The buy-in is $0, you just show up and play. You don’t have to go every week. However, when trying to qualify for the finals, you might want to. The top 5 from each location qualify by scoring points each week (8 for 1st, 4 for 2nd, 3 for 3rd, 2 for 4th, 1 for 5th).
A couple other things to keep in mind:
You’ll want to “friend” them on Facebook. They give a hint to one of the questions that day, and it’s usually one of the harder questions you’ll hear all night.
The point structure can be confusing to new players, so pay attention to the instructions when they go over them.
The night is a series of 6 rounds, with 3 questions each round. During the first half (first 3 rounds) you’ll wager 6, 4 or 2 points for each question in a round. You have to use all three of those - so if you’re confident on the first question, use your 6 points. If you’re unsure, use the 2. You cannot lose points here.
After the first half, there’s a halftime question. It’s a four parter, each part is worth 3 points. It’ll be something like “name the four countries with only one syllable”. If you answer “France, Chad and Greece” you get 9 points. If you answer “Zimbabwe, France, Chad and Spain” you also get 9 points (i.e. you still can’t lose points).
The second half is the same as the first, but the points are higher - this time they’re 5/7/9. You can gain a lot of ground here. At the end of the second half, the host will announce the scores - write them down. Because on the final question you can bet up to 20 points - and this is where you can actually lose points. It’s going to be of the “put these 4 things in order” variety. We won last night because the top team wasn’t confident about their answer. The scores were 85, 76 and 66. We bet all 20 points, they only bet 7. That’s usually not a bad strategy, but this was a pretty easy question.
Without a buy-in, do they award prizes each week? I’m just used to the pseudo-UK quiz night tradition, where everyone chips in $2-3 and it’s winner take all, with 2nd and 3rd getting bar tab reductions or alcohol related merch/swag.
The scoring system isn’t too weird, it seems. The one I go to has a final round similar to the one you describe. I usually end up betting the whole allowed amount, as I want the $$$, and don’t really care about the swag. But if points or ordinal places carry over week to week…
Thanks for the FB friend tip. I usually avoid FB like the plague, but if that’s the only way to get an edge, I’ll hold my nose and go. Frankly, I’ll be happy if the bar/league is just vigilant about cracking down on smartphone use. I stopped playing at another place because I got tired of people cheating their asses off.
It’s not like yesterday’s “Guess Britney Spears’s age” and I was like “Well, she had her first hit, ‘Hit Me Baby (One More Time)’ when I first started watching TRL after school, just before high school, so that was 1998-1999, so she’s just shy of 30.” So I’m always at a disadvantage to older people who go “Apocalypse Now? Yeah, I ditched Mrs. Rosibottum’s English class in the 11th grade and went to see that at the theater instead. So that was…1979.”
Yes - prizes every week. $50/$20/$10 in gift certificates for that location. And they make a “no cell phones” announcement at the beginning, and people (at least at my location) are very good about it.