It’s the off-season for Learned League, so almost every day brings four or five “One Day Specials” – single-topic trivia quizzes. I read all of them and usually submit my answers if I have good guesses (or better) for at least five questions (out of 12).
Yesterday’s One Day Specials were on Web Design, Time Inc., Math in Theatre, and David Foster Wallace. I’ve never read any David Foster Wallace, so I didn’t submit that one, but I did answer the others – and got all the questions right for Web Design.
I wasn’t alone in that – 38 players of the 1195 who submitted answers got them all right. Each correct answer earns 15 points. But there’s another factor besides correct answers on One Day Specials: moneying. You have to designate five of your answers as “money” answers – for each of those you get right, you earn a bonus, computed as the percentage of wrong answers for that question. So if 30% of the people answered wrong (or didn’t answer), you’d get 30 extra points. So you want to money the five questions that most people will miss.
I came close – I picked four of the hardest questions. But I thought that more people would know one of the frameworks powering today’s popular browsers (Blink, Gecko, or Webkit) than would know the name of the Weird Al Yankovic song which talks about HTML (White & Nerdy). I was wrong, and finished in 10th place – still by far my best finish ever in a One Day Special.