Learned League

I think I am the only one here is actually going to be relegated.

I might actually make it back to A, mostly off the back of a forfeit win on a day when I only got two right

My career in A is entirely without distinction

not strictly LL-related but i finished 19th in the world quizzing championships this past weekend and earned the top scores in the entertainment and lifestyle categories, which i can only attribute to insane luck, including a music category that was much heavier on metal and eurovision than normal

https://www.facebook.com/groups/oqlusa/permalink/447543662903536

something folks here might enjoy is the online quiz league pop solos competition, which is starting in january - it's pop culture-only live trivia via zoom; i've been playing in the inaugural OQLUSA team season and it's a ton of fun

I think I did that once. Maybe Tony Hightower was the host.

The world quizzing I mean, congrats. Not the other thing I just looked at.

I've got most of you in Player Tracker now, just because.

yeah, i did it in NYC the last few years - i don't think tony hosted last year, it was at some random bar in the financial district

it's a lot less distracting to do this without a bunch of people downstairs loudly yelling at a soccer game, it turns out

I did it a few years ago on Stone Street, I think, in some Irish pub.

i will probably squeeze by in the C rundle again, somewhere near the bottom. Increasingly clear this is my current level.

I will be joining you there soon.

I did WQC back in 2013, maybe? It was kind of an awkward scene, tbh.

Pleased to see that a Sri Lankan guy who I knew through my old job (he regularly submitted corrections to encyclopedia articles) was once again the top player in his country.

not strictly LL-related but i finished 19th in the world quizzing championships this past weekend

Sick drums and bugles fanfare! I've taken part every year since 2005 except this year, and I can say with confidence that is a truly great result. Didn't do it officially now bcz scared of being frustrated out of my mind by technical stuff that could go wrong. (Also the thing was held in 2004 before Norway got wind of it; but for that fact I might have done it just to keep a 100% attendance). But really, massive kudos!

Also it seems you're the Lifestyle King!

(this is a notoriously volatile title, judging by various year-on-year national and international stats one keeps half an eye on :-P )

oh man, thank you!

yeah, at the risk of being too specific (they sell the question sets after the fact, so i don't wanna jack their IP), the lifestyle category was mostly just stuff i knew - looking at my paper, i knocked out the first 18 before i even ran into one that i couldn't guess. i managed my time a lot better this year by not worrying about unguessable questions like those (see also: the sport category, much of which is impossible for americans), but it also helped that i'd been playing in the quizzing world cup and was very familiar with their canon and style. i haven't had much to do in 2020 but competitive quizzing, so i knew i was a lot better prepared for this than i was last year. still, i was hoping for something like a 120 (i got a 109 last year), and i outdid myself, mostly because of those two categories.

I did WQC back in 2013, maybe? It was kind of an awkward scene, tbh.

welcome to competitive quizzing lol

there are definitely people in the quiz community who take it way too seriously, but honestly most of them are pretty clever and into jokes and banter. i don't think i'd do as much of it as i do if everybody was super humorless and strait-laced! even in the world cup, which got pretty intense as we progressed into the playoffs, my team was always screwing around and joking, which made it a lot more fun even when we lost.

this was mentioned on the British Comedy thread but i am STRONGLY recommending all LLers try out the UK game show "Only Connect," available stateside via this guy's YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videos
it is fucking HARD

er, that youtube channel is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=featured

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wheelsongen/

fuck.

http://www.youtube.com/ c/wheelsongenius/featured

but remove the space before "c"

the OQLUSA folks are launching an online version of that in january as well! licensed and everything

https://quizcentral.net/connections/coql/

bobbin

What about it?

it's a good ilm word

Got another 9(6)! Though the feeling of accomplishment is a little muted since a win is a win and I only moved up two spots in the standings.

This season has been a rollercoaster.

Amazed that the guitar get rate was only 73%.

Eh, classical music is the worst category for the league as a whole.

