A weekend at a trivia convention, long PinPoint guesses, and the LinkedIn Games Triple Crown

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Last month, a few friends and I were sitting in the balcony at the Fillmore Detroit, watching an incredible performance by the Detroit Youth Choir. We were all blown away by the singing, but one of us was taking detailed notes on what songs they were performing, who the original artists were, and even how the singers were arranged on stage. We’d never do this normally, but when a youth choir performs as part of a high-production-value pub quiz-style event, you never know what the hosts might ask about afterwards.

This is what it’s like to go to SporcleCon, a weekend-long trivia event held this year in Detroit, Michigan. The event is styled like a conference, with a variety of smaller events taking place at a variety of venues in the same area, where attendees can pick which ones they want to attend. Unlike most conferences, the majority of the events are actively participatory and have an element of competition. Despite the fact that people are inherently attending to compete against each other, you’d never know it watching people interact. As a first-time attendee, my immediate impression was that it wasn’t unlike why people attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (which I wrote about in a previous newsletter). Sure, there are prizes on the line, but most people come for the experience of meeting other people who are so interested in something that they’d buy a ticket and travel miles just to celebrate it. It felt like the weekend was a homecoming for many. Here, trivia, an activity normally conducted in bars or on Zoom calls, can be experienced with an auditorium of people. It’s really something to hear a crowd of people simultaneously groaning at an answer they should’ve thought of (“Ohh, the Billboard-charting song that the voice actor for Tony the Tiger sang for was You’re a Mean One, Mr Grinch!”).?

The events themselves were, as you’d expect, quite difficult overall, asking questions on topics ranging from “global elections in 2024” to “volcanoes” to “lyrics in Sabrina Carpenter songs” (I knew the last one). Over the weekend, I found the joy in going to competitions not because you think you have a shot at winning (and, in fact, you feel pretty confident that you don’t), but because you want to see the people at the top do what they do best at an extremely high level. One of the competitions involved contestants being asked questions down a line, one by one, with a strict elimination rule: get a question wrong, and you’re out. The last few contestants were so good that the host ran out of questions, so he had to dip into unused questions from the previous year to continue the competition.?

(I want to break the fourth wall briefly and say that while I was writing this, I got a message in my SporcleCon team’s group chat saying, “REALLY HARD GEOGRAPHY QUESTION: name the largest city in the world whose name ends with -opolis.” A minute later, a team member responded “Florianopolis Brazil.” This is what I’m talking about — people doing what they do best at an extremely high level.)

The weekend, overall, was a success, and I loved the opportunity to take a peek into the world of trivia fans, and take in the feeling of community among a group of naturally curious, knowledge-loving people. I left with the resounding impression that where there are questions, there will be people who want to answer them.?

?? Pinpoint: The hardest puzzle of the week was the Saturday, August 31 things with caps puzzle. Only 70% of you got the answer, but on average, people only needed 3 clues to get there. I thought the comment “Got it in two but i had to convince myself that, no, LinkedIn wouldn't do ‘things mentioned in the beginning song ‘dear maria count me in’ by all time low as the answer” was very funny. To that commenter, I can say that at least five other people tried guessing some variant of “dear maria” (presumably based on “pen” and “bottle”). This gives me hope that if I do run a “Dear Maria” puzzle, there will be at least six successful solvers.

The Monday, September 2 famous rivers around the world puzzle, on the other hand, treated people much more gently. The solve rate was 97.4% (just shy of the 98.0% record), and people only needed an average of two guesses to figure things out. Love to see that LinkedIn solvers are globally minded!

The Tuesday, September 3 musicals puzzle (with clues “Hairspray,” “Grease,” “Cats,” “Wicked,” “The Phantom of the Opera”) was interesting. Over 500 people guessed “john travolta” based on the first two clues — I didn’t make the connection until now that he was in both “Hairspray” and “Grease,” but that’s remarkable. For the people who guessed him, have an honorary “???????” on me.

Looking more at the guesses, I’m seeing an emergent strategy of typing as many guesses as you can think of for the first clue, in hopes that one of the words gets recognized as the answer. To me, that goes a little against the spirit of the “one guess per clue” rule, especially when guesses become as long as “indicator marker hair rock peak beam eye case string thin fine tiny porcupine quills watch hay point crochet hooks tattoo pine tree pincushion syringes suture wounds phonograph compass direction board car loop yarn knitting machine medical thread sew inject blood fabric craft” (a real guess, based on the first clue “needle”). But, I do want to highlight that in light of that, I thought that, for the rivers puzzle, the one guess of “retail e-commerce online shopping forest cloud” was funny, since it seemed to use every connotation of Amazon except the intended one.

