Team Trivia Final

After some 20 weeks of visits to the nearby Applebees and Necter bar on James Island, the trivia league rounds finally came to an end a couple of weeks back and the qualifiers for the final were announced. Having notched up an impressive tally of results, the team i am on (named "Crystal Methodists") had ended up in 6th place and were thus automatically through to the final which was scheduled to take place on the 10th May (yesterday). With a first place prize of $2000, this was nothing to be sneezed at and, duly, the 32 teams involved in the final arrived at the venue in plenty of time. The format itself is simple - six rounds of three questions with a half-time question, and a final 'gamble' round. The first three rounds have questions worth 1, 3 or 5 points (you have to use each point value once, and be strategic in your scoring). The same goes for the last three rounds except the values go up to 2, 4 and 6. With the half-time question, it's usually multi-part with your team netting 2 points for every correct part (normally it's 4 parts, in the final there were 11 answers - thus, 22 available). After the game had played, everyone was pretty evenly matched and so we approached the gamble round with trepidation.

The last round is usually a single question where you can gamble up to 15 points. If you're right, the points are added; if wrong, the points are subtracted. The principle was the same in the final except we were given TEN questions and had to use point values of 1,2,3...up to 10 (again, each value was used once). Thus, with 55 points available, anything could change. And it did. We aced the last round and got 51 points (getting only the 2 point question wrong) and ended up tied for third place (after a minor quibble). Thus, with a tie-breaker (closest to the answer question), we managed to use logic and reason to win third place and $300 - between six of us. So fifty bucks - better than a smack in the face - and more importantly a team trivia t-shirt (Season 4: Best of the Best). With all that brain energy, we were quite exhausted by the end of it all - but little time to rest on our laurels. Season 5 starts on May 18th!