Disregard any previous updates you may have read about my trivia team! Call us “mavericks,” call us “crazy,” call us, “You guys really are rubber meets the road kinda people, aren’t you?” All of those things are totally true! We are “mavericks,” we are “crazy,” and we are “rubber meets the road kinda people!”

Did you know Meat Loaf had a fairly sizable role in the 1999 film Fight Club?

Bottom line? We ARE kinda crazy! There are plenty of trivia teams out there that play the same place week after week for YEARS on end. We are  NOT one of those teams! Like our cephalopod mascots, we like to venture out to different trivia spots every now and then, especially when a Great White Shark rears its head. Though, if you’ve watched enough YouTube videos, you KNOW a cephalopod can  kick a shark’s ass!

Octopus 1, shark 0…We’d like to think that like our cephalopod mascots, we don’t ALWAYS win…but it’s not wise to ever, ever count on us to lose! And watch out if we’re forced into a corner and sharks are swimming all around – that’s when we’re the most dangerous 🙂

A couple of developments since Wednesday have caused me to completely revise the trivia plan we had for next season. For starters, one of our players, who ran afoul with the law in 2015 (and the law won, for the record), refuses to drive to trivia games, and if he can’t walk his ass to a game, he won’t go -unless he gets a ride! And our Uber services are no more, so…all righty then! Secondly, one of our other players is having some “issues” with a trivia host with whom we’ve been playing since 2016, and wants to sit out some games where this host is hosting!

What can I say? I like to try to keep my “troops” happy so that they will keep playing. The stars are actually kinda right in this case. We have been playing in two trivia leagues for a couple of years now, and for the first time I’ve ever seen, they are both starting up at “about” the same time! So this makes doing a switch kinda easy.

So what’s the switch? Well, we’re going to be attempting to qualify in the Sporcle Live trivia league at the “Corner Brewery,” a place we haven’t played regularly since October, 2015. That’s pretty big news! This means instead of playing at the Wurst Bar on Wednesday nights, we will be playing Wednesday nights at “Corner” again. Our player who refuses to drive to trivia games can walk to this place – and our player who wants to avoid the trivia host at Wurst can avoid that trivia host here, too!

Never a dull moment with my team!

This means we’ll be playing our Sporcle Live games Wednesdays at “Corner,” and Saturdays at Oscar’s Grill in Saline. We have a player who lives really close to Oscar’s, so this will work out well for us.  It also tends to work well to have two Sporcle Live spots for qualifying for tournaments. Because sometimes the sharks get the better of us! Like when that dark horse team “Two Trivias to Paradise” edged us out of a finals spot in 2015 by FOUR points thanks to a baby names mystery round (this was a team that was bringing a baby to the bar, lol).

There are big changes that were just announced today in the Sporcle Live league. The biggest change is that teams can no longer advance to tournaments directly by just using the “barhop” pass. This means they can’t qualify for finals simply by playing on lots, and lots of nights. Sporcle has added a “last chance qualifier” game, which will allow the top 10 barhop teams to play – and also any other team who might have previously failed to qualify, which will happen two days before the tournament. Since my team has benefited from “last-chance” games in the past, I can’t say that this is a bad idea! But I do think this will affect some of the heaviest-hitting barhop teams out there. I know that some of the “barhop” players don’t like having to play in qualifying games. Likewise, some teams who play in one spot every week and have to fight for a spot at the end of it all might not like that players can simply walk into a tournament through barhop. I honestly don’t care either way.

As for the other trivia league, MTL, we will begin playing Mondays at Powell’s Pub when the new season begins. It may just be a couple of players warming the bench there, so we are taking a big risk. But then we wouldn’t be “mavericks” if we didn’t do things in this fashion, would we?

A scene from the 1994 movie Maverick, wbich is one of my husband’s favorite movies. The way these poker players compete against each other in this movie is not unlike some of the competitive behavior I’ve seen in the pursuit of pub trivia supremacy!

As for whether we return to playing at Wurst for the next season? Only our hairdresser knows for sure! We’ll decide that for sure when the new season begins next May.

That’s about it for now. Happy New Year, all of you! With the new year comes new trivia challenges for the ‘Pods! Go Pods!