Trivia formats - Revision history

Kevin Wang: /* Formats */

2026-02-11T21:41:42Z

Formats

Kevin Wang: /* Edge cases */

2026-02-11T21:37:58Z

Edge cases

Kevin Wang: /* Bar trivia */

2026-02-11T20:21:11Z

Bar trivia

Kevin Wang: /* Formats */

2026-02-11T20:15:25Z

Formats

Kevin Wang: /* Differences from quizbowl */

2026-02-11T19:31:26Z

Differences from quizbowl

Kevin Wang: /* Quiz League */

2024-02-26T00:10:08Z

Quiz League

Caspar Chatham at 00:36, 12 June 2023

2023-06-12T00:36:45Z

Caspar Chatham: slight rewrite of UC and trivia- added in point on UKSC as well. Competition may not be QB but does not seem to sit easily in trivia?

2023-06-12T00:35:43Z

slight rewrite of UC and trivia- added in point on UKSC as well. Competition may not be QB but does not seem to sit easily in trivia?

Kevin Wang: /* Quiz League */

2023-03-13T17:38:37Z

Quiz League

Kevin Wang: /* Player base */

2023-03-13T17:35:17Z

Player base

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 * The standard 5/5/5 timing rules indicate that quizbowl is a game for the young: no other competition is nearly as reliant on quick recall.
 * With <5% of its questions being pop culture, ACF Regionals has an order of magnitude less pop culture than any trivia format.
-* Even though it is not the hardest event on the calendar (or even in the regular season) it is almost categorically harder, especially when considering the difficulty of hard parts and early clues.
+* Even though it is not the hardest event on the calendar (or even in the regular season) it is almost categorically harder than any other event described as trivia, especially when considering the difficulty of hard parts and early clues.
 ===Bar trivia===
@@ Line 50: / Line 50: @@
 If you attend a bar trivia event, '''be sure to buy things and/or tip!''' Most of these events do not charge fees or pay their organizers and thus can only exist because they bring business to the establishment they are hosted in. Often the prize is a gift card or another form of credit meant to encourage return visits: if you attempt to "go positive" by only attending the trivia and spending little money, you may be asked to not return.
-{{Trivia format box|name=Learned League
+{{Trivia format box|name=Bar trivia
-|time=7
+|time=5
 |timeblurb=a couple minutes
 |academic=2
@@ Line 73: / Line 73: @@
 ===World Quizzing Championship===
 The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Quizzing_Championship World Quizzing Championship] (WQC) is an annual written quiz with 240 questions, considered to be the premiere event in its format. Quizbowl players Daoud Jackson, Yogesh Raut, and Jakob Myers have distinguished themselves as some of the best Brits and Americans in the event - in 2018, Jakob was the best first time player in the world (echoing their earlier title of Junior NAC champion).
 ===Online Quiz League===

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 :''Main page: [[QB League]]''
 The QB League (started by [[Kevin Wang]], [[Ryan Rosenberg]], [[Joey Goldman]], and [[Daoud Jackson]]) is not really a trivia format - it uses standard quizbowl questions and the [[ACF]] ruleset - but borrows the rare-in-college-quizbowl league format and has a distribution which was chosen specifically to appeal to those who were more familiar with trivia formats. As such, it exists between these two worlds.
 ==References==
 <references/>
 {{c|Games other than quizbowl}}

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 * teams of up to 6 sitting at a shared table
 * a single host reading questions on a microphone with access to a projector and/or audio system for multimedia questions
-* roughly six rounds over two hours consisting of 8-10 questions
+* roughly six rounds over two hours consisting of 8-10 questions each
 * questions predominantly on popular music, movies, and sports, with a small fraction of geography, history, and general knowledge

@@ Line 26: / Line 26: @@
 ==Formats==
 ===Learned League===
 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LearnedLeague Learned League] is an invite-only trivia competition operated by the pseudonymous "Thorsten A. Integrity" with over 20,000 members. In each day of a given twenty-five day season, players will answer six questions and assign a point value for each (termed "defense") - if their opponent answers a question correctly, they receive the points assigned.
-Between each season, various player-submitted one-days (1Ds) on specific subjects are held, in which players must answer twelve questions and assign "moneys" to questions they believe will be poorly converted - correctly answering a monied question will earn them additional points each to the percentage of players who did not get it, on top of a base fifteen points.
+Between each season, various player-submitted one-days (1Ds) on specific subjects are held, in which players must answer twelve questions and assign "moneys" to questions they believe will be poorly converted - correctly answering a monied question will earn them additional points each to the percentage of players who did not get it, on top of a base fifteen points. There are also themed minileagues whose gameplay is analogous to the regular season but with questions focused on a specific subject.
 {{Trivia format box|name=Learned League

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 The tenets of "[[good quizbowl]]" are that questions should be [[pyramidal]] and that they should [[fairly]] reward players who have more [[knowledge]]. Additionally, quizbowl explicitly avoids rewarding knowledge of "trivia", which is often held to encompass things that are not "important".
-As its name suggests, the various formats and competitions that fall under the umbrella of the trivia have no problems with asking questions about and rewarding things that would be considered unacceptable in quizbowl. This does not necessarily mean that questions are [[question quality#bad|bad]], but it does mean that they are very different and are aimed at a very different audience. The relative paucity of buzzer-based competitions also means that pyramidality is not frequently a concern.
+As their name suggests, the various formats and competitions that fall under the umbrella of "trivia" have no problems with asking questions about and rewarding things that would be considered unacceptable in quizbowl. This does not necessarily mean that questions are [[question quality#bad|bad]], but it does mean that they are very different and are aimed at a very different audience. The relative paucity of buzzer-based competitions also means that pyramidality is not frequently a concern.
 Because the competitions are not directly tied to schools, there is less of an emphasis on academic content in favor of more pop culture. This separation from schools also means that the average player of trivia formats is significantly older than the average quizbowl player. This can be easily seen in the pop culture that comes up: while there are typically attempts to produce an equitable distribution, there is much more emphasis on predominantly older media like musical theater, baseball, and network television, as well as more questions on content that is explicitly much older (such as music and sports from the 1970's), at the expense of questions on media aimed towards younger people like video games and Internet/online content.

