Week 37: The Steak Money Diaries part 1: Among quiz bowl's closest relatives
Bar Trivia and College Bowl for Thanksgiving week
At the end of 2017, as my wife and I were walking back across the carpet towards the elevator, we noticed a sign for a trivia night. Now I had seen ads for bar trivia before in the Pittsburgh area, but I hadn't made any special notice of them. I was rather happy with going to practice and helping out at quiz bowl practices two nights a week. That was all the excitement I needed, and all the time I could spare. But this one was interesting and stuck in my mind for a couple reasons. First, it was offering $200 for the winners. Second, you didn't need to eat at the same place every week, because it wasn't at a restaurant. Third, it was working on a false premise, that winning a quiz was to some degree a function of luck, something I could neither abide, nor let pass.
This was bar trivia in the middle of a casino.
Maybe it was the fact that this was the game that offered me the best odds in this building. Maybe it was because my day job is all about finding holes in systems and breaking them so no one else can break them out in the world, and this was an obvious hole in the system. Maybe it was the ironic thought that I could get thrown out of a casino for knowing too much. But whatever the reasoning, I couldn't shake the thought of that as an opportunity.
It took us three months to arrange things so we could go down there. It couldn't be a night we had Catie, it couldn't be a night I had to work late, and it couldn't be a night I had practice at 8pm, because the schedule would have been too tight. As it was my schedule was nearly too tight to make it from work if I left at 5pm. The first time there, I was late and just got seated for the first question's second reading, facing away from the reader, and staring at the casino steakhouse.
The format was four rounds, seven questions, with a numerical tiebreaker question for each round as a separate prize to be awarded. Top scoring team got $100 in food comps, $100 in free play, second $75/$75, third $50/$50, and all other attendees won $10 for being there. We were ahead in the first round, missed a question in the second, and won the third round. We whiffed two questions in the final round on tools and that put us in a tie for the lead, which we then were off on the tiebreaker and finished second.
If we were to take this as good fortune and be happy with just this, that's fine. My intention was not merely to do that, but to test several theories about quiz bowl, pub trivia, and competitions, generally. It was that if you had enough data (questions), you could determine a writer's tendencies, even if they don't have other constraints on them. Quiz bowl, compared to other forms of competition, has a remarkable number of constraints: a packet distribution, hard limits on question length, and pyramidal tossup structure, and limits of association in bonus questions. Each of those helps lead to patterns, which I noted in the first book.
But here we found ourselves without most of those rules in force. There's no way to enforce a distribution with four categories in a match. There's no effective limit to what can be asked, or a finely tuned concept of difficulty to rule out answers. The competitors here have no common expectation of the questions and what's in and out of bounds. But if we can figure out what rules and principles of quiz bowl do work here, we're closer to figuring out what will work in a third competition type, with different rules. What will work here hints at universal principles, which can be applied in any competition. And that will be useful for the second book. And to figure out those principals, we have to get more data.
The other thing that inspired this project was a charity event which connected some old friends of mine and put together a very profitable venture, until we got shut down. We will go into that next time.
The first lesson learned: Choose a venue where it is not expensive to learn, and where the expected value is positive. The unique part of this casino setup was that it required no actual investment for us in terms of buying food or drink, and our only expense was the time spent. Our expected value started at $10, if we did nothing but sit there. And as long as we placed our odds of finishing in the top 3 as greater than 3/(#of teams) we had reason to believe our expected return on our time to be much higher.
Yesterday, you likely saw the notice that College Bowl was returning to television, and you may have seen my one public comment on its return. I noted that it is a near certainty that when the schools are announced that at least one of them will be an HBCU, and they should be the favorite. Allow me to explain that observation more fully.
HBCUs are the only competitors in Honda Campus All-Star Challenge, which is the one remaining competition which is supplied by CBCI. Since these two institutions are tightly connected, it makes sense for some of their schools to be invited to compete on the television show. It's also true that these schools have competed for a long time in HCASC, and these schools have coaches who have worked with HCASC for years, so they are familiar not merely with the format, but with the writing choices, patterns, and style of the writers who will be writing for television. HBCU teams will have experience at least with the writing and likely with the format.
Secondly, the commitment by the network is ten episodes. That means either one match per episode or possibly two, and if there is to be maximum dramatic effect and to highlight the widest possible field, each match would be an elimination. (I admit this is the slender reed in my logic, College Bowl employed round robins for its later nationals, but elimination is the pattern of all other forms of televised quiz bowl) In such a situation, not only is experience with the format valuable, but experience is hard to achieve within the confines of the format. Experience allows one to learn from their mistakes, but elimination formats limits the number of mistakes one can make before their career ends.
Expect a generalized form of this analysis in the second book, as this expands the book's scope in an exciting way. When I started drafting this book on televised quiz bowl, I had no expectation that it would be applicable to college competition.