I haven’t done a trivia team update for a spell, so here goes! April was a pretty event-filled month for my trivia team, with us securing spots for tournaments in two different trivia leagues – My Trivia Live – and Sporcle Live. And in neither case was this uneventful! I am down to four regular players plus a “loaner,” so my strategy will be to use my human resources very, very wisely! Not all of them can play on every trivia night, so I will place the most importance on having “all hands on deck” for deciding games, and skeleton crews during the regular season games. With summer coming up, I may be able to do a couple of “all-female” games, since one of the females is a teacher, loves trivia, and has more free time!

We thought we had our semifinal spot clinched for My Trivia Live, but another team attempted to substitute a score for a game that was canceled because of the NCAA basketball championship game, which is not something the league allows teams to do. You can substitute a score, once per season if you have to miss a game, but you can’t substitute a score for a night that NO trivia was going on at your bar! So that was something I had to straighten out…twice – by e-mailing the league about it. All of that said, we will play a semifinal game Saturday, May 12 in Saline and if we finish among the top teams, we will advance to the league’s finals Saturday, May 19. Unfortunately, finals were scheduled the same weekend that my husband and I planned a cabin trip “Up North” for our 21st wedding anniversary, so we had to alter those plans a bit! Now instead of staying in the cabin Friday and Saturday nights, we will be staying Saturday and Sunday nights. No big deal, right? It’s not like Lake Huron’s going anywhere, right? The cabin we’ve rented is only 60 yards from the shores of Lake Huron in Cheboygan State Park, so freighter viewing should be pretty sweet!

A freighter can be spotted just to the right of my head. Just the day before, freighters had to be temporarily grounded because of a wicked thunderstorm that swept through the area with a wrath rivaling Cthulhu’s! A video of the aftermath can be viewed here. This storm was bad enough to drive us out of our camp site for the night. We wound up staying in a motel for the night (but hey…we got to use the hot tub, so that was a bonus)! This photo showing  Lake Huron was taken at Hoeft State Park in Rogers City, MI in July, 2017.

As for Sporcle Live, we qualified for its league championship by winning a spot at a bar called Oscar’s, after failing in our chance at the Corner Brewery, where we only finished fourth out of 13 teams in contention. We knew our chances weren’t really good for qualifying there, but hell, we had to try! So we went to the league championship, but had a player bail out just two hours before the game. We got off to a rough start in the game, but rallied in the second half of the game, and were ultimately “blessed,” if you will, with a very favorable final question category (best picture winning films), so we managed to finish fourth with a $150 prize. This clearly could have gone either way, with an unfavorable final category sinking us, which has happened more times than I can count! This was only the second time since 2013 that our team managed to win a cash prize at a tournament in this league! The only exception was in December, 2016, when we substituted our whole roster with another team, which wound up winning second place, of which they won 80 percent of the $750 prize (cost of doing business, I guess). Let’s just say it felt pretty good to do it ourselves – and not have to use a team of  “stunt doubles!”

We’re getting off to a bit of a rough start in the Sporcle Live league in this new season (haven’t won any nightly prizes for a few games), and lost a longtime player late last season. He had missed a team e-mail I’d sent out about subbing him out for a semifinal game and reacted…badly when I told him the news in person. By “badly,” I mean he called me a “f—ing asshole” in front of others! Keep in mind I have subbed him out for tournament games in the past without incident, so this kind of hit me out of left field! The fact that he called me an “asshole” instead of a “bitch” speaks volumes about his (annoying) overly politically correct persona, which was, interestingly enough, one of the many sources of friction between him and us. I like our trivia games to be a politically correct-free zone. Sometimes we do swear – and get a bit lewd, rude ‘n crude! Social media kind of suppresses all of us enough, doesn’t it?  Why should we feel suppressed when we’re at the bar – drinking with our friends?  Which president said “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen?” Google says Harry S. Truman (welcome to my obsessive brain). I have said before that our trivia team’s vibe at times is not unlike that of a pirate ship! And even more so now because I just had a crew member abandon ship!

His abandoning ship was really no huge loss to us, since this player can never play in weekend games or tournament games, and was not really a significant help in the regular season games, either. Tensions were kind of building up with him over the past couple of years anyway, so it has actually been a weight off our shoulders for him to have walked away. He wasn’t someone that anyone on our team considered to be a real “friend,” so this clearly could have been more painful than it was! These things happen… We are attempting to win a tournament spot at Original Gravity Brewing Co. again this season, and will likely use Oscar’s as a “second chance” spot again. We have a player who lives very close to Oscar’s, and is Gung-ho about playing the Saturday games, so those will continue again this season (though not every week)! A couple of us will play at Oscar’s tonight, hopefully we can break our drought in prizes!

A recent development might wind up working in our favor! Last August, we acquired a very good “loaner” player named Evan who plays on a rival team. He has helped us in some of our season games, and at three tournaments. Another “regular” player from his team is moving away to Washington, D.C. so it might be possible that he’ll be more available to play with us in the future! He has said that he and this other guy are essentially the “core” players of their team, so we’ll see how that shakes out! When one door closes, another door opens? Turns out he only lives 20 minutes away from Original Gravity. so I may be inviting him to some of those games there this season if his team does not play their games at Sticks (which happen the same night). I’m nothing if not an opportunist…

That’s about it for now. Stay tuned for further updates! I’ll have a recap of tonight’s game posted Sunday morning. Thanks, as always, for reading!