Week 6 of the 2011 $2,000 Elbo Room Trivia Tournament

The nice thing about participating in the Elbo Room tournament is that, sooner or later, you’re going to move up the standings ladder and lock yourself in.  Right now, though, nobody’s really “locked” in, but realistically the top three teams – Team Schooled, Woo Hoo a Go Go and Street Academy – have a better-than-average shot of making the finals.

Still, it’s nice to see new teams in the mix – like the Polanskis, who joined the tournament last week and earned 3 playoff points for a second-place finish.   It seems like everyone wants to try their luck at Elbo Room – including, believe it or not, the two Bud Light promotional models, who arrived to hand out Bud Light T-shirts and Bud Light party necklaces.  They actually signed up to play as a team; however, after finishing the half at negative 48 points, they went back to their gig as promotional models.

It was a good solid night of competitive team trivia, and I definitely have to hand tonight’s game results to my teammate Jeremy McNamara.  Earlier in the week, Jeremy competed in a marathon run from Schenectady to Albany; unfortunately, partway through the run he developed painful blisters in his heels and toes, and finished the last eight miles of the run on sheer will power alone.

Still, that did not stop him from knowing the fruit with a skin made of hundreds of red seeds (a pomegranate), or the band that evolved from the Seattle group Mother Love Bone (Pearl Jam), or the childhood ailment that becomes “shingles” in adults (chicken pox).  Alexis knew the TV sitcom that originally had the word “Chronicles” in its title (Seinfeld), while I snagged 24 points by knowing the three easternmost states in Australia (New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, good on’ya!).

But now we come to the final question.  After 19 questions, we had a respectable 122 points, but Woo Hoo a Go Go (126) and the Polanskis (130) were above us, while Team Fist and Get That Poison Out had 90 apiece.  Team Schooled brought up the rear with 68 points.

The final question was “Governors.”

We decided to bet enough to ensure that if we got it right, we would get third place and a playoff point.

“On January 1, 2011, Rick Snyder became the governor of what state?”

Crunch.  We tried the process of elimination.

“California?”

“No,” Jeremy said, “That’s Jerry Brown.”

“Massachusetts?”

“No,” Alexis said.  “That’s Deval Patrick.”

Of course, you can’t go through all fifty states in two minutes, and we didn’t know who the governor of Minnesota was, so we wrote down Minnesota and handed up the slip.

The Polanskis and the Poisons both wrote down Alaska.

Woo Hoo a Go Go said Virginia.

Team Fist went with Illinois.

Team Schooled bet zero points and wrote down Norway.  Ho ho ho.

Well, apparently NONE of us were right, because Rick Snyder is the duly elected governor of Michigan.  It was a murder question, and it wiped a lot of teams out.

If you saved some points – as Team Schooled, Woo Hoo and Street Academy did – you finished with playoff points for the night.  If you bet the farm – as the Polanskis did, they bet all 130 of their points – you were wiped out like Jake Gittes’ nose in Chinatown.  Owtchie.

So here’s the standings after six weeks. The top eight teams are listed above the “CUT LINE”; if the tournament ended today, those would be the eight teams that can play in the championship round. Any team with a star in the box marked “Finals” has mathematically qualified for the money round, no matter how they do for the rest of the tournament.

Elbo Room Trivia Standings – Week 6 of 20

	Trivia Team	Points	Totals	FINALS
1	Team Schooled	5	18
2	Woo Hoo a Go Go	1	13
3	Street Academy	3	12
4	Team Fist		7
T-5	The Polanskis		3
T-5	Get That Poison Out		3
7	Skidmarks		1

And only the top eight teams will make it into the final tournament round. Any team in ninth place or below will not make the cut. So teams now have to keep playing and avoid the dreaded cut line.

Six weeks down. Fourteen weeks left to go.