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb: The Friday, August 30 puzzle ending with a two-word plural term for things to play at get-togethers (PARTY/GAMES) had the highest average solve time in the past month, at 3 minutes 12 seconds. According to one comment, “Paolo Pasco chose violence today.” Five-letter Crossclimbs tend to play tough, and this one had a feature of the cluing that made it especially tricky. The two clues that, based on comments, gave people the most trouble ([Pale, as skin] for PASTY and [Helium, argon, neon, and the like] for GASES) were both at the ends of the ladder. This means each of them only connected to one word, making it harder to guess which letter changed. If PASTY were between, say, PASTS and HASTY, you know that either PASTY or HASTS is an answer. Having both tricky clues at the ends of the five-rung ladder didn’t help in either case!

To address a common complaint, the GASES clue had a lot of people initially guessing NOBLE or INERT, since all the gases mentioned were noble gases. Those answers don’t work with the clue, though — remember the tip I shared in an earlier newsletter about the clue’s part of speech always matching that of the answer. In this case, the answer to the GASES clue shouldn’t be an adjective, since the clue is a list of nouns (so a plural noun would probably be more fitting). If I wanted to clue NOBLE, the clue would be something like [Like helium, argon, and neon].

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: The Wednesday, September 4 puzzle played unusually hard for a mid-week puzzle; the average solve time jumped from 1:44 on Tuesday to 3:49 on Wednesday; that’s a higher average solve time than for any puzzle from Monday to Saturday of last week! That puzzle (called “Magneto” behind the scenes) had a pretty involved process behind placing your first queen.

Here’s the grid, and here’s how I went about it:

The 1x2 yellow region takes up the entire rightmost column; therefore, every cell in that column outside the yellow region can be X’d out.

The blue and brown regions are two regions that cover the entire 7th and 8th columns, so we can cross out every cell in those columns that’s not in either of those regions. Note that we could’ve done something like this as our first step (see that the blue, yellow, and brown regions cover the three rightmost columns), but the order of these steps doesn’t matter.

Now, we can use a strategy similar to the previous step. The available portions of the orange and pink regions now act as two regions that are entirely contained within the 5th and 6th columns, so we can now cross out every cell in those columns that’s not in either of those regions. (Note that we count all the orange cells in those columns as one region, even though the cells in those columns are in two separate groups).

Now, look at the square marked with a star. If this square contained a Queen, where could you place a Queen in the pink region? The bottom two squares in the pink region would be in the same row as that Queen, and the square in the row above would be adjacent to that Queen. Therefore, the starred square cannot contain a Queen. You only cancel out one square with that deduction, but it accomplishes a lot — with that square X’d out, there’s only one remaining spot in the seventh column for a Queen. A lot of work for one Queen, but the puzzle falls faster once you get an initial break-in!

Play today’s Queens

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This week’s topic: The LinkedIn Games Triple Crown ??????

Last week, I got a message from Joe Abajian about a challenge that he, Elliot Mintz , and a group of their coworkers came up with: the LinkedIn Games Triple Crown. All you have to do to accomplish it is:

• Solve Queens in under 10 seconds.
• Solve Crossclimb in under 20 seconds.
• Solve Pinpoint in one guess.

Of course, these all have to be on the same day.

No one in Joe and Elliot’s group has accomplished it yet, which is totally reasonable; I can’t comment on the Crossclimb and Pinpoint (having written both, I feel like my chances of doing well on the puzzles are higher than average), but the Queens time limit seems like a very tough time to beat. Looking at my scores for the past week, I’ve only gotten a sub-10-second solve once in the past month (August 5, in 9 seconds). The Crossclimb limit is also strict — I’ve seen times as low as 12 seconds, but those were from a friend of mine who regularly places highly at crossword tournaments, so I imagine most other people are slower.?

All this is to say, these limits are tough to beat individually, let alone on the same day. But if it was easy, they wouldn’t call it a Triple Crown.

Have you accomplished the Triple Crown? Have you come close? Which part of the challenge is the hardest for you?

Share your thoughts in the comments below??

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