Our second quiz night at The Old Colliery was well attended. With 5 minutes to start time, there were about 8 people there but in that last 5 minutes, almost 30 new quizzers arrived en mass.
It did take a bit of time to get organised so we were late to start. I think it would be a good idea for anybody coming along to try to get there by about 1845hrs.
On their first outing to the quiz, Don’t Know It Alls run out as winners. In a close-fought battle with The Outsiders, they made a late rush for gold and ended up being convincing winners.
The handicapping system is in place to even out the playing field but it will take a few more quizzes before it is in full flow and working effectively.
Scoreboard
Most of the teams are already pretty well grouped together so it only takes a few questions to change the whole look of the scoreboard. Once the handicaps really kick in I am pretty sure the competition will hot up. TTFN was the original name for Georgios.
Jackpot Games
There will always be two jackpot games played at each quiz. I have a few we can play but the current games are Open the Box and Take It or Leave It. Both these games benefit from being run for an extended period of time.
Take It Or Leave It
This game is based on Deal or No Deal.
14 boxes to open one at a time. Inside each box, there is a voucher for a cash value starting at £1 up to whatever the jackpot is for that week. As each box is opened, it’s value is removed from the game board.
At various stages, the player will be offered the chance to take a cash payout to quit or to continue to play for the jackpot. We continue playing until there are 2 boxes left. The player then has to choose one of the boxes and whatever the value of the voucher inside is their prize for playing.
This week The AA’s won the chance to play and left with £12 cash.
The jackpot will remain at £50 for the next quiz on 28/08/19
Open The Box
Simply put, there is cash inside a safe. The safe has a keypad used to unlock it. There is a bag of table tennis balls each with a different number written on it. If the player chooses the right ball, at random, and the safe is opened they win the contents. the player is chosen by the sale of raffle tickets and a random number is generated by the Jackpot software.
One person gets to play and if there is no winner the jackpot rolls over to the following quiz.
There was no winner this week so the jackpot is carried forward to the end of August. It is currently valued at £100.
So why are the jackpots not increasing?
Whenever a new venue comes on board the jackpots all start at £0. This is obviously no incentive for quizzers to take part. To make it attractive to the quizzers, I fund the jackpots personally. This obviously means I am out of pocket so the jackpots will only increase once I have recovered the initial investment.
Take It Or Leave It £7.48
Open The Box £61.00
Technical Issues
During the quiz, there was a problem with teams dropping off the network. I did what I could by adding a repeater which seems to have worked. This issue was a major pain and cost us a lot of time. The quiz ended about 45 minutes after the scheduled time. Included in that late finish was the late start due to teams arriving late and getting set up.
After the quiz, I looked into the issue more deeply. I am sure that some of you understand how the channels allocated to different wireless networks are allocated. In the Old Colliery, there are a number of different wifi channels including the public networks, POS networks as well as management networks and others from outside the venue.
These wifi frequencies were all dumped onto 2 channels, ch1 and ch6. The router used for the quiz defaults to ch1 so the signal had a lot of interference from the others. Switching my router to ch11 fully resolved the issue so that is what I will be doing in future.
It was a very annoying problem not just for me but also for the quizzers. Fingers crossed because you never know with tech, this will not happen again.
Upcoming Open Premier SpeedQuizzing Events
Thursday 01/08/19 The Cuddie Brae, Newcraighall
Wednesday 07/08/19 The Coalgate, Ormiston
Thursday 08/08/19 The Cuddie Brae, Newcraighall
Thursday 15/08/19 The Cuddie Brae, Newcraighall
Thursday 22/08/19 The Cuddie Brae Newcraighall
Wednesday 28/08/19 The Old Colliery, Shawfair
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