Week 39: The Steak Money Diaries part 3: April-May 2018
Figuring out tendencies.
Thus far: A team of bar trivia novices (myself, my wife and her coworker) have finished well at one week of trivia at the local casino. From this and my previous experience with a higher-stakes competition, we've resolved to get as much as we can out of this casino game, offering us the best odds in the house. This week we learn from our experiences and keep going.
Pub quiz/bar trivia is not a descendant of quiz bowl, but it is a variety of the same species, heavily cross-bred with quiz bowl. The knowledge useful in both fields is not the union of both, but there is something there in the intersection. And though there's nothing like a common distribution between them, or even the guarantee of a distribution in bar trivia, they both adhere to their own rulesets and writing processes. And because both have that commonality, there may be applicable rules which allow one to use the same tools and techniques to profit in each field. The same key can open different doors. That was part of the hypothesis I wanted to test, and if it were true, it might mean that every competition has some common aspects that a competitor could exploit. And if I can make buck on it while figuring it out, that's just gravy.
While we did well in our first appearance, I realized that we could do so much better. I also realized that we had an inside line on performing well at this every week, because the more questions that we saw from the writer(s) of this competition, the more we could glean about their writing style, favorite subjects, and tendencies in their question selection. For that reason, we resolved to attend as often as possible.
Within a few weeks of competition I began noticing patterns in the writing of this particular quiz. The first was that despite not playing music at this event, almost every game had a music round. That made sense as a standard trope of pub quiz, there's significant overlap in profession between DJs and pub quiz hosts, so they will tend to write what they are most familiar with. Given that that was the area of quiz bowl trash where I'm least skilled, or more accurately, my favorites and quiz bowl favorites diverge, this was one of the ways we could be beaten. So in an effort to outflank the writer, I kept careful notes about their question and answer selections.
I realized they were writing for the expected audience of a bar, meaning age distribution and demographics. The most diplomatic way to say it is probably that the audience for this was Billboard Hot 100 while the audience for quiz bowl is more Pitchfork. The writers also paid careful attention to anniversaries, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductions. Following that also gave us a more important clue about their writing.
When the writer chose to include clues about current events (inductions or anniversaries) they referenced articles that I had seen which were published about 2-3 weeks earlier. As we had done with the competition in Youngstown, that was an advantage to exploit, once the pattern is established. If you know how much lead time the writers provide themselves, you can focus on major stories in the time period of production, and quickly scan for possible questions before the game takes place. This skill is one of the easier ways to exploit any format, even quiz bowl and even in situations where there are no official current events questions. As you read articles right about a week before a tournament's submission deadline, note articles which include quiz bowl topics. You can either pay attention then, and internalize them, or review them just before the tournament. This works for academic journals, or subject magazines, or general news outlets. As long as you know the production deadlines, you have something which is likely to inspire some of the writers.
Another small advantage we learned to exploit came after we figured out how the writer's mind worked relative to category names. When categories are given for each set of questions, it's sometimes useful to note whether the writer is writing the questions to fit the category, or if they are grouping a bunch of questions under a category that fits them. In one category on Sculpture, I ended up tying myself in knots because a question referred to a flag in a sculpture. I locked on to the name of the category, and kept rejecting Jasper Johns as an answer because he isn't primarily known as a sculptor. It of course was Jasper Johns. And that told me the category came first.
Additionally, that category and its questions helped me to deduce whether the writer was writing One Key Clue, or creating clues to eliminate possible answers.
Jeopardy! is often framed around one key word or clue, where the rest of the text of their answer could be removed, and not affect your ability to answer the question. Questions that focus on multiple eliminating clues is more of a quiz bowl tossup thing, where while there is at least one uniquely identifying clue, many of the clues knock out possible answers rather than correspond solely to one answer. Quiz bowl writers use clues to lead you away from wrong answers as much as they lead you to the correct answer. This writer was clearly in the former camp, and managed to demonstrate this to us with a question about an artist inserted the word "can" awkwardly into a phrase, and that was sufficient to lock into a correct answer of Andy Warhol.
That usage of "can" also highlighted a difference, when clues are awkwardly written in formats other that quiz bowl, unless the writer is inexperienced, that awkwardness can be used to highlight a clue through puns or wordplay. In quiz bowl, questions with those types of phrasing are an error. This is because the quiz bowl writer knows their text will need to be interpreted by many readers, while a pub quiz is often read by the writer. The quiz bowl read is also fast, without repeating, without showing the players the text, and a cold read, once through. Awkward phrasing in that situation serves not to highlight clues, but to present an obstacle course for a reader to stumble through
Next week, we'll wrap this up with a few more observations of the differences and similarities between pub quiz and quiz bowl, and what techniques are applicable in both domains. Then I'll actually do an accounting of how successful we were in performing this.
The Lessons Learned this time:
How questions are to be read gives writers freedom or constraint.
Knowing when a question is written is always valuable.
Give someone enough data, and they can find patterns. But those patterns are only valid when the writer doesn’t know they’re there.
In other news, I'd like to congratulate the folks at the World Quizzing Championships for keeping the competition going this past weekend. Despite the postponement from June, they managed to go forward with a mixed mostly-online strategy, and serve the quiz to over 660 players around the world. Also, congratulations to the many quizzers and quiz bowl alumni I saw on the rolls for this year's event. I will make special effort to get back to it next year. My occupational therapy first run at the WQC last year was quite satisfying, and I would like to take another run at it after I've figured out more of its patterns.