Gordon Pepper
reality editor

Here is the second part of my Game Show vacation. This part deals with my role in the Viva Trash Vegas Trivia Invitational. I found out about the tournament by visiting the game show convention, and I wanted to be involved.

Taking out the TRASH

TRASH (which stands for Testing Recall About Strange Happenings), is a trivia tournament invitational which invites teams of as many as four people to compete against other teams. The teams compete in regionals, and the best ones go to the national finals. This event is an open invitational, where anyone can
come in to compete.

The spokesman for this event is Dr. Kevin Olmstead, who won $2.18 million on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. James Dinan, who won $64,000 on the show, is TRASH's business manager, and the main force behind bringing the tournament to Las Vegas.

Since this is an open invitational, the questions for the event are actually created by the teams that are participating. The playoffs and the final questions are created by Dinan and the TRASH staff. The themes of the questions are all from music, TV, movies, sports and other forms of entertainment.

What's in a name?

Speaking of the teams, from a talent standpoint, they were loaded. WWTBAM winners Jason Block and Tim Sternberg formed "The Millionaire Boyz", while grand prize winner Ed Toutant headed up the "Legends of Trivia.' There were also Jeopardy champions on many teams, including "Viva Las Ketchup", "Fogeys", "Tia and the TRASHmen", and the "Below Average White Band". In terms of name creativity, these teams were tough to beat too. How could you go up against teams called "Albert Belle's Saturday Nite Study Group", "Christopher Walken is the King of New York New York Hotel and Casino", and "The Italian Gerbil"?

The event was a two-day affair, starting on Saturday, July 12, and ending on Sunday, July 13. Eighteen teams were divided into two brackets, which, of course, represented the Vegas theme with the Siegfried Bracket and the Roy Bracket.

I signed up as the moderator - and my job was to read questions and signify whether or not they were correct. In addition, in some cases, I also kept scores. On the Friday night before the tournament, I was given the opportunity to run two games. James and company thought I was ready to moderate the tournament.

"And now, your host..."

We started at 9am in the morning on Saturday. There would be nine games played. The teams in each bracket would be going round-robin - the four teams with the highest record in each division would advance to the play-offs on Sunday. There would be three rounds of games played in the morning, and then the remaining six would be played after the 2pm break.

Being a moderator was, to say it lightly, fantastic. In the third round, I had a bunch of WWTBAM players on one side and a bunch of Jeopardy players on the other side. Deep down inside, I was asking myself "How in the world did I get to be here in the same room with all of these people?" It was a great  experience, to say the least.

If I was looking for an exciting match-up on Saturday, though, I wasn't going to find it. In this tournament, where most of the questions were worth 5-20 points, no game was closer than 100 points and one of the games final total was 500-0.

The first day's worth of action ended with a raffle. There were many prizes available, ranging from expensive (Penn and Teller Tickets, Matrix Reloaded press Kit), to cool (Blood and Donut's Movie, Tietam Brown by Mick Foley, Weird Al Yankovic Package), to plain old goofy (Partridge Family Game, N'Sync Bobble Heads, DVD about the President of South Korea, Darth Maul Rubiks Cube). I was fortunate to win 2 of the prizes - the Tietam Brown book and the South Korean DVD.

As for my moderating skills? Most people liked it. My only problem is that I was going to slow in terms of coordinating asking the questions and keeping score. That changed on Sunday when Jason Block (who's team surprisingly didn't make the playoffs) volunteered to be the scorekeeper of the game.

Your Final Four are...

The quarterfinal game that I did was very exciting. It came down to the last question as "We're In It for the Buffet" pulled it out by 20 points. They didn't make it to the finals, though - the two teams left standing were Below Average White Band and Tia and the Trashmen. In a well-played final match, the Band defeated the Trashmen to win the title.

Does this sound like fun to you? Would you like to test your trivia wits against game show champions? If so, then make sure that the weekend of November 7-9 is free on your calendar, because that's when the TRASH Regionals are. They will be located in the following areas - Boston University, California Technical Institute, Emory University, Iowa State University, Simon Frasier University, Swarthmore University, Washington University - St. Louis, Western Ontario University and the University of Oklahoma.

If you wish to enter a team, if you want to moderate, score keep, of help out in any other way, or if you want more information about the event, e-mail James Dinan at [email protected]. Get in the game - see how good in trivia you really are.

Next Week - What did happen after the Convention, what happened the Monday afterwards, and how I personally did in Vegas.

Pictures courtesy the BBC