Week 38: The Steak Money Diaries part 2: Youngstown
In 2015, I missed out on the first opportunity for a share of $10,000 because I was going to be in San Antonio that night. When Kenny's team walked out with prize money that night, I resolved I wasn't going to miss out again.
The competition was a charity quiz which was organized in conjunction with a golf tournament at a country club near Youngstown. What made this competition extraordinary were two factors, first was the prize money, and second was the presentation of questions. Each round of the competition brought two local athletes on stage, and after they were interviewed by the contest organizers, they read questions to the audience. And because they were visiting dignitaries, some of the questions were based on facts from their individual career.
The reason they could offer the prize money was that they had a $2,000 buy-in for a table of eight, and you could also play in the golf competition. Most of the entrants to the event were teams from local businesses, and there for the golf. We were emphatically not that and emphatically not there for that. We approached as a high-stakes cash game. As long as we were within 4-1 odds that we would win this, we should go.
The things that were likely to burn us were that there were only 35 questions in the competition and they were all multiple choice. The former is a small sample space, and the latter leaves room for people to make lucky guesses.
The biggest advantage I thought we had was simply our quiz bowl experience, each year we assembled a well-trained team of ex-quiz bowl, and ex-game show veterans. But the specific aspect of our experience that helped was our ability to research and remember information. The first year, we researched each guest question reader, and compiled information about their careers. Each year I did this, and spent time working many of the facts into questions. This helped us to identify what sort of questions could be asked for each guest. This was a variation of a rule of thumb in quiz bowl: If you see a housewrite tournament, and you don't understand the name of the tournament, learn what the name is famous for before the tournament. This rule served me well whether in academics (Georgia Tech's Heinrich Bowl tournaments), and in trash (when I got a question on Fred Ottman despite being historically weak on pro wrestling)
The secret advantage we accumulated over time was this, by compiling and adding to our dossier, we had notes from each competition, including the conversations each guest had from previous years. Yes, facts from those interviews became questions in subsequent years, and those details had stuck in our memory, and like in the writer's memory. That became a further advantage, we paid attention and realized that what was shown in that year’s competition could be useful in future. I kept notes of the answers of each year.
We came to understand that the writer was working with the charity organization and that this writing for each year's tournament was his entire writing for the year. This made sense as they were solid choices for facts to use in questions, just slightly unpolished, and they learned from their missteps in past years. That also made it easy to see their entire writing style and tendencies in subject matter. When you have the complete output of someone's writing career, you can take a lot of data to use later. The best indication of what a writer will write is what they have written, and the more you see, the more patterns you can see.
The notes of each year’s answers could be used to figure out what they liked to write from the attention they paid to the subjects, and what subjects they'd only write with shallow detail. For the non-celebrity centered questions, we could tell when they had been written: details on the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers victory parade and the 2017 Tour de France, placed those questions as written no more than a couple weeks before the event, and gave us a rough idea of when we needed to focus our study. We discovered that when the writer needed a question that sounds obscure, they went to the sport of fencing.
All of these were little advantages, a percentage point in our favor here and there, but combine to shift the odds of success dramatically. But that is in no way cheating the system. The information was open to all competitors, and each logical inference could be made by anyone observing the situation.
If there was any vaguely morally questionable thing we did, it was this: we didn't highlight the opportunity to others, once we filled our teams. And that's a fair accusation, though I'm not sure another group of quizzers would evaluate the odds and jump in, knowing there was another competitor with their experience. That would be enough to shift that 4-1 odds limit.
So how did this pay off? Well, first year, it didn't. We picked wrong on enough 50-50 guesses and finished just out of the money. The 2017 competition was better, and we walked away with the top prize. 2018, they got wise to us, and realized we weren't like the other teams, and closed the field before we could get in. 2019 they gave us the chance to come back in, and we won again.
In summer 2017, flush with success in Youngstown, I included some of the above logic in the book using it to explain some patterns in quiz bowl. But where that logic breaks down for quiz bowl is in the sheer number of people who influence a question from it being written to it being edited and read. And packets in quiz bowl very rarely stem from a single source. So if I wanted something to study and see if this approach was universal, I needed somewhere where a single writer's whole record is publicly presented. That was when I decided, if I ever wanted to pursue the logic, I'd need to figure some sort of setup where I'd see the same writer's output on a regular basis. Six months later, the opportunity presented itself.
Next week, we take what we learned in Youngstown, and see if it can work elsewhere.
The second lesson(s) learned:
The more you see of a writer's output,you will be able to pick up on their quirks.
The best indication of what a writer will write is what they have written.
Every question not only tests what you learned in the past, but is also training for a future question.