St. Valentine’s Revenge Tonight

Back in action tonight (Gonna just do one quiz this week, since none of the regular twice-a-weekers showed up early in the week and, more importantly, I’m feeling lazy). Action starts at the Vous at 6:15. On to Founding Fathers at 8:30 p.m. Expect some celebrity breakups and some bad love songs. Oh, and no question of the week this week. See ya tonight!

Quizzo Tonight

Action starts at O’Neals at 8 p.m. It’s our St. Valentine’s Revenge quiz, so expect some famous breakups and some bad love songs.

On to City Tap House at 10:15 p.m. 2 for $20 pizzas, $3 Gannets, and we’ve been rocking lately. Let’s make it happen. See ya tonight!

New Quiz Debuts Tonight!

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A new JGT quiz will debut tonight at Alla Spina. Carl B. Sure will be hosting on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m., starting tonight. They’ll be taking $2 off all drafts and offering $6 glasses of wine, and they have a deep dish Chicago style pizza special every Tuesday as well. It will be my exact same quiz, same format, same questions, and as you guys know Carl does a fine job of hosting it. And once we get the ball rolling, I’ll be looking to switch with him on occasional Tuesdays. So come on out tonight and check out a brand new JGT quiz!

So You’re Headed to Quizzo Bowl…

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Just a quick primer for those of you headed to Quizzo Bowl tomorrow:

Doors open at 7 p.m. The earlier you get there, the more options you have for your table. Things will be open both upstairs and down. Upstairs may get a bit crowded (though the view is awesome), so just be prepared.

Action starts at 8 p.m. It’s a Saturday night, and we’ve got a lot on the agenda. Music, giveaways, Fastball Bob, etc. So sit back and relax. This won’t be a typical hour and a half quiz. We probably won’t wrap up until 11:30 or so.

For those of you who want to stay up past your bedtimes, we will be having an afterparty. It will be held at Quig’s, which is located at the Plays and Players Theatre on 1714 Delancey Street. It is in a residential neighborhood, so if you decide to go, please be respectful of the neighbors and keep your voices down until you get inside.

What prizes do we have? We’ll have prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. We also have a prize for last place, a prize for best dressed team, and a prize for 7th place. We’ll also have raffles throughout the game.

As for the style of the event, our theme is the Spirit of ’76, so you can take that however you want in your outfits.

As for tickets, we are officially sold out. That said, if you don’t have a full team of 8 and want to add 1 or 2 people last minute, we do have left enough room for them to get in. So feel free to bring them.

Smaller teams: if you have a team of 5 or smaller, there is a decent chance we will be teaming you up with another small group, for the sake of space. It’ll be fine…one of the teams playing together this year met when they were randomly combined at Quizzo Bowl V, and are still good friends seven years later.

Alright, let’s have some fun. I’m suffering a stress-induced nervous meltdown looking forward to it!

Koob and Crew Kick Off 7 Nights, 7 Quizzes Campaign

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Koob and his crew (who will hopefully not be winning Quizzo Bowl) are playing 7 quizzes in 7 days. Here’s Koob’s recap of the first 3. If you want to follow along in real time, follow @johnlkenney on twitter, as he is live tweeting the shenanigans. 

SUNDAY LOCAL 44

We kicked off our first quiz of the week at Local 44 which is a great little bar with good food and a great beer selection. The place tends to get packed for quizzo so we made sure to get there early. The participants were Nate, Kenney, and I.

This quiz was named as the Best Quizzo in Philly mag back in 2012 and it’s pretty solid. I call this the “Irish John” style of quizzo which is three rounds of ten questions each and a joker to play which will double your score for one round. There are also bonus questions mixed in that are basically follow-ups to the question currently being asked and you can gain extra points by getting them right (but they do not effect the joker).

The host, JB Farley, is great. He seems like a genuinely nice guy and he seems to enjoy hosting and we also enjoyed some of the pop culture references that he threw in as part of his banter.  My one gripe is that the quiz can take a little long for being only a three round quiz and the host tends to overexplain things sometimes such as when going over the rules at the beginning of the quiz and occasionally giving too many hints during the questions. Just plan on the full two hours from 9-11pm if you are going to play here.

