Thursday, November 3, 2011 Game Recap & Discussion [SPOILERS]

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katiedidwhat
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by katiedidwhat »

Congrats to Roger, who clearly owned the game, but I thought Brian and Kara played well, too. I did an undignified fist pump in my living when I got FJ right. So far this has been a highly entertaining tournament!
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by opusthepenguin »

seaborgium wrote:
Roadgeek Adam wrote:Surprised me that Roger went with the ballsy $20,200 wager.
Unless you're concerned about which podium you get in the SFs, you have nothing to lose in a lock QF, so I don't see how it's ballsy. I must say, however, that after my grousing in recent times about players not attaining the highest ten-thousands digit available to them, I appreciated Roger's attempt to break 60k when the downside was meaningless.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but ... the winners in the quarter-finals get to keep their winnings, right?
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by DBear »

8800 won't get you into the semis. I see no reason not to bet it all. Kara just raised the white flag on FJ.
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DBear
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by DBear »

8800 won't get you into the semis. I see no reason not to bet it all. Kara just raised the white flag on FJ.

FJ gave me no problem.
Last edited by DBear on Thu Nov 03, 2011 8:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by jeff6286 »

I was on the right track with FJ!, starting in the Mediterranean, although I don't really know why. I think my first thought when thinking of peaks in that area was Mt. Etna, but then I realized that it was in Sicily, which isn't a country, and I was pretty sure that it was more known as a volcano than a particularly tall mountain peak, so I decided to go with Italy and Malta. I really had no idea if Malta shared anything with Italy, but I know from my Sporcle that Cyprus and Malta are the only two island nations in the Mediterranean, and I was pretty sure that Cyprus was much closer to Greece than Italy. As soon as Alex mentioned Olympus, I immediately knew that the answer was actually Greece and Cyprus, and I couldn't believe that I was that close, and yet completely wrong.

I found that DJ! board much more TOC-like than the previous 3 rounds in the first two QF games. I was cruising through the J! round, but came to a screeching halt when DJ! began. The Virginia Woolf and 60s music categories were ones in which I had very little chance of coming up with most of the answers. The other 4 categories had lots of clues that I could have gotten, but some of them took me way too long to figure out, and there was no way that I was going to come up with them before Roger blurted out the correct answers.

Based on the difficulty level of yesterday's FJ, I figured that Kara and Brian should both bet it all, but of course they wouldn't have that information available to them. Now, after the difficulty of today's FJ, if we get a couple more like that, Kara might still have a chance with her $6,012, but I doubt it. It seems odd to have two FJ clues in a row that deal with European geography, but I bet some of our resident geo-buffs were loving it.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by opusthepenguin »

I was really surprised that "between" and "unit" were triple stumpers.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by Bamaman »

Kara's position wa one where you might as well bet big. Brian's score was borderline at best for getting in, so his bet wasn't bad.

Nothing bally about Roger' bet. In the QF round, you are playing with Monopoly money so it doesn't matter what you wind up with if you have a lock game unles SF position is important to you.

No shot on FJ. Went looking for an island in the America and picked Cuba and nothing else came along and scribbled down Panama just to have a second answer.

I thought the boards were harder than yesterday, but when you drop Baseball and replace it with Virginia Woolf, that is going to hurt my score. I did enjoy the 5/5 in Presidents, however.
Last edited by Bamaman on Thu Nov 03, 2011 8:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
slam
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by slam »

Impressive performance, Roger!

In the heat of the moment, the Kinks tripped me up, too. With some extra time, it was clear that 1963 was too early for them to have their first, let alone fourth, hit.

I was pre-calling Australia before the clue was revealed. I figured that Mt. Koscuiszko was the most obscure tallest national mountain that an FJ clue could reasonably be written about. Seems like you thinking somewhat similarly. Maybe because of focusing on that, I didn't come anywhere near the correct response. I think it was gettable, but it certainly wasn't an easy one. I seem to have an impression that QF FJ's are typically more difficult than the SF and F ones (though yesterday's didn't strike me as all that hard).

Curious about the $5K DD wager. You had $23K+ at that point. That's always been good enough to advance with margin to spare. Let's say you miss the DD and then your opponents get hot on the buzzer. Then you get in for one or two clues but neg out of frustration. All of a sudden, you're at $16K going into FJ. You then probably wager small but miss it and end up with $15K. You're still feeling good about your score but it happens to be a very high scoring tournament (it's happened before) and you're done. I know this chain of events is unlikely, but if you wager tiny on this clue and put down your signalling device, you've written your ticket to the semis. Why take any chance at all?
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by seaborgium »

opusthepenguin wrote:
seaborgium wrote:
Roadgeek Adam wrote:Surprised me that Roger went with the ballsy $20,200 wager.
Unless you're concerned about which podium you get in the SFs, you have nothing to lose in a lock QF, so I don't see how it's ballsy. I must say, however, that after my grousing in recent times about players not attaining the highest ten-thousands digit available to them, I appreciated Roger's attempt to break 60k when the downside was meaningless.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but ... the winners in the quarter-finals get to keep their winnings, right?
Yes, but their final totals aren't part of those winnings!
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boson
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by boson »

Wow Roger - congrats! Really impressive against ToC competition. Good effort by Brian and Kara, but the domination was pretty much complete.

About the DD wagers: I agree with Seaborgium that the second wager wasn't really a big risk. On the other hand, I thought the first DD wager was larger than you needed - congrats on nailing it, but if you had missed it (down to 4k approximately?) you might have been under a little more pressure.

That translation exercises category was a tough one - and obviously confused at least one contestant. I think it would have been fair for Alex to explain it a little more.

