Hovey Benjamin – "Winner Winner" (2017)

I won the game for my team

Feel good to be the winner

Now I’m ready for the dinner

Imagine that the following is being read by a guy with a classic TV-announcer voice – say, the late Don Pardo:

And now . . . it’s time for this week’s episode of “Team Dynamite’s Excellent Trivia Adventures”!

After disappointing finishes in their last two Tuesday-night trivia competitions, will Team Dynamite bounce back and reclaim its accustomed top spot on the leaderboard . . . and reclaim its swagger as well?

Or will the gods of trivia punish the members of Team Dynamite yet again for their insufferable braggadocio and rodomontade, and teach them a much-needed lesson in humility? 

Stay tuned to find out!

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I felt good going into my regular Tuesday-night trivia contest at Smoketown Brewing this week.  Really, really, REALLY good.

My team – “Team Dynamite” (it’s a long story) – was in the midst of what seemed like a long dry spell.  (Actually, our dry spell was only two weeks long – and we did finish third in one of those weeks.)  

Don’t sleep on finishing third, which is good for a 10% discount on the night’s bar tab.  That may not sound like much, but your tab can swell to impressive proportions when you’re a naturally generous fellow who is quick to buy beers for my fellow man – not to mention my fellow woman.  (By the way, I swear I had NO idea that hot blonde was married to that bodybuilder-lookin’ guy playing in the cornhole tournament next door!)

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We made it through the first of the four regular rounds of trivia questions Tuesday night with a perfect score thanks to one of my bartender teammates, who knew not only that the TV show whose characters included Jesse, Danny, Stephanie, and D.J. was Full House – that was easy-peasy for a lot of people (including me – I watched the show religiously with my identical twin daughters in large part because they are the same age as the Olsen twins, who shared the role of Michelle, the show’s lovable wisecracking toddler) – but also was able to pull the name of the family’s dog.* 

[NOTE: The answer to that question and the others mentioned below appear at the end of this post.]

We rode roughshod through the second-round questions as well, which included the statistically toughest question of the night: “What English Lord and former Poet Laureate of the UK penned the line ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’”?**  

We were also asked to identify the pitcher who was traded from the Washington Nationals to the Los Angeles Dodgers last year – and who recently signed a lucrative contract with another NL East team – and also name his original MLB team.***  

In addition, we were asked what two Canadian provinces have capitals named for a queen who died in 1901.****

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We were proud – soooo proud – of our perfect score after those two rounds, which gave us a fairly comfortable lead over the other 12 teams who were competing that night.

You can guess what happened next, right?  Proverbs 16:18 says it best: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

The photo round – where we were given a sheet with photos of ten different TV game shows and asked to identify each one – was a bit of a show.  

I knew only two of the ten.  (Jeopardy was one of them – pretty hard not to get that one right.)  My teammates were able to name four more.  

The other four were utterly unfamiliar to us.  (Where does one go to watch these shows?  Some foreign-language cable channel with a four-digit number?)

Fortunately, no team got more than eight of ten correct in that round, so we were still clinging to our first-place spot as we went into the next round . . . which is when the wheels threatened to come off our team bus.

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In order to fully appreciate the next part of this tale, you need to know a little about the rules of our Tuesday-night trivia competitions.

As I just mentioned, there’s a photo round – which asks you to identify ten photos – and a few other bells and whistles that I won’t go into here.  But the basic game consists of several five-question rounds.

You can wager either 1, 3, 5, 7 or 9 on the questions.  (If you get the answer right, your wager is added to your score.  If you get it wrong, you simply score zero on that question.)  But you can only use each of those wagers once per five-question round.  

If you’re confident of your answer, you bet 9 – or you bet 7 if you’ve already used your 9 wager ion that round.  

If you’re clueless about a question, you bet 1 to minimize the likely damage to your score – or if you’ve having a tough round and you’ve already used your 1 bet, you bet 3.

Where you can find me every Tuesday night

Ideally, you use the big wagers early in the round, which takes some of the pressure off.  You try to save your 1 bet as long as you can because you never know when you will run up against an impossible question – sometimes the last question is the toughest, and it’s nice to have some insurance against that possibility in the form of a 1 bet.

But things don’t always go according to plan.  As a wise man once said, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”  (I said he was a wise man.  I didn’t say he was a good speller.)

For example, what if the first question of a round stumps you?  You have to bite the bullet, use your 1 bet, and pray you know the remaining answers.

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This week, the third round kicked off with a “three-clues” question.  That’s a question where you get three clues before you have to give the answer.  But the host pauses after reading the first two clues – if you can answer correctly without having to hear the third clue, you get bonus points. 

