Come and ‘ave a go

Last night I headed to Dublin to watch Ireland host Uruguay in an international soccer friendly.  However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have any quizzing action for you today.

Opta Sports are the company that, according to their website, are “passionate about collecting, compiling, databasing and supplying sports data”.  You’ve probably heard of them if you’ve ever watched a live football match from the UK as they supply the media with stats such as: highest percentage of shots scored, who has covered the most ground during a match, who’s conceded the most throw-ins etc.

Last week, Opta Sports hosted a table quiz for the professional sports media in the UK.  It was won by the team from Sky Sports, closely followed by ESPN and The Guardian.

If you’d like to take on the journalists and see how you’d have done on the night, you can by following this link: www.optasports.com/about/news/feature-the-opta-joe-sports-quiz.html

Read Full Post »

Long lost cousin Sidney’s answers

Sidney Nolan painting of Ned Kelly, 1946.

Here are the answers to the questions posted in Friday’s Long lost cousin Sidney.

I won’t be in Gilligan’s next Tuesday night, alas.  I’ll be in Dublin watching (hopefully) Luis Suárez and Diego Forlán playing football.

But that’s next week.  Let’s get last Tuesday out of the way first.

Read Full Post »

Long lost cousin Sidney

Sir Sidney Nolan, 1988

Sometimes you get asked a question and not only do you not know this particular answer, but you know that you’ve never even heard of the person/place/thing involved. OK, that happens a lot of the time.

On rarer occasions though, you hear one of these “nope, never heard of that, definitely” questions and you feel a bit peeved because you wonder how this can be. “How come I’ve never heard of that?” or “How did I get to this point in life without even chancing upon this fact?” you ask.

You know you would have remembered because it’s related to something you’re interested in or there’s some other connection that definitely would have made it memorable. But the simple fact is, bizarrely, you and this fact avoided each other your entire life.

This happened to me on Tuesday night. This week’s quiz master at Gilligan’s asked us about “famous Australian artist” Sidney Nolan.

Sidney Nolan? Well, we share a surname so, if I’d ever heard of him, I would have remembered. But no, I hadn’t.  I’ve looked him up since and, yes indeed, he is a renowned artist – one of Australia’s most famous sons, in fact.

Alas, for my team, none of us were even aware he had existed.

Read Full Post »

Organising a quiz?

Are you organising a quiz in the near future? Would you like to have it included on the tablequiz.net calendar?

I’d had several requests of late but these have reached me in a higgledy-piggledy fashion: some arriving in my email, others posted as comments on various pages etc.

So, I’ve now created the ‘Running a quiz?‘ page, through which anyone can submit their quiz details to the site’s calendar.

If you’d like some advice on how to put the quiz together, click the continue.

Read Full Post »

Lightning strikes… four times… answers

Hereby follows the shortest ever post on this site.

As much as I try to pad it out, I’ll surely never be able to lengthen this article to make it look like it isn’t not very big.  Even my thumbnail picture seems tiny.

Anyway, click continue to see all three answers to the questions asked in Friday’s post.

Read Full Post »

Lightning strikes … four times

On Wednesday night, the local football club, Ballyhaunis Town FC held a table quiz in The Hazel Bar, Ballyhaunis.  Twas nice to have a relatively local quiz to go to – usually I have to drive through Ballyhaunis and then on to Claremorris or somewhere even more exotic.

It’s not often (i.e. never) that I’ve based a post around the raffle that took place on the night but today will be an exception.

Let me explain: as with almost every quiz you’ll attend, this one featured raffle tickets being sold at half-time.  Ger was away from the table at this point but myself, my dad and father-in-law all bought tickets (as you do). Normally, neither I nor any of my team-mates ever seem to feature in the prize-winning, when the tickets are drawn out of the hat.  However, on Wednesday night, for the first time in my life the opposite problem occurred.  Between the three of us with tickets, we won four different prizes!  This level of success became embarrassing, to be quite honest with you.  My own win came third in the sequence and things were already becoming shameful.  Even though there were several bottles left on the table, I opted for some chocolates!

Bizarrely, we weren’t the only multiple winners in the draw.  Two other fellows in the bar ending up winning two and three prizes.  I think the rest of the crowd were on the verge of revolution by the end!

And then we ended up winning the quiz.

Read Full Post »

Shamrock and roll: answers

Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh! Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all!*

Just a very quick post this morning as I am about to head out and do some volunteering for the local Community Radio station at the nearest parade, in Claremorris.

Anyway, click on the link below to see the answers to the questions posted in Shamrock and roll.

Read Full Post »

Shamrock and roll

Last night’s quiz in Gilligan’s was news-worthy for two reasons, neither of them brilliant.

I received my first serious complaint about the blog. A gent who hosted a quiz here a few weeks ago objected to the fact that I’d used his work, and (first) name, without his permission.  I offered to take down the post involved and he agreed.  So I have now done that.

Second, my great run of #winning is over.  It was a close run thing but my team, the topically named Shamrock, lost out by a single point to Outback, who scored a magnificent 99/110.  As you all know, I normally hate losing by a point but, after five weeks of being on winning teams, it didn’t feel so bad. 🙂

I think the quiz master also didn’t feel too bad about it – he voiced his relief that there was no need for a tie-breaker!

Read Full Post »

Kids these days: answers

Here are the answers to the questions posted yesterday in Kids these days… All of them.

It became the post with the most comments ever on this site so it obviously piqued some interest.  Yes, I know five comments doesn’t exactly put boards.ie under threat but it’s a big deal here.  You’re a quiet bunch.

The questions are pretty impressive.  I got into quizzing when I was in primary school but unfortunately I remained the big fish in a small pond as our school quiz team never actually took part in any competitions! I have one vague but pleasant memory of my mother returning home from a parent-teacher meeting and telling me that, whilst academically I was “doing well”, my teacher had been much more impressed that I’d known the name of  Cardinal Ó Fiaich* in a quiz he’d called out from a newspaper.  It had been about three weeks beforehand but he still remembered it when the P/T meeting came along.  Well, I was about 8 at the time!

Anyway, this is just to illustrate my belief that the quizzing kids of today no doubt got most of these questions right.

Read Full Post »

Kids these days…

The Irish League of Credit Unions has held a nationwide quiz for primary school teams for the last 20 years.

The quiz takes place over three rounds.  Individual Credit Unions hold a local quiz for the schools in their catchment area with the winners of this going on to take part in the ‘Chapter’ round.  There are 25 credit union chapters in Ireland, regions basically, and the winners and runners-up from these qualify for an All-Ireland final in Dublin in April.  Furthermore, the quiz is divided into two sections: Competition A (for children up to 11 years) and Competition B (children aged 11-13).

This is clearly a very well-run event.  The questions are provided centrally and are preceded by a lengthy foreword advising local quiz masters as to how to carry out their duties:

• Each question is read out twice
• All six questions are repeated at the end of each round
• Answer sheets are to be collected after two minutes
• The answers to round 1 are given when round 2 has been collected, and so on
• It is recommended that there should be one corrector per 10 teams
• When the answer is a person’s name, accept the surname
• Exact spelling of words is relevant only for spelling questions

Now, that’s a useful list for all quiz masters and organisers, not just those involving primary school children.

Read Full Post »