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STEVENS POINT, WI (WSAU) - The world’s largest trivia contest is done for another year. The 44th annual event was hosted by the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point’s college radio station, WWSP 90FM. Overall, 376 teams involving over 9000 players gave 80,649 correct answers.
Jim Oliva and John Eckendorf write the questions. Oliva says, “There’s trivia everywhere, you just have to write it down.” He does, all year long.
The contest involves hundreds of teams and generations of players going 54 hours straight for the trophy and bragging rights, but Oliva says it’s also one of the college station’s fundraisers. “It keeps us on the air, and keeps us able to provide the kind of programming that Stevens Point has, which is really amazing considering we’re a community of 25 thousand, and the kind of programming we have here is typical of a big city.”
The Student Government Association is the primary funding source for the radio station, but Trivia covers a good share of the expenses. “We give right to the station each year immediately $14,000, and then there’s other (dollars) we keep in reserve for future years. Our gross budget for the year is about $70,000 dollars.” Oliva adds, “The Student Government Association is the primary funder of the station. The station isn’t on the air without student government, and all we are is a supplement, and also provide some good scholarship monies to students.”
Oliva says Trivia has been here for 44 years, and the computer has changed how players and teams play the game. He says they write the questions in a way where you can’t just do a computer search and easily get the answers. “We know that they’ve got databases, we know that there’s the Internet, we know that there’s Google and they can type anything in that they want. We also know that you can ask things ambiguously enough that the only thing Google’s going to be able to tell you is (for example) it happens to be from this movie.”
The winner this year was Dad’s Computers-35 Years of Trivia with 10,685 points, followed by Festivus For The Rest of Us with 10,630 points.
There were actually three teams that had fun, but didn’t get a single point.Next year’s contest will be April 11-13th, 2014.
TOP TEN TEAMS 2013
10. 7,410 points I Did I Did See A Lactin Puddy Tat
9 7,455 points Nights of Neek
8 7,490 points Trivial Fursuit
7 7,495 points Network
6 7,605 points Graduates of a Lesser God
5 7,615 points Freshly Squeezed
4 8,235 points Tinman
3 8,775 points Ugly Undulating Uvulas
2 10,630 points Festivus For The Rest of Us
1. 10,685 points Dad’s Computers-35 yrs of Trivia