place out of 10 in the penultimate round we ultimately finished in 8th out of 9—somebody left early—and 14 points out of first place. It probably didn’t help we put Beyonce down as the artist for three different songs. It probably really didn’t help that none of those artists were Beyonce. And it probably definitely didn’t help that we had no idea who those three artists were.
Then after a middling performance two weeks ago, last week we shocked even ourselves with our first victory since last autumn. Just how shocking? 19 points in that oft ill-fated music round. (It’s not really, but I’ll have to make another graphic about that.)
Credit for the piece is mine. Credit for the score goes to my teammates.
Well after the last two weeks of recording solo trivia performances, I decided that this week I would showcase a team effort.
And we finally placed, ending the performance tied for first place. But if you look closely you will see the final score has us at second. Why when we were tied with the same number of points? Because tiebreaker. And after I was selected to represent the team, I needed to respond, within three seconds, with the names of Tom Hanks films in a back-and-forth response.
I could name only Saving Private Ryan and Castaway. My competitor, she named three. They won.
This past Wednesday I once again ended up playing trivia at the pub solo. Once again, I decided over the final pint that I would attempt to visualise my performance.
One thing to keep in mind is that on Wednesday there were fewer teams competing—five instead of nine. And while I never placed higher than tied for third, this week’s bar charts show how I was incredibly competitive until the final music round.
Despite an abysmal performance at naming celebrities as they were as children, my near-perfect second round kept me only five points behind first place. And a perfect fourth round meant heading into that final round I climbed back to being only three points back. Thankfully I knew more of the songs this past week. And enough to not finish last. But, I was close enough that a perfect round would have been enough to still place first.
Super helpful that Lord of the Rings questions appeared a few times.