Geek Bowl

I don’t normally chime in on Unilocal,because I’m not a big fan, but with Geek Bowl V on the horizon, I wanted to say a few things. First of all, the last Geek Bowl was fun enough that we have a team of barely employed nerds flying out to Denver again this year. A great event, a lot of fun, and the fact that GWD ups the ante every year in both content and prize money is impressive.
Secondly, as someone who hosts these types of events, I wanted to say something about the accusation that someone «Is making bank, and it’s not the players.» That charge is absurd. You have obviously never tried to rent a venue (typically runs in the thousands of dollars) and hire performers (also in the thousands). Nor pay for insurance for said event (hundreds, if not thousands). Or spend the hundreds of hours it takes to put something like this together. In my opinion (and I have told John this), his prizes are too large. John makes very little if any money on this event, despite the hundreds of hours he puts into it. He does it a) as a promotional tool and b) as a celebration for geeks all over the country to come together and have a party. Personally, I think he should make more money off of this event than he does.
If you want to complain about the length of the event, the lighting, or the time between questions, those are completely valid and fair points. But to make accusations that someone is getting rich off this event when you obviously know nothing of the sort is uncalled for and unfair.
That said, I do want to give a heads up: Philly’s team is winning Geek Bowl this year… guaranteed.

Too expensive for what you get.

I thought this years Geek Bowl IV was light years better than the previous 2 that we’ve been to. That’s not to say it was perfect. Yeah, the lighting was an issue for us as well. There were a few smart teams that brought their own light sources (the aforementioned headlamp… brilliant!) We made due with the LCD screen from our digital cameras. I understand that it can’t be too bright in there so that players can see the screen-​projected questions, pictures and videos. That’s what happened to us last year – it was too bright and we couldn’t see the pictures from one round. Maybe in the future, a decent balance can be achieved. As for next year, I’m definitely bringing an alternative light source. Or maybe there can be some GWD glow sticks at next year’s bowl?
I’d have to agree also that the music round was lackluster. I can appreciate the uniqueness of a guitar/​drum-​playing one man band, but honestly, I couldn’t wait for his set to be over (no offense The Limbs dude… while you are talented, not quite my cup o’ tea). Also, this being our 3^rd Geek Bowl, I can’t help but wonder, why don’t the music rounds have themes like weekly quizzes do? Just having random songs seems so un-​Geek like to me
We sat up in the balcony and if there’s one major complaint I have, it was the closeness of the tables. I was literally back-​to-​back with one guy from the team sitting next to us. We kept elbowing each other. Normally, we use scratch paper (I second the idea of official GWD scratch paper!) to convey our guesses to our team mates, but with not really enough light to write by and so much ambient noise, we were definitely almost shouting our answers to one another and could no doubt be overheard by our extremely close neighbors.
Overall, we had a good time. It was obvious that a lot of thought and planning went into this year’s Geek Bowl. And I have no doubt that next year’s will probably be even better.

I was totally psyched up for Geek Bowl, team shirts and all. While overall I had a pretty good time, there are several aspects that could be improved upon.
1– Length of time between questions. It was barely enough time to write an answer down, let alone THINK about your answer
2– Length of time between rounds. There was seriously way too much down time. Perhaps a little more of that could have been filled with entertainment or allowing us more time on each question.
3– Amount of money that went into the prize pool was pathetic. Maybe it’s the poker player in me, but the math of 75 teams with about 6 people each at 25 bucks a pop adding up to only 4K to be divided among 3 teams just doesn’t add up to me. Someone made some serious bank, and it wasn’t the winning team.
I would be very hesitant to attend next year based on this year’s showing. .. they would definitely need to address the aforementioned concerns for me to consider it. But I’ll still keep going to trivia night for some free fun!

This was a great night in my opinion (and I’m not just saying that because my team won). Geek Bowl IV upped the ante with more entertainment, more weirdness and just more fun.
I do understand some complaints. No event is perfect. There should have been more time at the end of rounds and the time between rounds should have been briefer, but I was never bored during that time because of the music playing and being able to visit with different teams. And I think the complaint about it being too dark makes no sense to me. I could see everything perfectly well from where I was sitting and the only time they darkened the room was during the visual rounds. Last year everyone complained because the lights of the room made it hard to see the screens so this year they darkened the room and now everyone complains they can’t see their paper. I could see it fine with the ambient light round me, but maybe it was different for other people.
I think its amazingly hard to put on an event like Geek Bowl and certainly paying for an event like that means you want it to be worth your dollar. But I think I would have been just as satisfied if I had not gotten a return 1,250% investment on my ticket.

Holy crap. I had no idea how serious a theater full of 360+ geek could be about their trivia. But, I learned my friends, I learned.
Geek Bowl 2009 was my first brush with this event and even though I was just a spectator rather than a, um, trivia-​er? I could still feel the tangible excitement in the air. What was so exciting you ask? I believe it was either the $ 500, $ 1000, and $ 1500 prizes, the nearness of all the other smarties, or just the booze. It could have been a combination of all of the above though.
Geek Bowl is fairly similar to the weekly quizzes in the fact that there are 8 rounds and they have varying topics. But, here each round has 10 questions. And the music round this year was performed live on a ukulele by Ukulele Loki himself. I almost lost it when he played Ozzy’s «Crazy Train» on that thing.
I imagine this bowl every year takes enormous amounts of effort to pull off and I simply want to say well done to those in charge and that helped out. I’ll be back next year, perhaps as a challenger, or um trivia-​er.