Trivial Pursuit

It was a cold and stormy night...

After our dismal defeat at the SEE anniversary trivia night, Captain, MrFodder and some of our uni friends thought we might try our hand at a pub trivia night. It's pretty tough to get a group of people together at the same time, but we finally managed to get together on Tuesday at The Common Man at South Wharf. It said it started at 6pm on Facebook, but the actual trivia started at 6:30pm. There's no minimum / maximum team size.

There was no theme for the night, and the categories for the trivia were: TV / movies, sports, general knowledge / science, music. Our team was called Springtime for Melbourne, a parody of Springtime for Hitler (which I accidentally wrote in the sheet for round 2) and the fact that it's supposed to be Spring but it still feels like Winter. We didn't do too badly at the start. There was a drinking challenge and the person from our table managed to chug his glass of Coke in about 2 seconds (not even exaggerating, I have a video of it), though about 20% of it ended up on his shirt / the floor. But the rule was that you had to drink it and tip it upside down over your head, so the trivia master awarded us the win.

There was another round where you had to guess how much a car was worth. It was a 1977 Holden Kingswood, I don't remember what colour it was, but it had 100,000 kms clocked on it. Captain initially suggested $800, but Autofix said that it's probably one of those vintage cars that's worth a lot more than it seems. Pharmacist added that you should never guess a round number, because the challenge was to get the closest without going over, so if we guessed the same number as another team, we'd tie.

When the answers were announced, the other teams guessed: $3,000, $4,500, $5,000, $6,500, $10,000, and then there was us.... at $100,001.

It turns out the car was worth $8,000. The trivia master then went on to explain to the other teams the logic for why we went with $100,001, as he overheard us discussing it. He was really struggling not to burst our into laughter as he said the challenge was to guess the amount without going over, and we still felt the need to add that extra $1. He also explained how we were worried another team would pick $100,000. Needless to say, we didn't get any points that round. The trivia master was a bit of a dick about it though. It's hard to tell when questions are going to be trick questions, and none of us really knew how much it was worth.

Going into the final round, we were placed second, a comfortable 7 points ahead of the team in third place, but 8 points behind the team in first place. However, the last round was the music round. And none of us knew much about recent music. Sure, video game music, classical music, movie / TV theme songs, I can do all of those. But pop music... nope.

Unfortunately, the music round was also worth a whopping 20 points! So we dropped from 2nd place to 3rd last, which is unfortunate, because 2nd last place wins a free pizza. 2nd place wins a $50 bar voucher, and 1st place wins a $100 bar voucher. We were robbed!

Not a big deal in the end, entry was free, and we had a great time. I learned that blue-eyed people are more likely to be sensitive to light, but also more likely to have a higher alcohol tolerance (that was a pretty divisive question, with our team split 50-50 on which answer to pick). I also learned that 20% of a snake's body is its tail.

The food at the venue was pretty nice, and the bar staff were friendly. The trivia master was a little CBF, but he kept the night moving, and was relatively funny. It wasn't some crazy booze-fest like I was dreading, and the questions weren't completely out of our league, which was nice. However, I felt like some of the questions were just a 50-50 guessing game, and that felt a bit cheap.

For example, one of the questions was trying to guess which sumo would win in a fight, with nothing to go on but their stats.

And another was trying to guess whether a water skier would land his jump properly.

But as I said, great night. We need to learn a bit more about music if we plan to return, but I think we did well.