Going into the last round, we had 21 points and I believe the team in first had 31 points but they had already used their joker so we knew it would be close. We were able to pull out a 9 out of 10 plus some bonus points. The only question we missed was “What is Olin’s ball powder used for?” and I think most teams missed it as well so it didn’t hurt us too badly (the answer is something to do with loading ammunition in firearms).

We wound up tied for first place after three rounds so the tiebreaker was a question with a year as the answer and whichever team came closest would win. The question asked was “On this date in what year was Guy Fawkes executed?” Kenney knew right away that the Gunpowder plot was in 1605 so we guessed correctly that Fawkes was executed in 1606 but so did the other team. So we went to another tiebreaker question which was “In what year was the monk Thomas Merton born?” We were not as sure on this one but went with  Kenney’s guess of 1922. The other team guessed 1925. Thomas Merton was actually born in 1915 so we pulled off the win for being closer. The prize was a $40 Local 44 gift card. One down, six to go.  On to Stoagie Joe’s for night two.

MONDAY STOAGIE JOE’S

Night two of our 7 quizzos in 7 days quest took us to Stogie Joe’s on Passyunk Ave. in South Philly.  The participants were Nate, Kenney, and I, plus my wife Kristy and our friend Erica.  The food at this place is fantastic.  I highly recommend the pizza and the chicken cutlet sandwich but you really can’t go wrong with anything on the menu.

The quiz is hosted by Jimmy who is definitely an old school South Philly guy (which I like being a native of South Philly myself).  He does a good job and the questions are usually pretty good.  The format of this quiz is similar to the traditional Pat Hines style quiz with three rounds of ten questions, one of which you can double, but instead of just one picture round in between the other rounds, Stogie Joe’s does two picture rounds so you get a total of five rounds (can’t double the picture rounds).

We started off pretty strong with a 9/10 in the first round but we only got 7/10 in the 2nd round and only got 8/10 in the first picture round which was pictures of the set of famous television shows.  I talked the rest of the crew out of Frasier as I swore the chair that was pictured was Archie Bunker’s from All In the Family but I was wrong.  We aced the second picture round which was famous movie scenes as depicted with Legos, but we suspected that we might be too far behind at that point.  We still had the double in our back pocket and we got a 10/10 plus the double on the last round but it was not enough as two of the teams that were ahead of us also got perfect 10s and doubled as well.  Alas, my hopes and dreams of actually winning all seven of these quizzes were crushed but we won the 3rd place tiebreaks and scored a $25 gift card.

TUESDAY- SLAINTE

We hit up Slainte right by 30th St. Station for the 3rd night of our 7 quizzos in 7 days quest.  Slainte is owned by the same people that own the New Deck Tavern on Penn’s campus and as far as I know still gets their questions from Pat Hines himself straight from Ireland.  The participants were Nate, Kenney, Kristy, and I.  The format was the traditional Pat Hines format which is three rounds, ten questions, one joker (which doubles your score for that round) and a picture round in between.  There is also a connection round in which the answers to all ten of the questions in one of the rounds are connected in some way and if you can figure out the connection, you can get an extra point for the round.

I didn’t catch the host’s name but he was not very enthusiastic.  Pretty much just a straightforward reading of the questions with no banter or anything which is fine for some people.  They also have pretty good food and drink deals at this place during quizzo and the food is pretty much your typical pub food and very similar to New Deck.

We proceeded to ace the first two rounds with perfect tens.  Then came the picture round.  The picture round was images from “famous” Super Bowl commercials.  I put famous in quotation marks because this was probably the lowest scoring picture round that I have every seen.  There were a few that we knew right away and a few that we recognized but had no idea what the product being advertised was and a few others that just did not look familiar at all and we all felt like we had a pretty good grasp of famous Super Bowl commercials.  We wound up only getting four right which worried me for a little while…until the host read the answers and scores and we realized that a four was actually tied for the highest score of any team in the bar.  I don’t think I can ever recall a round scoring that low overall.

