Philly Team Finishes 4th out of 76

Our team, Trust Us We’re Doctors, finished 4th out of 76 teams. At first glance, that’s pretty good, but the sad truth is that 4th place is first out of the money. 3rd Place won $750. We won nothing, and they beat us by one point. Needless to say, there were a number of points left on the table. We would not have won (the winners had 108, we had 100) but we should have finished 3rd. Our main problem was time. The quiz lasted 4 hours long, but only a fraction of that time was spent answering questions. Most was spent grading them. The people asking the questions were hauling ass, and once the round was done, you only had 30 seconds to hand in your paper. That meant no discussion amongst teammates. You either knew it or you didn’t, and you did not talk things through. I didn’t really like that part of it, because part of the fun is discussing things with your teammates. That being said, every team was dealing within the same parameters, so it is no excuse and no consolation.

As for the event itself, it was a lot of fun, but a lot different than Quizzo Bowl. There were 8 freaking rounds to this thing, and about 450 players. It was held in a venue that reminded me a lot of the Trocadero, an old theatre called the Gothic. Between some rounds there was entertainment, between some rounds there was none. The questions were extremely heavy on pop culture. Two music rounds, and two movie rounds. (The movie clips round was very cool, as they projected clips of films up on a huge screen on stage.) There was not a single history question, not a single geography question, and one television question (about a commercial). There were two sports questions (about the NBA and NFL logos at that) and one science question. There was a fair amount of minutia, such as what are two extra flavors of Fruit Loops (they are Marshmellow and Reduced Sugar, we got neither).

The hours of studying we did in the days leading up to the event? Totally worthless. Garbo memorized currencies, Nate memorized world capitals, I studied cooking terms, and so on, but nothing we studied came up. Oh well, we had fun quizzing each other everywhere we went. 

I was a hated man at this thing. My smacktalk on their site had really displeased the opposing teams, and numerous presenters called me out as the crowd booed, and at one point in the evening a comedian had the entire crowd yell in unison, “F*** Johnny Goodtimes!” Needless to say I loved it. As you all know, my dream has always been to be a bad guy wrestling manager, and blowing kisses to a crowd of 450 people while they booed me vociferously was a dream come true. 

We drank away our sorrows at the afterparty, and I think a lot of people who met me were surprised that I was not a monster. Garbo had to fly out the first thing this morning. The rest of us headed back to the hotel. Phil and Koob left this morning. Swanson, Nate, and I are gonna grab some brunch downtown. I got a ton of video from the event and am gonna put together a short movie on the whole experience which I think will be kind of funny. We had a pretty quotable team. 

Our congratulations to the winners, Jesus and Tequila. They were the better team on this night. But we will live to fight again. And when we fight the next time, we’ll know what to expect. We won’t finish out of the money again. I was proud of our team, but I think we all know in our heart of hearts that we can do better. And we know that next year we will. Special thanks to Denver for being such a good host, and special thanks to phillyphaithful for supplying our uniforms. Denver has not seen the last of these doctors.