Last weekend IQ MANIA 2 rocked the house at the Biltmore Cabaret and we once again crowned Vancouver’s ultimate trivia champions! You want to know all the nitty-gritty details on the rounds, questions, and more? We got ’em!
Twenty-seven teams competed at IQ MANIA 2, our second consecutive sell-out for the big show, with Biltmore Cabaret’s famous crimson underground again providing the arena for the scorching hot competition (both literally and figuratively)!
When the smoke cleared, it was I Have No Mouth and I Must Meme, who repeated as champions from last year against an even stronger slate of competitors!
Though the audience was mostly Vancouverites, we did have a few visitors come in from out of town — Victoria and Calgary, we see you! And with dispensaries almost as common as Starbucks, we thought we should kick things off by getting everyone “high” in Round 1.
This turned out to be our easiest round, with an average score of 6.3 out of 8 possible points, and six teams blazing their way to perfect scores! The hardest question this round was identifying Toronto as the Canadian city in which you’ll find High Park. Chalk it up as one of those times where guessing the biggest city would have been correct.
High Park, leafy oasis of The 6ix. For the record, no teams answered “The 6ix,” but we would have accepted it if they did!
And right on the heels of our easiest round, It’s Bro Time proved to be the night’s toughest, with an average score of 10.4 out of a possible 16 points. No perfect scores, and only one brave team dared used their double. Round 2 also contained the hardest question of the whole night, which was to name Jake Paul’s bro-tastic YouTube posse… only two teams (Brewsual Suspects and Shirtless Trebeks) knew this was the, uh, “famous” Team 10. That question also brought the two best wrong answers of the night: 2 Born 2 Runner Up went with “Paulitburo,” while Korny Wits thought it might be the “Paul Bearers”! Genius!
Team 10, originators of that immortal lyric “England is my city…”
After they rocked the house last year, we were so glad to have Laydy Jams back again to host our music round! The concept “It’s Not What You Think” referred to the fact that the song titles do not appear anywhere in the song’s lyrics!
Nine teams opted to double down on this round, although statistically it turned out to be the second-hardest of the evening (average score: 10.8 points). One of those doubled teams was eventual winners I Have No Mouth and I Must Meme, who also were the only team to get a perfect 16 out of 16.
They say synthwave is back, but you wouldn’t know it from this round – New Order and “Bizarre Love Triangle” were the two hardest questions overall.
Seven-year-old Ginger, friend to IQ 2000 and trivia wunderkind, joined us for a very special video round on some events and things from before she was born… in 2010 (as well as a few Qs on her favourite trivia topics)! Hopefully you remember Ginger from that Facebook post in June, one of IQ 2000’s most Liked of all time!
Average score on this round was a respectable 5.7, and three teams notched up perfect scores. The most challenging question in this round was naming that icon of 2009 ironic fashion, the Three Wolf Moon shirt. Turns out there’s been a lot of ironic fashion in the last decade or so!
Presented by the famous Institute of High IQ Studies, the very same group that certified IQ 2000’s 2000 IQ! We learned about some new locations they’ll be setting up shop in as part of their aggressive expansion plan. Our whirlwind world tour included stops in five continents (and one subcontinent), a submarine, a mythical island, a touring rock concert, and I guess what you’d have to call a “zone.”
Average score was 11.8. Ten teams opted to throw down their double, the most of any round, although there was only one perfect score (2 Born 2 Runner Up). Two questions tied for hardest in this round: namely Bangalore as the IT Capital of India, and Olduvai Gorge being that treasure trove of early hominin artifacts.
Olduvai Gorge – possible site of the world’s first trivia contest
Featuring the sensational vocal talents of Tiffany Rivera… and IQ 2000 as 007! Not gonna lie, this was a lot of fun to do, and teams did pretty well to boot. Three teams doubled their scores on this round, which had an average of 11.5 points and no perfect scores. The toughest question in the round was the vexillological/heraldic term for a diamond (it’s a lozenge!) which only five teams got correct.
Tiffany Rivera and IQ 2000 in: DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
Definitely the most popular round of the night! We’ve done Miscast Movies before but I decided I needed to up the difficulty a little for the big stage, hence why we expanded the pool of Photoshoped-in people from actors to anyone at all.
It was also our second-easiest round of the evening, with an average score of 12.4 points, which was enough to tempt four teams into doubling. By far the hardest question of the round was a perfect blending of the Silent Era with the Really, Really Loud Era, The Music MANna May Wong, which sounds like a movie I’d watch any day. I put that one last on purpose, since the image of a great big marching band blasting out “76 Trombones” seemed like the perfect way to cap things off.
Only two teams managed perfect scores here, which just so happened to be the eventual top two finishers.
No particular theme here, just good old-fashioned random trivia! Every team had already played their doubles by this round, so everyone took home the points they got here. That came out to an average of 11.9 points, and no perfect scores.
This round’s toughest question, and the second-toughest overall on the whole night, was about that dead US president who paid a visit to Vancouver a week before his demise, and is memorialized in Stanley Park. That would be none other than Warren G. “Return to Normalcy” Harding, generally rated by historians as one of the worst to ever set up shop in the Oval Office, although he does get some credit for being the first sitting president to visit Canada.
On a mission trying to find Mr. Warren G.
And that, as they say, was all she wrote! As mentioned above, I Have No Mouth and I Must Meme repeated as champions, with a final score of 120 points, Catticus Finch runners-up on 118, and Stammtisch third place with 109. Average score for the entire event was 92.8.
Thanks to all our teams for coming out, we’ll see you at IQ MANIA 3 in 2019!