FJ was crazy hard - 20% or less on the poll, I bet. I guessed Denmark and Greenland (Does Denmark even have a mountain?). Was scrambling to think of a former french colonial island in the Carribean... An impressive get by Kara. Brian at 8800 obviously thought he needed well over 15k to get a wildcard, which seems unwise. Kara not wagering much also seems odd. I can only assume that both got a little shell shocked during the match, and felt like their wagers didn't matter. I can sympathize.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by Mark B »

StevenH wrote: I had no chance at FJ. For some reason I interpreted the clue to mean that one country was in Europe and one wasn't. I guessed Haiti and France, even though I didn't think that Haiti could fit the "island"part. I know what Roger was thinking with Australia and Poland and it is impressive that he made that connection but there was no way that those two could fit every part of the clue. Mad props to Kara for coming up with the correct response, but she made a bad wager. She needed to bet large.
I went where you went, SH.
slam wrote: Curious about the $5K DD wager. You had $23K+ at that point. That's always been good enough to advance with margin to spare. Let's say you miss the DD and then your opponents get hot on the buzzer. Then you get in for one or two clues but neg out of frustration. All of a sudden, you're at $16K going into FJ. You then probably wager small but miss it and end up with $15K. You're still feeling good about your score but it happens to be a very high scoring tournament (it's happened before) and you're done. I know this chain of events is unlikely, but if you wager tiny on this clue and put down your signalling device, you've written your ticket to the semis. Why take any chance at all?
I thought the same, slam. If I were RC, I'd be feeling pretty martial under most circumstances, but this seemed one time to back off a bit.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by Suze »

DBear wrote:8800 won't get you into the semis. I see no reason not to bet it all. Kara just raised the white flag on FJ.

FJ gave me no problem.
Dave made it into the semis in the last ToC on a wild card with $4,999. I don't know why it's impossible for Kara to do the same, with slightly more.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by dirck_hals »

Congrats to Roger on an outstanding game. To go 24/2 in the DJ round against stiff competition... that's one for the ages.

Re: the high wager -- I think even good players are too conservative with their DD wagers (in general). If you know that you're >90% in a category (as Roger must be in this spot), and there's that much Coryat left on the board (for catching up in the unlikely event you're wrong, you're making a major error by not wagering big. Put the game away as quickly as possible.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by BigDaddyJ »

Fantastic game, and congratulations to Roger.

Kara, I hope you can make it with that total, but I fear it won't be enough!

My wild guess for FJ was India and Sri Lanka since they were both under British rule. I wouldn't have come up with the correct response without some more help than was present in the clue as written.

Not to minimize Roger's total domination at all, but I thought tonight's boards seemed easier than last night's and my Coryat nearly doubled.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by code65536 »

Here is Kara's "threesome" response from tonight's episode:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFDvg6122Ls

And yea, Roger's "Group, 6" sounded... rather apropos. ;)
Last edited by code65536 on Thu Nov 03, 2011 10:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by econgator »

Mark B wrote:I thought the same, slam. If I were RC, I'd be feeling pretty martial under most circumstances, but this seemed one time to back off a bit.
So did I ... and I said so back on page 1. :P

And no, boson, Denmark has no mountains, the highest natural point being 560ft above sea level.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by georgespelvin »

Well, here I am back again. The ToC could not keep me away.

Roger certainly did not give me any reason to remove him from my Facebook profile photo (taken with me and Nick Condon during the National History Bee). I'm still terrible at geography so my response to FJ was "What is Greece and Crete?" :o Part of my problem was that I first thought of the obviously ridiculous response of Haiti and the Dominican Republic (wrong for so many reasons) and it stuck in my head until I finally broke into Greece with a few seconds left.

I didn't respond with the Kinks on "You Really Got A Hold on Me" but the first thing that blurted into my mind was the Beatles cover of the tune from their Hamburg days so I didn't get to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles in time. This game had a lot of my categories in it so I probably had a great Coryat for a ToC game, but I'm sure that I would not have buzzed in on time for many of them. Still, I'm glad that the online test registration is up so that I can try to kick the football again.

I agree that Kara should have wagered everything on FJ. Brian was in a difficult range IMO--8,800 is definitely no guarantee for the semi-finals, but a smaller wager at least leaves you a chance (albeit smaller) if you are wrong. I know that conventional wisdom says that the category should not come into play in a FJ wager but if I were in Brian's situation (I wish--in a ToC game) I would definitely factor in my confidence with the category in determining whether to go all in or be more conservative (if I had Kara's score I would have gone all in).
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by alietr »

Yowza. (Equally applicable to both Roger's performance and Kara's line.)

The best I could do for FJ was Australia and ... uh, um, somewhere else, OK, New Zealand. As for Malta, I've been all over those islands and it doesn't really have a high point (OK, there is a hill 830 feet high).
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by legendneverdies »

opusthepenguin wrote:quote]
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but ... the winners in the quarter-finals get to keep their winnings, right?
Nope they don't keep their winnings. THe six players eliminated in the QF get $5K, and $10K each for the six eliminated in the SF. The two game final has a minimum of $50K for second place, $100K for second place, and $250K for the winner. They win more than those amounts if their two game total exceeds that, which isn't likely.
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Re: Thursday, November 3, 2011 TOC Game Recap & Disc(SPOILER

Post by opusthepenguin »

seaborgium wrote:
opusthepenguin wrote:Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but ... the winners in the quarter-finals get to keep their winnings, right?
Yes, but their final totals aren't part of those winnings!
So Roger gets a measly $5,000 for today's game?
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