Another last minute update - final quiz of year

Wednesday, December 26, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: 2012: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Thursday, January 24, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: TBA

12 Steps Down quiz tonight; Spring term begins at Draught Horse January 24

Wednesday, December 19, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down
9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: 1980s NEW WAVE / POP

... which you're listening to on the stereo there all of the time anyway, right?

Thursday, January 24, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: TBA

Final quiz of Temple term at Draught Horse this week

Wednesday, December 12, 7:30pm 12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: ALTERNATE & SUBTITLES OF FAMOUS BOOKS

Thursday, December 13, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: ALTERNATE & SUBTITLES OF FAMOUS BOOKS II: THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL

 

Owing to the unusually early starting and ending dates for Temple's Fall term, this will be the last quiz of 2012.  I'll try to get a start date for the beginning of next term in time to announce it during this quiz.

 

Back to Draught Horse after a little hiatus

Wednesday, December 5, 7:30pm
12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: EUROPE

Thursday, December 6, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: BEGINS WITH K

Guest host Thursday night

Wednesday, November 28, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: ASIA

Thursday, November 29, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: ?

 

Hey Temple people - for the first time in 5 years I need to take the night off.  I'm doing some other-work-related travel.  Quizmaster John will be filling in for me using a quiz he wrote in the same format.  QJ is my go-to understudy, has played my quizzes since the beginning and has twice been a member of teams that have scored the highest scores ever in my format.  I expect you to give him the same general lack of attention and respect you give me.  I should be back at the helm - and with that room set up it seems literal - next week.

 

Gobble up some quiz

Wednesday, November 21, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round:THE AMERICAN COLONIES

Thursday, November 22

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

 NO QUIZ - THANKSGIVING - BAR CLOSED

 

Unlike the Detroit Lions, you get a day off from losing.

Upcoming subject rounds

Wednesday, November 14, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: FAMOUS SIDEKICKS

Thursday, November 15, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES

Explore trivia this week

Wednesday, November 7, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: EXPLORERS

Thursday, November 8, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: BIOLOGY

Life imitates The Simpsons here in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Voting Machine Changes Obama Vote to Romney

We really shouldn't even have voting machines.  Paper ballots would be superior in any number of ways, and far cheaper.  Ireland just sold theirs for scrap.

At least the sensible Jill Stein button still works.  Also allow me to recommend Ms. Marakay Rogers for Attorney General, a great, gutsy and fair lawyer who helped me out pro bono several years ago when we were both filing papers in the same Harrisburg office.  I walked in the door not knowing her, she saw some state workers jerking me around and automatically volunteered herself as on the spot counsel.  Now that's service!  She should be behind a desk in Harrisburg.

Halloween brings a set of spooky, scary trivia questions

Wednesday, October 31, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: SPOOKY SCARY HALLOWEENY-TYPE QUESTIONS

Thursday, November 1, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: AMERICAN GOVERNMENT

Letter-specific subject rounds this week

Wednesday, October 24, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: BEGINS WITH Q

Thursday, October 25, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: BEGINS WITH Z

Weekly subjects

Wednesday, October 17, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: GEOMETRY

Thursday, October 18, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: FICTIONAL REALMS

A few words on how cheating is handled

A couple of Draught Horse regulars mentioned some phone-based cheating to me last week.  That's appreciated as it is a large room - with 15-20 mostly large teams probably one of the larger regularly scheduled quizzes around - and I can only see so much from where I'm located.  So by all means feel free to snitch.  And please feel free to confront people yourself.

I'd just like to remind folks that it usually becomes evident to me after the fourth round who might be cheating.  It doesn't look like I'm doing much about it but that's by design.

The whole idea of the quiz is to fill seats and encourage people to stick around, presumably buying food and drink.  It's therefore my policy to let cheaters cheat without comment and continue conducting the game while the cheaters think they are doing well.  They get eliminated at the end of the quiz and the bar still gets their money, which is transferred to honest winning teams in the form of prizes, and to me in the form of... their money.

Sometimes it becomes evident a team has cheated on a few answers and isn't really very good or very motivated at that activity either, and won't be finishing in the prizes anyway.  Those people I just leave alone.

It's also an aim of mine that people who enjoy the challenge should feel that they aren't being cheated, and of course neither the bars nor I appreciate our honest customers getting ripped off.  Thus I'd just like people to know that I take a hard line against cheating, I do like to know when it's happening, and although it's mostly unspoken something is happening to defeat it.

Fortunately it's generally evident when a team is cheating.  People who underestimate the rest of our abilities to determine when they cheat are usually not bright enough to pull things off well either. Signs include:

- Teams who get 5 correct in the first round and then 8 in each of the last few. Possible but very unlikely.

- "Knowing" a difficult answer and then misspelling it, especially when it's not a difficult item to spell.  This is clearly happening when one person is looking up the answer and a different person is writing things down.  I tend also to have more confidence in sheets written in different handwriting, as team members slide the sheet around to the person who knows the answer, and who doesn't want to say it out loud.  Cheating teams generally assign one person - usually a female if they have one - as a scribe.  We are after all talking about lazy people.