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 The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Quizzing_Championship World Quizzing Championship] (WQC) is an annual written quiz with 240 questions, considered to be the premiere event in its format. Quizbowl players Daoud Jackson, Yogesh Raut, and Jakob Myers have distinguished themselves as some of the best Brits and Americans in the event - in 2018, Jakob was the best first time player in the world (echoing their earlier title of Junior NAC champion).
-===Quiz League===
+===Online Quiz League===
 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiz_league Quiz leagues] are a staple of British quiz and involves alternating reading questions to individual players on two teams of four - each person has an opportunity to answer for two points or pass to their team for one, with the other team getting a stab if they fail. Some of the biggest and best-known in-person quiz leagues in the United Kingdom are the Merseyside Quiz League (MQL), which developed the format, and the Quiz League of London (QLL).

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 ===University Challenge===
 :''Main page: [[University Challenge]]''
-One of the premiere quiz television shows in the United Kingdom, University Challenge (which draws from various colleges and universities around the country) can scarcely be compared to other trivia formats, where applicants need merely pay the entry fee to participate, and its question content is ostensibly significantly more academic than trivia competitions. Nevertheless, its non-quizbowl format and lead role in popularising quiz competitions in the UK makes it similar in more ways than one. Its unofficial spinoff [[Schools Challenge]] follows a similar format but lacks the national influence of its inspiration amongst other organisational differences, making it no more related to trivia than it is to quizbowl.
+One of the premiere quiz television shows in the United Kingdom, University Challenge (which draws from various colleges and universities around the country) can scarcely be compared to other trivia formats, where applicants need merely pay the entry fee to participate, and its question content is ostensibly significantly more academic than trivia competitions. Nevertheless, its non-quizbowl format and lead role in popularising quiz competitions in the UK makes it similar in more ways than one. Its unofficial spinoff [[Schools Challenge]] follows a similar format but lacks the national influence of its inspiration amongst other organisational differences, making it far less related to trivia than it is to quizbowl.
 ===''Jeopardy!''===

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 {{Right quote box|And yet: Dylan Minarik was at it again.<br/><br/>-''Shane Ryan, writing for Defector''}}
-After the start of the [[COVID-19 pandemic]], the [http://www.onlinequizleague.com/ Online Quiz League (UK)] was started to run competitions using the quiz league format online using [[Zoom]]. This quickly crossed that Atlantic and the [https://quizcentral.net/league/oqlusa Online Quiz League (USA)] was started by Steve Bahnaman. A 2021 Defector article about Online Quiz League<ref>[https://defector.com/online-quiz-league-is-the-future-of-competitive-trivia/ Online Quiz League Is The Future Of Competitive Trivia]</ref> focused on team "4 Out Of 5 Cats", featuring [[Dylan Minarik]].
+After the start of the [[COVID-19 pandemic]], the [http://www.onlinequizleague.com/ Online Quiz League (UK)] was started to run competitions using the quiz league format online using [[Zoom]]. This quickly crossed the Atlantic and the [https://quizcentral.net/league/oqlusa Online Quiz League (USA)] was started by Steve Bahnaman. A 2021 Defector article about Online Quiz League<ref>[https://defector.com/online-quiz-league-is-the-future-of-competitive-trivia/ Online Quiz League Is The Future Of Competitive Trivia]</ref> focused on team "4 Out Of 5 Cats", featuring [[Dylan Minarik]].
 {{Trivia format box|name=OQL

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 Despite the differences in format and content, many modern quizbowl players also participate in the myriad of trivia formats. Part of the appeal is that there is much more pop culture, which is obviously very popular, and also that the academic content that does appear is almost invariably much, much easier than in quizbowl. As a result, strong quizbowl players with comparably good pop culture knowledge like [[Matt Jackson]], [[Jakob Myers]], [[Dylan Minarik]], [[Mike Sorice]], [[Yogesh Raut]], and [[Kenji Shimizu]] have successfully become top competitors in various trivia formats.
-It is rarer, though certainly not unheard of, for people to make the jump the other way, and the recent preponderance on online events like [[Dede Allen]], [[ACRODEMIA]], and [[Buzzword]] has made this more common than ever. However, the difference in how academic content is handled in trivia formats means that many trivia players can make strong appearances at lower difficulty academic tournaments but struggle disproportionately at harder tournaments. There are, of course, exceptions, with some top players being good enough to be competitive in the active circuit.
+It is rarer, though certainly not unheard of, for people to make the jump the other way, and the recent preponderance on online events like [[Dede Allen]], [[ACRODEMIA]], and [[Buzzword]] has made this more common than ever. However, the difference in how academic content is handled in trivia formats means that many trivia players can make strong appearances at lower difficulty academic tournaments but struggle disproportionately at harder tournaments. There are, of course, exceptions, with the top trivia players being good enough to be competitive in the open circuit.
 ===Staffing===