Anyway, we felt pretty comfortable going into the last round and we figured out the connection pretty quickly.  The first few answers were “Big”, “Gone With the Wind”, “Go”, and “The Sugar Bowl” and we figured out that the connection was “daddy”.  The next answer was “Hoosier” which gave us all a chuckle.  We wound up going 10/10, doubling, and nailing the connection so we knew there was no way we could be caught.  The one disappointment was after the quiz, the host brings over our gift certificate and it is only for $25.  I asked him about it and he said that it’s normally $50 but since there weren’t that many teams there, they lowered it to $25 for that night. But a win is a win and we were very happy with the bounce back performance after the disappointment at Stogie Joe’s.  Off to Westy’s Tavern Wednesday night for quiz 4.

7 Days, 7 Quizzes

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Koob, Nate and Kenney (the infamous Jesters of Tortuga) are going to try to do something no team has ever done before…play 7 quizzes in 7 days. He’s going to keep a diary of it on this blog all week.

And so it begins…
For the past several years the core members of my Quizzo team (Sofa Kingdom aka Jesters of Tortuga aka Independence Hall and Oates) have been talking about if it would ever be possible to play quizzo every night of the week for seven consecutive nights. The biggest obstacle to this has of course been that while it’s very easy to find multiple quizzos a night in Philadelphia on Sunday through Thursday evenings, it is very rare to find any quizzes being offered on Friday or Saturday night. Over the years we have heard rumors of mythical weekend quizzes somewhere in the suburbs or perhaps down at the Jersey Shore in the summertime but we’ve never been able to confirm anything or put a plan together.
We figured out a few years ago that if we started the quest on the Sunday before the Quizzobowl that we would have half of our problem solved since the Quizzobowl is always on a Saturday night. Therefore we would only need to find a Friday night quiz and plus how cool would it be to actually win all of the quizzes for the first six nights and then culminate it all at the end with a Quizzobowl victory. A tall order to be sure, but at least worth a shot.
Still that Friday night quiz always eluded us and we’ve never been organized enough to actually put a plan together…until now.
A few months ago, my maintenance supervisor at work mentioned that he had played a quizzo on a Friday night at a place called Dominic’s Tavern in Bellmawr, NJ. Bellmawr is pretty much right over the bridge in Jersey and is actually the town that my brother lives in. All of a sudden, it seemed that this quest might actually be achievable so I reached out to the crew to see who was interested.
I’m sure in our hey day, we would have been able to put together a solid crew of five or six who would have been up for this challenge but with everyone now getting older and married and moving away and having babies (or in the case of Garbo volunteering at a rape crisis center in the Marshall Islands for a month) we figured that there might not be many more chances to try to pull this thing off so Nate, Kenney, and myself (along with the permission of my and Nate’s wives) decided to give it a go. Nate was still not fully convinced as he joked about how far I went to perpetuate the ruse of a Friday night quizzo that I created an entire fake website for Dominic’s Tavern.
Since Johnny Goodtimes only does one quiz which is the same at all of his bars during the week leading up to Quizzobowl, we knew that we would have to mix it up and Dr. Kenney put together the schedule which is as follows:
Sunday, 1/31 – 9pm – Local 44
Monday, 2/1 – 7pm – Stogie Joe’s
Tuesday, 2/2 – 9pm – Slainte
Wednesday, 2/3 – 8pm – Westy’s Tavern
Thursday, 2/4 – 9:30pm – The Bard’s
Friday, 2/5 – 7pm – Dominic’s Tavern
Saturday, 2/6 – 8pm – Quizzobowl at the World Cafe Live
Ideally, we would love to win all seven quizzes as well but that would obviously be very tough especially with only a three-person team.  However, we plan to have some help along the way at various quizzes throughout the week and we will of course have a full 8 person team for Quizzobowl. Check back here to see how we do throughout the week, and feel free to come out and compete against us.
-Koob