- Always doing better at the beginning of the round than at the end, because there was less time to look things up at the end.  Again, these are lazy people, and if they were better at looking things up they'd have a skill set which might include knowing them offhand from the start.  Sometimes I deliberately make the last couple of questions in a round the ones that are more difficult to Google, and often this results in a team who was looking things up turning a sheet in earlier than other teams, there being no point in trying to brainstorm an answer, with all their correct answers front-loaded.

- Teams that get some difficult questions correct and then leave others in the same round completely blank - just no attempt whatever at an educated guess - make me suspicious.

- In the case of a generally younger crowd such as we have at the Draught Horse, getting a 1980s TV question correct but not a contemporary one.  Again it is possible but it draws my attention.

- Only getting the straightforward questions correct and never getting the complex ones correct that'd be difficult to Google.  An example of a straightforward question in this sense would be a sports record holder, or a capital.  Easily researched, and if I'm asking it there is generally one definitive answer.  If your team gets all of those correct, no matter how obscure, and can't answer anything correctly requiring multiple elements, or requiring a plot element from any book or movie... I'm suspicious.

- Getting most of the answers correct in the Secret Theme round but not even attempting to propose a Secret Theme.  This is especially the case when the questions were difficult but the theme more obvious should you have them to work with.  That one's a big red flag and usually these teams will miraculously go on to get 8 answers correct in the final round.

Most cheating teams do a combination of all or most of the above.  Usually they might as well just stand up and announce that they are looking up answers.

There are likely a few other things I'm forgetting.  Most of the time I'll just skip over a team name when giving the final scores when it's obvious cheating occurred.  And most of the time this takes place no one bothers to follow up with me about it, which is another sign that they did dirty.

Rarely people will have the temerity to challenge me on de facto accusing them of cheating, and this is usually easily handled by asking them simple follow-up questions - simpler ones in fact - about their answers.  An example from life would be asking a team who "knew" what Huck Finn's hometown was what primary character Huck was with during his raft journey.  When the team didn't know Jim after multiple guesses it was clear they didn't know the book.

Your weekly subject rounds

Wednesday, October 10, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: LESS FAMOUS WORKS BY FAMOUS AUTHORS

Thursday, October 11, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: MUSICALS

This week's quiz subjects

Wednesday, October 3, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: ORIGINAL PLACE NAMES

Thursday, October 4, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES

Lil' Roy Breaks Their Own All-Time High Score Record by One Point

Some four and a half years after setting the all-time record in my quiz format at 189 out of an available 219 points, most of the Lil' Roy crew plus a lone (and temporarily abandoned) member of usual challengers Lady Snark topped that by a single point last Wednesday.

The team had a perfect 10 in the Easy round, but followed with only 16 of the 20 available points in the second frame.  They then scored an extra point on the Speed round by finishing first - very out of character for this group, and correctly answered 9 of those 10.  Eight of 10 in the final round and an outstanding Secret Theme round, naturally with the correct theme for the 8 bonus points, really put them over the top.

Job well done!  It took you guys nearly 5 years, about 250 quizzes, but I am impressed.

On the all-time leader board this makes the first appearance in quite some time of any team at 12 Steps Down a #1, drops their own previous mark into second, bumps everyone down a notch and eliminates the longest-running Draught Horse team, now going by the moniker Nudist Balloonists, from the board completely.  This also means that in its fifth year, the Draught Horse now has zero of ten scores on the leader board.  I'm looking to Nudist Balloonists, No Means Anal or the other name-changing, multiple-year veteran regulars to correct that.

Moving into tenth place (actually a tie for ninth) now requires 185 big points.

Philosophy and/or Original Place Names this week

Wednesday, September 26, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: PHILOSOPHERS & PHILOSOPHY

Thursday, September 27, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: ORIGINAL PLACE NAMES

Movie stills ID rounds this week

Wednesday, September 19, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: VISUAL IDENTIFICATION: MOVIE EDITION

Thursday, September 20, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: VISUAL IDENTIFICATION: MOVIE EDITION II

Simple enough concept - I show you a still from a movie, you ID it.

This week's subject rounds are...

Wednesday, September 12, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round: MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

Thursday, September 13, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: AMERICAN BOOKS & AUTHORS

This week's subject rounds are...

Wednesday, September 5, 7:30pm

12 Steps Down

9th & Christian Sts.

Subject Round:  LATIN AMERICA

As promised/threatened last week.  If you're one of the regular teams with a Latina and she lets you down on this, a call to la migra is in order.

Thursday, September 6, 9pm

The Draught Horse

Broad St. & Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Campus

Subject Round: FOOTBALL (AMERICAN THAT IS)

Great to see some old faces up at the Draught Horse last week.  We had a smaller than usual amount of larger than usual teams, so still a full house and one that gave a whole lot of patient attention to the quiz, including among the new faces, a harbinger of a great semester ahead.