Tag: Three-Way Ties

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Déjà Vu #FactCheck: First Three-Way Tie Going Into Lightning Round

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On the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show that aired on 2016-06-11, Bill Kurtis made a statement at the beginning of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round stating that, for the first time in his tenure, that all three panelists were tied going into the Lightning round. The claim that it was the first time in his tenure as official judge and scorekeeper caused all of the mental alarms to go off. I knew that Bill has made that statement in the past and remembered that I wrote about it when happened, all the way back in 2015-08-01. In that blog post, I found that it had already happened two times, 2015-02-28 and 2013-03-09, while Bill Kurtis was judge and scorekeeper. Of the four total times there has been a three-way tie going into the Lightning round with Bill Kurtis was judge and scorekeeper, Brian Babylon …

Blog Posts

#FactCheck: First Three-Way Tie Under Bill Kurtis’s Watch?

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At the end of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round on the show that aired on 2015-11-07, all three panelists, Paula Poundstone, Amy Dickinson and Peter Grosz wound up in a three-way tie. Bill Kurtis stated that it was the first time that has happened under his watch [source] (nb: Peter Grosz also stated that three-way ties have never happened either.) Of course, such statements make my Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! alarms go off big time and I had to see if that statement was correct. With that, I cracked open my favorite database tool for querying the Wait Wait Stats Page database and started pounding away at the data. The following is the query that I used to pull in panelist scoring data and filtered out shows that were repeats or Best Of shows (which don’t have panelist scores anyway) and only return results in …

Blog Posts

#FactCheck: First Three-Way Tie Going Into Lightning Round

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On the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! show that aired on 2015-08-01, at the beginning of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round, or Lightning round for short, Bill Kurtis made the following statement: I can; it’s easy. First time ever, a three-way tie. [Source] Upon hearing that, a Wait Wait Stats alarm went off in my mind, because I knew that such three-way ties had in fact happened in the past and weren’t all that rare. That said, I wanted to find out how many three-way ties have actually happened in the past several years. Also, I wanted to know if it was the first time Bill Kurtis presided over a game in which all three panelists were tied going into the Lightning round. Before I go into the actual nitty-gritty of how I got to my answer, below is a quick refresher of the structure …

Archived Blog Post

Mo Rocca: Three Way Tie on WWDTM

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On this week’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, there was a three-way tie between Peter Grosz, Kyrie O’Connor and Mo Rocca at the end of the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank round. Mo asked when was the last time there was a three-way tie. Well, looking at the statistics that I have been collecting, it was on 2008-09-27; where, Mo Rocca, Kyrie O’Connor and Tom Bodett tied with 14 points each. You’re welcome, Mo. :)