A decent turn out tonight and two Jackpot winners!
Winners
We had three winners this week. Bubble & Squeak won the quiz outright and went home with the £25 gift card to spend at The Cuddie Brae. They also won the nearest wins question for a big box of Maltesers. Well done girls, I’ll see you again next week.
More Winners
Both our Jackpot games had winners this week.
Scrambled Eggheads won the chance to play Take It Or Leave It and after what looked to be a disastrous start, they won £18 cash by sticking with the original box they selected. Well done guys! The Jackpot resets again to £50 for next week.
Take It Or Leave It is panning out to be a different beast than I had originally intended. The original plan was to create an ever-increasing jackpot so eventually, it would end up in the hundreds of pounds. This isn’t happening but I think this is a good thing.
Each winning team is winning far less than the Open The Box jackpot value but there is a win every week. Some of you guys walk away with £1 but who could argue with £20 or so. Still not too bad. As long as the game continues to self-finance I will continue with this one for a while.
Our other winners this week must be the luckiest team I have ever seen. Despite their lack of knowledge with the questions, they try very hard bless them, they carry the luck with the jackpot games. The Dipshits won themselves £300 on the second attempt to Open The Box.
The Open The Box Jackpot resets to £450 for next week.
The first attempt went to Darren of The AA’s. He must now be the unluckiest player of the jackpot games. I have lost count of the number of times he has had a chance to win big but he has failed in all but one. Last week, Darren was the winner of £60 in Take It Or Leave It.
Scoreboard
Again we can see from the scoreboard that the teams were grouped pretty well. There were four teams with the victory in their sights before the last nearest wins question for 100 points. Ultimately, the leading team took the 100 points to stretch out their lead on the final scoreboard.
New Teams
We had two new teams this week. Both teams ended up in the last two places on the scoreboard but there is no shame in that. The handicapping system works very well after a team has played maybe 2 or 3 times. On their first visit, each team is given a starting handicap equal to 66% of the average score of all other playing teams.
As I was explaining to one of the new players, this gives every team a chance to win. Bubble & Squeak, this week’s winners, normally end up in the lower half of the scoreboard. This was their day, everything fell just right for them and they had a victory.
Without the handicapping, the same two or three teams would win every single week resulting in almost no incentive for the other teams to come back.
New teams are allocated their smaller handicap as I have no idea how they will perform. I have no guide to the level of the knowledge of new teams, any new team may either be superbrains or genuine dipshits. The handicap given is so they still have a chance without the opportunity to totally run away with the quiz. Take it as being a taster to experience the quiz knowing that on your next visit you will be given a handicap based on your actual performance. Over a few visits that handicap will level out to be more representative of your abilities and ultimately, you will get a win.
The quiz is for FUN and shouldn’t be taken seriously!
I Made A Mistake This Week
Well, I make them all the time but this week I was caught off guard with a request to join a team at the last minute. The main point was to take part in the Open The Box jackpot game.
I apologise to everyone for allowing this to happen. This is something I have always rejected in the past and should have done so again this week. To ensure this doesn’t happen again I will put into place the following ‘rule’.
Because of teams potentially turning up a bit late to the quiz, I allow them to join in after the quiz has started and they are given the same starting points as any new team. This has been done a few times.
From now, any late team will still be able to join in up to the end of the second round, after all, we do want to encourage more people to the quiz.
To prevent players simply joining to play jackpot games, any player wishing to join an existing team must do so before the start of the second round and actually take part in the quiz.
This is not intended as a dig at the player from last night, who wouldn’t want to be part of a team which could win £720, but as an admission of my error. I know, for a fact, that had I said no it would have been accepted.
One Last Winner
I keep a record of which team wins each quiz. Since the start of the year, I have also started to keep a record of which teams would have won had there been no handicapping. I am sure we all know which team leads the way here.
However, for the very first time, The Belters had the highest number of points scored on the night but gave up their lead due to the handicaps. Well done!
The scoring this week was quite low. As the handicaps are calculated over the last 5 results from each team, regardless of when they were, some of the handicaps for next week will increase. Even teams at the top of the scoreboard will have higher handicaps but that is just the way it works.
Difficulty Of Questions
Last week the questions all seemed to be very easy. This week I selected a range of questions which were of medium difficulty, maybe a bit too difficult hence the low scoring. From now I think I should just trust the system and accept that sometimes it will be too easy. The easy difficulty, so to speak, has always worked well for us and I will stick with that for all future quizzes.
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