The third clue usually makes the answer pretty obvious.  So it’s tempting to jump in early in hopes of scoring the bonus points and getting an edge on your more cautious competitors.  But it’s more important to get the answer right so you get credit for your wager – it doesn’t make sense to risk losing out on a 9, a 7, or even a 5 bet just for the sake of a couple of bonus points.

Here are the first two of the three clues for Tuesday night’s “three-clues” question, which asked you to identify a country:

1.  In 1976, this country banned the practice of all religions, becoming the first officially atheist country in the world.

2.  The main international airport of this country is named for Mother Teresa.

Say whut?  You’re telling me there’s a country that banned religion and then turned around and named its biggest airport after a Roman Catholic saint?  

Mother Teresa Airport

We sure as hell weren’t going to roll the dice and take a wild-ass guess based on those two wackadoodle clues, so we held off answering until we heard clue number three:

3.  This country – which is bordered by Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro – would be the second name on an alphabetical list of the member states of the United Nations.*****

After hearing that clue, we thought we knew the answer – but we weren’t confident enough to bet 9, or even 7.

Actually, I should say that I wasn’t confident enough to bet 9 or 7.  

My trivia teammates are the bartenders at the brewery where my Tuesday-night trivia competitions take place.  They are kept pretty busy pouring beers for the dozens of trivia players who show up each week (not to mention the dozens of contestants in the weekly cornhole tournament that’s held in an adjacent space in the brewery), collecting empty glasses from the tables occupied by people who are too lazy to walk  their empties up to the bar, and doing all the other tasks that bartenders have to do.

Because I’m just sitting on my ass during trivia instead of working for a living, it’s only natural that the task of writing down our answers and taking them up to the host falls to me.  Sometimes, there’s barely a chance for me to consult with my busy teammates on the correct answer to a question, much less the size of our wager – so I often have to decide what to bet all by myself.

I waffled and bet 5 on the “three clues” question last Tuesday when I should have had a pair and bet 9.  

That lack of b*lls would cost us later.

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The second question from that round was an even tougher one.  I might have bet 5 on it if I hadn’t already used my 5 bet for the round.  I could have stuck my neck out and bet 7, but decided to go in the other direction and play it safer by wagering 3.  

The good news at that point was that I had managed to save my 1 bet in case one of the remaining three questions in that round was a killer.  The bad news was that I was going to be forced to use our 7 and 9 wagers on two of those three – whether we were sure of the answers or not.

Here’s the next question:

Name the play by Thornton Wilder that is set in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners and features a character known as “Stage Manager” who speaks directly to the audience.  For two bonus points, name the state where Grover’s Corners is supposedly located.******

Of course I knew the title of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that is generally acknowledged to be the greatest American play ever written – a play that is performed frequently to this very day.  After all, I’ve seen the play more than once – and a couple of years ago, I read a biography of Thornton Wilder that devoted quite a few pages to his most famous work.

But for the life of me, I could not think of the name of the play at that moment.  

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I had an absolute meltdown when the name refused to pop up for me.  

I panicked.  All I could think was “OMG, OMG, OMG!”

I knew that Grover’s Corners was supposedly in New Hampshire BUT I COULDN’T THINK OF THE NAME OF THE PLAY!  

I looked at my teammates beseechingly, but they looked back at me with blank faces.  

Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzer Prizes

“Every high school in the United States has done this play!” I said.  They started throwing names of popular Broadway musicals at me – like Oklahoma, West Side Story, and Cats.  (CATS???)

“No, no, no, it’s not a musical,” I babbled.  “There’s no music in it!”

“EVERY HIGH SCHOOL IN THE UNITED STATES HAS DONE THIS PLAY!” I repeated, only in all caps this time.

The clock was ticking away as clocks are wont to do, and the time allowed for us to turn in an answer to the host was going fast.  I wrote down 1 in the space for our wager and was about to turn in an otherwise blank answer slip, when one of the bartenders came rushing over and whispered “Our Town!” into my ear.  

(I’m guessing she got the answer from some random character sitting at the other end of the bar – I’m pretty sure she didn’t get a last-second inspiration and come up with it herself.  Sometimes it’s best not to ask too many questions.)

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As soon as I heard the words “Our Town,” I KNEW it was correct – my prayers had been answered, and just in the nick of time!  As the host harangued us loudly for our tardiness, I scribbled the answer down and rushed up to hand it over to him.

That’s what I did.  But it’s what I didn’t did that was important.

What I didn’t did was change our wager from a 1 – a smart wager when you don’t know the answer, which was no longer the case for us – to a 9 (which is the appropriate wager when you are absotively, posilutely sure you’ve got it right).

(That would make an excellent trivia question!)