Ah, okay.

i had some sort of brain fritz and confused segovia with anton karas

Ha, that is incredible.

i felt fucking clever too!

It’s a good wrong answer, makes for a good story.

I had no idea there were OQL USA / WQC folk on ILX but it seems inevitable, somehow (also, turns out portentous pepper is on an OQL USA squad with a friend of mine, argh small world)

(I am utterly terrible at the WQC so don't go looking for my score)

my freshman year roommate in college played classical guitar, and insisted on practicing it after he finished his homework, even if i was trying to sleep six feet away

tbf he was good and at least it wasn't bagpipes or something, but i will neither forget segovia nor forgive p___ v_____

I had no idea there were OQL USA / WQC folk on ILX but it seems inevitable, somehow (also, turns out portentous pepper is on an OQL USA squad with a friend of mine, argh small world)

oh ha - i've seen your posts a bunch over the years on ILX and never made the connection. i4in is a really nice guy and an extremely strong quizzer and it's been delightful having him on my OQL team.

best of luck later today; it should be an incredible match :)

It was very much an incredible match of me being terrible at second-guessing what a category might be and i4in being absolutely awesome! Great fun though, and so far today alone I have Zoom quizzed against like two of the two three in the WQC and the sixth highest Jeopardy total winnings earner of all time (and that's not even counting also doing the final against T & S and others, which was recorded yesterday)

nevertheless, congratulations! it was an amazing team effort on a couple of brutally hard packets.

being terrible at category choice is a feeling i completely understand - if there was a chance to catastrophically misjudge the content of a category based on title, my team did so during this tournament. ("music and transport" and "ball sports" were the big two for which i was personally responsible, the latter leading to impossible questions about rugby and squash.)

it's kind of uncanny how many of our matches, win or lose, came down to somebody picking a trap category or the wrong mystery box, but i really enjoy the quirks of this format, and scotland did amazingly well. defeating the caliber of teams that you did has little to do with luck.

Oh, I lucked out on a few early doors, and picked up a few where others misjudged - sheer luck has what's seen us through. Was ball sports the one that ended up being a 50/50 between Jansher and Jahangir Khan? That seemed ill-judged for the format.

I absolutely thought Kids might include MGMT, just didn't think it'd go as deep as "what album is Kids on" - was hoping for some kind of Kids in America / Kids Are Alright (film or song) / actual film Kids with Chloe Sevigny as the trash categories weren't what I expected so thought that might have been secret trash. None of those things. Was just weird.

Oh, definitely, that's a way deeper pop music question than what they normally ask. (In hindsight, there were three questions about AC/DC that I can remember in the playoffs - what was the deal with that?!)

I know. I think in the final you can actually hear me ask if that was the same question they asked in the semifinal. Actually, I noticed a lot of category crossover, and I think that was because they clearly wrote sets of three, and not all of the third questions made it into the mystery so they just used the third to base a new category on. Like how last week Savage Garden came up in duos not Australian bands, but you'd think they'd have separated them into different weeks at least.

Like, I usually do food and drink categories (so don't ask why I didn't pick spices, I have no idea). One week was about which island caponata was from. Then it was the other way round, which Sicilian dish is blah blah and I totally didn't say caponata because it had already been a thing. Little did I know....

Like Panama and waterways were categories in the same week...

Congratulations ailsa! Fun match to watch. :-D Agreed about the cross-cat question clustering.

With yesterday's win, I've avoided relegation! Whew, so I can go though this drama next season.

Ha, my approach was: the only way out of this drama is through it.

Relegation is still a possibility for me, though it would require me to lose while three people below me won.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZarmRLa2p9Q

Ha, my approach was: the only way out of this drama is through it.

I think you're onto something! My QPct tends to be slightly below C-rundle average, so I'm usually going to flirt with relegation unless luck swings in my favor.

My TCA is incredibly low this season, think only one person here is worse and only then by one point. Tomorrow that might even invert.