#59. What am I for 40 (Monday, May 14, 2007)

What was your best day…of messing something up really badly, but having an unforgettable experience despite that?

As my eidetic memory would suggest, I am pretty good at trivia. And long before my foray into Starkville (#60), back in high school I was actually able to put that to good use as a member of my school’s Reach for the Top team.

Just to recap from #109¹, Reach for the Top was this academic competition that pitted two teams of four against each other to answer questions from a vast range of academic (and some non-academic) topics as quickly as possible. So, it was Canadian quizbowl, featuring over 400 schools from across the country.

Here’s a video of last year’s Reach for the Top national finals, noting that this was long after they stopped filming these in legit studios and broadcasting on the main provincial TV networks (like they did for us)…

My school, Lisgar Collegiate Institute, had a very strong team. So my first two years, I was not good enough to be on the main team (though my best friend Nigel Healey (#89), one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known, was there from the start). Both years, we made it to the Top 10 in Ontario before losing in the first televised round, and the choker label was starting to get passed around.

Throughout my junior year, with a few seniors from last year having graduated, the fourth spot kind of alternated between me and three others – Chelsea Barrett, Colin Griffiths, and Sebastian Soletsky. (The captain Jake Carter, plus Brian Hurst and Nigel were the three main players.) Either way, we easily qualified for the provincial tournament in Toronto, and for the first time I would be going as well. That was my first time traveling for any sort of competition, and I was pretty stoked.

Those four days, besides the actual competition, were pretty sweet. The six of us guys stayed in one of the University of Toronto Scarborough dorms, which was like a house with three floors. That feeling – the first time you stay multiple nights away from home – is just something indescribably awesome. Made all the better by our spacious living arrangements and the fact that the two adults, our coach and teacher advisor, were staying in a different house.

Now at the time I was right in the middle of a phase (which included me running that jewelry business, #83) of being overly motivated by schoolwork and success, so I pretty much locked myself in my room and studied all night. Though I did join the others in one game of Risk, which I won², I missed out on what must have been an entertaining moment when Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals was on in the common room; and Daniel Briere from the Sabres scored against the Senators to tie it with six seconds left. And the other Reach teams all from Southern Ontario taunted my teammates mercilessly for two overtimes until Joe Corvo scored to win it for Ottawa anyways.

As for the actual competition, it was quite a roller-coaster. It started with each team playing seven games on Sunday to narrow it down from 40 to the Top 10. We ended up winning 6 and losing 1³. That was good enough for 6^th seed, against our 5^th seed rivals from University of Toronto Schools (UTS), who had knocked us off by 10 points (one question) as a 9^th seed the year before.

The question now became: who’s in the fourth spot for the first TV game on Monday? And as Monday passed on and we watched the other first-round matches at the TVOntario studio, I had no idea. Looking back, I’d always had a small edge thanks to my literature knowledge and math skills, despite my poor reflexes. But it was still a pleasant surprise when I was handed my name tag shortly before the game was to begin.

Right before the game in the hall, I remember feeling a type of nervousness I had never felt before, but talking with Nigel and the two seniors really calmed me down a lot. I knew Nigel was really happy for me: we had both joined the team together as freshmen, and although he had always been much better than me, I was finally able to experience the same thing he had all those years.

The game went by like a blur. We were both more like 2^nd and 3^rd seeds: we had choked our game, and UTS had been in the same group as the eventual national champs from London Central, so the game was played at a very high level. UTS got lucky on a few 40-point questions, and beat us handily 500 to 340. Fortunately, as the top-scoring losing team out of the five, we also made it into the next round, but facing that top-seeded London Central team. We also had a segment in the middle where we each talked a bit about ourselves, and I mentioned that jewelry business I ran last summer.

As we’d already gone further than the previous two years, we celebrated that night at a pretty fancy buffet. Satisfied that I had contributed to this with a few correct answers (gloom, Stephen King), I was glad that Sebastian – the second alternate and a senior who had never gone on TV – would play the next game tomorrow instead of me.

Or so I thought. As we had lost by 10 points the year before by playing a senior (Sean, #89) instead of Nigel, it was decided that we would take no chances and keep playing the better player, which was me.

But, as it turned out, not on that particular Tuesday. I ended up playing by far the worst game of my life, not answering a single question as we lost to London Central⁴ 490-310. What stung was that UTS got the wildcard spot to the semifinals with 330 points in their loss.

What stung even more was this:

The Reach host, Nicole: I am a game, whose name origin comes from the term “to deceive”.⁵ For 40 points, what am I?
Jeff (buzzing): Polo? (not sure what I was thinking there)
Mackenzie from UTS: (after conferring) Poker.
Nicole: Correct, 40 points!
[after the game]
Jeff: (to Sebastian) Did you know any of the answers up there?
Sebastian: (trying to downplay this) I knew poker.

Even though my teammates and coaches kept reassuring me that it was just bad luck and not my fault, the ride back was probably the worst I felt in my life in terms of regret. It really was a horrible feeling that kind of dampened what had otherwise been an excellent three days.

But there was nothing I could do about that. All I could do was learn something from this to take into next year.

Since that was a while ago and this is important.
Australia strategy, with Nigel’s pleas after the second turn for an anti-Jeff mission going unheard.
To a private Gifted school from Richmond Hill whose captain had went on Teen Jeopardy, and whom I later connected with at Waterloo where he graduated with the highest average in the Math department.
Whose captain answered all but one of their questions.
The reader reads clues in decreasing obscurity, with the point value going down by 10 each clue. But if you’re lucky, or the question is poorly ordered (which happens a lot), you can grab the 40 right away.