Trivial pursuits

I've mentioned a few times here that in recent weeks I've been participating semi-regularly in a weekly team pub trivia contest run by Vegas Pub Quiz. The team, "Quiz On Quiz Off," is a loose and ever-changing group anchored by Katie Baxter and Bob Lauria. The team has been privileged to have as guest players such luminaries as Shamus, Julius Goat, and Matt Matros.

There was a series of ten weekly contests constituting league play, and our team came in first from those playing at McFadden's. Saturday night was the season finals, gathering together the top finishing teams from all of the pubs in which VPQ runs the contests--16 teams in all.

Unfortunately, we were seriously handicapped by the fact that Katie recently decided to move back to the Washington, D.C., area. If there was one team member who most reliably was alone in knowing some obscure bit of information, it was her. But it was a freeroll, so we gathered at Quinn's Irish Pub at Green Valley Ranch, and did what we could.

We aced the first round, 100%, but then stumbled badly on the next two rounds. Things were so tight that it seemed impossible for us to have any room in which to make a comeback. After the completion of the first five (I think) rounds, when they announced standings, I counted eight teams listed ahead of us, and two more tied with us. Only the top three won the cash prizes. It was looking grim.

But then we pulled off a stunning rally in the final round, where questions are harder and point values are doubled. On no less than five questions, none of us knew the answer, but we put together weird combinations of uncertain fragments of wispy memory, reasoning, and good guesswork--and nailed every one of them. These included such oddities as the kind of bird the character "Flit" was in the Disney Pocahontas movie, the popular store chain known for having a "You break it, you bought it" policy, a rock band named by combining parts of two of its members' names, and the number of freedoms FDR listed in a speech.

Amazingly, we did so well in that last round that when they announced the final standings, we had advanced into a three-way tie for second! First prize was $500, second was $250, third $150. Fourth place team would receive nice commemorative keychains. (Insert "loser" tuba sound from "The Price is Right" here.)

The tiebreaker question: How many bottles of wine does the average American buy per year? We guessed 9. They gave the answer as 15. (Poking around the web now, I think the real answer is probably closer to 13, but whatever.) Apparently one team nailed it and was awarded second prize. Our team and one other were left to fight for the min-cash.

Strangely, and without forewarning, they announced that this would be settled by Rock, Paper, Scissors, rather than by another trivia question. Which seems to me kind of like resolving a tied tennis match by playing a hand of gin rummy, but they didn't ask my opinion.

Stalwart team member Chris Minton was forcibly pushed volunteered to go up on stage. Just before he went, I had one bit of advice for him.

I pause in the story here to tell you that I am by no means a Roshambo expert. I do know enough, however, to understand that it is, or at least can be, far from just a quasi-random means of settling disputes, which is the only way most people know of it. I first became aware that there were serious students and players of the game maybe six or seven years ago when people like Annie Duke, Phil Gordon, and Rafe Furst put together Roshambo contests for charity in conjunction with the World Series of Poker. (Why did they stop that? It was fun to watch!) After hearing about those hijinks, I followed a few web links, and discovered that there is a whole subculture of people who take the game very, very seriously.

My most eye-opening moment came when I read Furst's chapter on Roshambo in The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide. Perhaps your first reaction, like mine, was, "Why is there a chapter on rock, paper, scissors in a poker book?" Well, Furst explains some of the basics of the leveling and mind games that go into serious Roshambo, and shows how the same principles are relevant to poker.

People may try to be random in their selection between rock, paper, and scissors for any particular throw, but, in fact, we humans are terrible randomizers. Most people end up with fairly easily observed patterns. The experienced and attentive player can predict what his opponent will do (and sometimes even influence what he will do) with sufficient accuracy that a rookie has nearly no chance to beat a good player over a string of, say, 100 throws. People are predictable enough that a computer can beat most players over the Internet, even though it can't observe tells telegraphing what the opponent is going to throw, the way expert live players can often do. (I wrote about failing to beat the computer here. You can see all of my posts that discuss Roshambo here.)

So, as I said, I'm not an expert, but I've read enough from the those who are to have picked up a few basic pointers. Among them is what I think must be the single most easily exploited fact when facing an unknown opponent who one presumes is not a serious student of the game. It was that bit of well-documented observation that I whispered to Chris just before he left to do battle for our team:

"If they send a male, go paper. Most men will throw rock the first time." *

He looked surprised, but accepting.

Chris and the other guy get up in front of the crowd. The announcer counts down the fist pumps with them: "One, two, three, SHOOT!"

Other guy: Rock.

Chris: Paper.

And just like that, team Quiz On Quiz Off slides into the min-cash and chops $150 among our five team members.

After all of the strange things we had to know or guess at in order to win the league from McFadden's and then squeak into a tie for second place, it was that one bit of knowledge about game theory that ended up the difference between getting cold, hard cash and getting keychains--a fact that I knew only because of having read about Roshambo due to its interesting psychological parallels with poker.

I have to admit, I still can't stop grinning when I think about how it ended. Sure, first or second prize would have been nicer, but it was pretty sweet to snatch third place from the jaws of defeat, not by virtue of us knowing an extra piece of trivia knowledge, but by virtue of being better game players.

They'll still be running the weekly trivia contests at McFadden's and elsewhere, but I'm no longer going to make it a priority, as I had been doing recently. The prizes are reasonably generous, but they are all in bar tabs. Since my standard is to get one $3 lemonade to sip while we play, there's really not much incentive to spend a couple of hours a week at it. It's been fun, but I think I've had enough for now. I might revisit when friends are in town (I have reason to believe that Cardgrrl would crush the competition, which would be fun to watch) or some such other special occasion, but not every week. I'd rather spend the time making money at poker.

Or rock, paper, scissors.

* Of course, this doesn't apply to people who are aware of it (which, fortunately, is a slim minority of the populace). In fact, Furst's chapter describes some of the Jedi mind tricks he plays on opponents. For example:

My power move against new opponents is to say, "I'm going to throw rock," and nothing else. I am doing this to induce in you a belief that I'm not going to throw rock, at which point I will throw rock. Or if I think you are the type to believe that I will do as I say, then I'll do so with the intention of throwing scissors (or paper, depending on whether I think you will be aggressive or not).

Bonus footage: Lisa and Bart Simpson play Roshambo: