Xtreme Team Research???

For those of you that read the blog regularly, you know that I've become quite obsessed with our local trivia nights! We started playing about a year ago, and since then, our team has won and lost, we've added members and lost members, we've tried new bars and gone back to the original ... and all along ... it's been a blast!

Most of us are teachers and trivia allows us to leave work behind for the night (even though the night normally consists of several school stories) and have a blast even though it means staying up late on a school night. Sometimes during a really busy week, I know that trivia night is the one fun thing I get to do that week with friend.

Lately, it hasn't been so much fun. We normally compete for 1st place with other other die-hard team, My Favorite Team. They've been playing at Tanner's longer than we have. They also have a consistent team and tons of useless knowledge like we do. The new top teams are other teams there that do nothing but cheat (with iPhones and voice-recognition devices), and have been winning and beating most of the other teams lately. Now, don't get me wrong, we have been known to cheat in the past with a phone call here and there and a few times we've had teammates with the internet on their phone. However, we also have a very well-rounded team and we all have our strengths that make for a good answers!

Anyhoo ... I was reading my daily blogs the other day and I read this! Xtreme Team Trivia: Change in use of Electronic Devices. The original rules stated that "cheating is encouraged" in the first 10 weeks ... but once you get into the regionals and then eventually the all-metro championships, cheating was prohibited! For The Finer Things Club, this was great news! We knew that meant that the teams that cheated all along would be sifted out and the really good teams would rise to the top!

The new rules allow electronic devices at every stage of the tournament! Amy said it best when she said, "That's not trivia ... that's research!" Who really wants to bring their laptops to a bar and sit around and look up things? I can do that at home! That also takes away the conversation and challenge. Boo!

So, the last few days some of us have been talking about giving up with trivia. Maybe we need to come up with another Wednesday night activity: bowling, dinner, movies, etc. There are 2 more weeks in this "season", so maybe after that we will make a decision about what we are going to do. In the meantime, we want it to be known to the "powers that be" that we think this new rule is stoopid and we think it takes away all the fun of our fun trivia nights!