Re: Of Trains and Bears

cognito20 · Sat, 29 Jul 2000 15:12:31 -0700

The question asked about Albino Luciani was
something along the lines of "What was the real name of
Pope John Paul I, who served as pope for about a month
in 1978?" The choices were: A. Albino Luciani B.
Giuseppe Sarto C. Eugenio Pacelli D. Giovanni Braschi.

Shutterly's answer was the most impressive thing I've seen on
Millionaire so far, on what is by far the hardest question
I've ever seen on the show. (A distant second would
probably be Stephanie Girardi's $1,000,000 question,
asking which character in "Hamlet" said the line,
"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." She walked
away.) Not only did he know it was Luciani, he did it by
process of elimination, by identifying Sarto as Pius XII
and Pacelli as Pius X. Either this guy is a devout
Catholic or a serious historian. Either way, it was
impressive, and he might have won the million if he hadn't
wasted the phone-a-friend lifeline on the $250,000
question (which he knew) about the proper way to address
an ambassador in a letter. He called his mother so
that she could get on the show, and when he needed
that lifeline on the $1,000,000 question about Jethro
Tull, he was up shit's creek without the proverbial
paddle.

One thing I've noticed that WWTBAM does sometimes is
split up the categories some so as to limit the amount
of money won, figuring that there aren't a lot of
people out there who know enough over a wide range of
categories to make a serious run at the million. What I mean
is that I've noticed that if the fastest-finger
question is a pop culture query, you can almost bet your
daughter that most of the tougher Hot Seat questions are
going to be on hardcore academic stuff, or what passes
for "hardcore" on WWTBAM, anyway. :-) And vice versa.
One of the reasons I think Dave did so well is that
that strategy doesn't exactly work on a good college
quizbowl player like him.

I think that any
halfway-decent circuit quizbowl player who manages to get
through the random drawings and qualifications and finds
their way into the Hot Seat has a damn good chance of
walking out of that studio with a million dollars in
their pocket. $32,000, at an absolute minimum, and I
would think that circuit players would at least average
a good $250,000 a pop. Dave may only be the first
of many.

--Scott