Week 123: Actual Strategy from an Actual TV Competition
And I have trepidation about returning to a place I've never actually been to.
I turned on the local TV program this week, and found a situation that I had to write about.
The format has been modified slightly since last year. Due to COVID restrictions teams are zooming in, and still not facing tossup questions, but they’ve replaced the final round which had a fixed number of questions with a 45-second lightning round format. Questions are given a theme, which is the same for all teams. Questions are worth 20 when answered correctly, -20 when incorrect or passed, and if a question isn’t answered when time runs out, it isn’t counted against you. Fox Chapel was up 40 on Charleroi, and up 100 on Albert Gallatin. AG played first and got up to Charleroi’s position, which and Charleroi pulled 40 points ahead of Fox Chapel. The interesting bit then happened in Fox Chapel’s round. After getting four questions right to start, and 25 seconds to go, the team was asked the country whose capital was Bamako. The team then proceeded to almost offer an answer, then when prompted by the host stated “we’re still thinking” and then stall out all 25 seconds to not take a 20 point penalty, and stay ahead by 40.
The question I have here is how much information Fox Chapel had at the beginning of their round. They already had the advantage of knowing their score, and that they would play last, so they had to know the margin by which they were ahead. The things I don’t know because the show is edited and assembled:
- Do the players get to see the other teams play their questions? If yes, that explains behavior, but it also gives the team ahead an incredible advantage. Since the lightning rounds are written to have the same basic format three times over (first question was a capital, the second a chemical element, etc.), and the same titled theme (in this case “4-letter words”,) By the time the third team went, I knew which element was going to be asked about, and they practically jumped to the conclusion before I did.
- If on the other hand they just had the score of their opponent after their lightning round, they knew it was locked after they passed them, but they did the extra question to be sure.
- On the third hand, if they weren’t even given the results of their opponent’s lightning round, they were playing a very bold strategy, guessing what some percentage of the field does in that situation, and guessing that they were much better off 120 points away from their opponents starting point, than they were 100 points away. Even if they weren’t able to see the other teams’ questions, they should have deduced that the same pattern of difficulty would try to be followed by the writers in each lightning round, so if their first four were reasonable and then it got tough at five, their opponent probably faced the same problem, and so they could probably stand down there rather than chance the miss.
This sort of question of the amount of imperfect information is present only in videoconference competition, but I think we can take the case where all parties have perfect information and note it in the book. As unlikely as it will be that your team is ahead so much as they can stall in this fashion, knowing that this can happen is important and reflects the importance of knowing the exact rules of the game. Fox Chapel used the rules they were operating under perfectly. They secured the win, and executed the kneeldown permitted under the rules.
Next week will be another bottle episode, theme is already set, but I will be writing it on a plane to Seattle tomorrow morning. We’re on the road again, to various places in Nevada. I’ve been wondering why I’ve had a slight sense of dread about this trip, and I’ve finally put a finger on it. We’re going to be spending time in Reno, and for NAQT members of a certain period, the mention of “Reno” is like mentioning “Norbury” to Sherlock Holmes. It’s a reminder of a bit of hubris on our part and a plan that fell apart.
Sometime between 1998 and 1999, someone at the PBS station in Reno had an idea to reward some of their larger local corporate sponsors. They proposed a new program “Corporate Quiz” where teams formed from sponsoring companies would compete in a quiz bowl tournament. We were brought in as a source of questions, and the taping was set.
On the surface this looked like a great opportunity, that we thought we’d be able to parlay into a sort of second franchise; it would be right at that border between quiz bowl and bar trivia, and it would have a readymade local market of contestants, which were already sponsors of the station’s efforts. It could be a turnkey franchise that could exist alongside a high school program. It felt good, it was hubris.
The hubris comes in here in that we thought our existing high school questions would work for this. We managed to miss the difficulty, the subject distribution, and the general vibe the station sought with it. They wanted easy bar trivia, without a trace of quiz bowl. A couple of the teams asked for practice questions from us, and were confused and angry when we wouldn’t send them the exact questions they would be playing. We got kicked off and they retooled the program by buying questions as a rush order from someone else. But doing that jacked the cost of the operation, and the replacement questions weren’t much of an improvement, even for the goals the station wanted, and it didn’t make it to a second airing. Worse than that it put a wedge between some of the partnership that might have contributed to some folks leaving; part of that part was my hubris in thinking we could make it work out after it broke.
Now would a “Corporate Quiz” be possible today? Sure. Some PBS station could turn it into a clever way to reward local sponsors, or some other station could see it as a way to slide local advertising into a locally produced show. But I don’t see it as obvious a winner as I did in 1999. We screwed it up. Though we’ve learned our lesson and retooled our difficulty, meaning we have something that will work if given the opportunity, we’ll probably not see such an opportunity again.