The First Pub Quiz

I managed to leave the office relatively early due to a farewell party organized for two departing colleagues leaving on overseas postings (going to London and Riyadh respectively). There was excellent otak, chee kueh and char siew food wise bought from Tiong Bahru market. Should definitely go back and buy the otak in bulk when I next have a gathering at my place/pot luck to attend.

I was hoping to head over to the Old Brown Shoe early to find a team to join. I was hanging about the bar counter when I rather fortuitously bumped into an expat teacher that I recognized from my time spent relief teaching at ACJC. He agreed to "give me a go" on their team subject to the agreement of his mates. After I had told him about my quizzing and gameshow experience, he decided that I was a 'ringer' and that it was vital that I was recruited for his team so I wouldn't end up with the opposition!

The format of this quiz was quite simple. 5 rounds of 10 questions each, with the first round usually set on what was "in the news" and the final round being "pot luck". An interesting additional element is that each team had a Wild Card which enabled them to double their score in any given category, but they had to choose which category to nominate before the start of the quiz. Obviously, the choice of wildcard could well prove crucial in deciding the winning team.

The round for the evening were: In the news, Myths and Legends, What Happened in 2005, On the Playlist (45 seconds of a tune from the Brown Shoe iPod) and Pot Luck. The rest of my teammates decided to play our wildcard on Pot Luck after reacting adversely to much of the other categories.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well we did over the first few rounds. We scored 9,10 and 10 in the first three categories respectively. I was especially surprised by how easy the Mythology questions were: stuff like who were the founders of Rome, what Jason and his Argonauts were after, is pretty much common knowledge, one would think. Still, a number of teams struggled on those questions.

In the end it was pretty much a two horse race with another team. The entire team surprised themselves by scoring a 9 on the music round. We went into the Pot Luck need a score of around 7 in order to be sure of the win. The questions were quite random, which was always the danger in any pot luck round but we scored 8 in the end to win quite comfortable (and getting 46 out of 50 questions correct with a total score of 54 points.

The best part about winning was the fact that we took home the entire pot of cash which worked out to slightly over $50 per person. However, that more or less disappeared after I paid my bill for 3 pints of beer and a burger (with my taxi fare home not included). Still, that meant that I had a evening of good beer and fun quizzing completely free of charge. Certainly can't complain about that. I promised to return next week as we attempt to defend our title and I must say that I'm definitely keen for more quizzing.

Afternote: I stayed quite late at the bar chatting. I also overheard a Norwegian bloke mentioning that he was negotiating a deal with Keppel Fels, which was the company that Vic's dad had a senior position in. Things surprisingly deteriorated however, with one of the Norwegians accusing me of initiating the conversation just to show off, and that it was unwise to go around tossing names of acquaintances of acquaintances. It was certainly quite bizarre as that had not been my intention at all. Besides which, I have known Vic and his family for more than 10 years now (including teaching his brother GP at ACJC!). I guess it must seem quite bizarre to have some random young guy claim to know someone who is a senior executive in a big company, but that is part of what Singapore is like. Everybody knows someone who knows someone else. It is best never to take that for granted.