That little oversight on my part – “choke” is such an ugly word! – came back to bite us on the ass on the very next question, which was:

According to the lyrics of this TV show’s theme song’s lyrics, which title character could go “from Nashville to Norway, Bonaire to Zimbabwe, Chicago to Czechoslovakia and back”?*******

My kids used to watch the oh-so-educational show whose theme song featured the quoted lyrics when it ran on PBS from 1991 to 1995, but the thought of that show never entered my mind – nor the minds of my teammates (who were too old to have watched the show themselves and too young to have had children who might have watched the show).

Because I had wasted our “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass” wager of 1 on the Our Town question, I was forced to use our 7 wager on this one – costing us a potentially game-deciding six points.

With only the 9 bet left for the remaining question in the round, we were very fortunate that I knew the name of the NBA Hall of Famer – he’s now a TV announcer – who was the shortest player (at 6’ 6”) to lead the league in rebounding.  I also knew where he played his college ball, which was the bonus question.********

It turned out that my failure to perform under pressure by changing our Our Town wager from 1 to 9 didn’t cost us the lead, but it narrowed the gap between us and the second-place team considerably.

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With the help of one of the bartenders, we got off to a good start in round four – the final five-question round – by correctly identifying the hiphop artist Doja Cat.

I knew that the Huguenots were the French Protestants who were persecuted by Louis XV, while everyone on the team knew that the name of Helen Keller’s teacher (portrayed in The Miracle Worker by Anne Bancroft) was Annie Sullivan.

Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan

The fifth question of the round was a three-parter with pie-related answers, which we aced – so we were sitting pretty with a seven-point lead going into the final question.

Pourhouse Trivia’s rules provide that you can wager from zero to 12 on the final question.  But the kicker is that a wrong answer causes your bet to be subtracted from your point total.  So the standings often undergo a radical transformation as the result of that final question.

Following basic “Final Jeopardy” strategy, we bet an amount that guaranteed us a first-place finish if we got the answer right.  But if we didn’t answer correctly, we might finish as low as sixth place.

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Here’s the final question:

Which foreign capital city shares its name with a United States city of more than one million residents?*********

I immediately started running through a list of European capitals in my mind – London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Madrid, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Amsterdam, etc. – but to no avail.  There are several American cities that took their names from Europeans capitals, but none of those American wannabes had a population greater than a million.

I decided to reverse field and started silently naming all the large American cities I could think of, hoping that if I tripped over one that was also the name of the capital of a foreign country, it would jump out at me.

I started on the East Coast, and worked my way west, finishing in California.  I ticked off Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego . . . nope, nope, nope, and nope . . . and suddenly time was up and we had nothing.  Nada.  Zero.  Zilch.  Bupkis.

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The two minutes or so that we waited for the trivia host to review everyone’s answers and calculate our final scores were perhaps the longest two minutes of my life.

The announcement of the final results was SHOCKING – and when I say SHOCKING, you best believe I mean SHOCKING. 

Exactly ZERO of the 13 teams who competed at Smoketown last Tuesday came up with the correct answer . . . which meant that my team had backed our way into a first-place finish.

To the victor goes the 50% off coupon

It wasn’t pretty, but big-time competitive trivia isn’t Olympic ice skating – you don’t get points for being pretty.

Given that we had points deducted for not knowing the final answer, our final point total was far below our best score ever.  But the only thing that mattered about that point total was that it was at least one point greater than any other team’s total.

Because it was, I walked away with a coupon worth 50% off my next bar tab at Smoketown.  (That will make it much less expensive to buy beers for neglected cornhole wives next week!)

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One final note.

Each week’s first-place team gets to pick the category for the first question in the next week’s contest.

I hadn’t come to trivia with a category in mind to use if we ended up winning – in my experience, exhibiting such hubris is an invitation to the trivia gods to teach you a lesson in humility – so I had to improvise.

My go-to strategy when our team wins is to pick a topic that is related to the New York Yankees, and therefore virtually impossible for me not to get right.

So next week’s opening trivia question will ask something about Yogi Berra.  

That is, unless the host misunderstood me and thought I said Yogi Bear instead.

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Here the answers to the questions mentioned above – how many did you get right?

* – Comet

** – Alfred Lord Tennyson (NOT Lord Byron, you illiterates!)

*** – Max Scherzer’s first MLB team was the Arizona Diamondbacks

**** – British Columbia (Victoria) and Saskatchewan (Regina – that’s Latin for “queen”)

***** – Albania

****** – Our Town

******* – Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? 

******** – Charles “The Round Mound of Rebound” Barkley played at Auburn

********* – San Jose (California and Costa Rica)

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“Winner Winner” was released by comedy rapper Hovey Benjamin in 2017.

Click here to watch the official music video for “Winner Winner.”

Click on the link below to buy the track from Amazon: