Entry 4: Quizzically Questioning

Blog 4

                Every week my friends and I get together and play trivia at a bar. It amazes me the number of people who do not know the activity exists and are surprised to learn about it. The way the game works is everyone at your table is your team. You create a team name and the organizer uses that name to keep track of your team’s points. The organizer will go around and hand your team a score sheet to keep track of your own points on and a pad of paper to write your team’s answers down on it. The game is organized into 6 rounds of 3 questions with a mid-game and end game special question. During each round the organizer will tell everyone the topics of the three questions in the round: History, politics, and religion for example. For the first 3 rounds each team will assign each of the questions in the round either 5, 3, or 1 point, using each value only once in a round. The assignment is chosen when the team answers a question and the questions are answered on at a time. Teams can use the topics of future rounds to gauge how easily they will be able to answer future questions to strategize which point values to assign. Should the team get the question right then they will receive however many points that they assigned to the question. The mid round question is usually a question that will have multiple correct answers and teams get 2 points for each correct answer they submit. An example of a midround question was “what are all of the elements that end in -on that are not noble gases”. The second 3 rounds continue like the first except the assigned point values are 6-4-2 rather than 5-3-1 making the second round even more important to answer correctly than the first. The final question is a hard question that will have a variable amount of answers but the question is always difficult. Each team will wager from 0-15 points on their answer. Should the team get the question correct then they get that many points, and if they get it wrong they lose that many points. The top 3 teams get a gift card reward at the end.

                Team Trivia is a fun activity that many more people should know about. My team has only gotten into the top 3 once yet we enjoy going all the same. A strong knowledge of presidents and 80’s pop culture as well as sports history would be the most successful subjects to study to insure success.