Seth Kinast’s Blog

…as a center of intellectual prowess, at least. We went last night and stayed the night for a nerd bowl tourney. It wasn’t… very well run, to say the least.

We started at 8:00 in the morning. The Rolla people apparently thought it would be funny to have us play seven rounds in a row… until 1:00… with no breaks. Then we got until 2:30 for a lunch break… which meant that we didn’t get out of the tourney until after 5:00. Phew.

The questions were not very academic-bowl-like. Lots and lots of current events, pop culture, and sports. (Not even good current events… silly stuff like Martha Stewart :p) The format was funny too. Here’s how it worked. There were two halves of ten questions each. Each question had 30 points worth of bonus… but the bonus could be split different ways (15 - 15; 6 5’s, etc.) There was no rebounding on bonuses, which meant you HAD to get the questions.

So in the morning, we promptly started the first half of the first game by falling behind by 50 points. Just because the other team read Harry Potter and listened to 50 Cent. Good nerd bowl people don’t do these things :p. But we barely squeaked it out in the end. Of course, by this time I’m afraid that we’re doomed to lose our 36 - 0 record, because that wasn’t a very good team.

The rest of the morning surprisingly went very well. We blew past the rest of the teams as we got warmed up (we had 4 games of over 400 points apiece, and shut out one team 415 - 0). After lunch, we played the same teams, except for the #2 seed, Norwood. We hadn’t played them yet, but we were nervous, because we had heard they had scored over 500 in one game.

The championship game came and I knew we were going to have to play Norwood. Having no clue what to expect, I was understandably a bit uncertain. And in walked… Cuba, who had beaten Norwood in overtime! We had previously beaten Cuba 425 - 85. ‘Nuff said. This time we beat them even worse: 440 - 80. We walked out with the biggest trophy I’ve ever seen in my life. Lol. Good stuff. But now I’m exhausted and buzzing simultaneously after drinking 3 Mountain Dews. Buzzzzzz…