Andrew Ma

Andrew Ma
Noted subjects	Geography, History, Classical Music
Current college	None
Past colleges	None
High school	Lakeside (WA)
Middle school	Evergreen (WA)
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Andrew Ma is a quizbowl player at Lakeside (WA), where he is currently the club president. He is known widely for advertising quizbowl and encouraging students to join the club, causing the greatest revival of Lakeside's quizbowl program since the graduation of Kyle Haddad-Fonda. His greatest achievements as a player and club president include introducing Lakeside to National History Bee and Bowl (NHBB), renaming the club from Knowledge Bowl to Quizbowl, and convincing Austin Wei, Matthew Shum, Carl Schildkraut, and Sanjay Raman to join the team. His philosophy towards quizbowl is quite eccentric and revolves around a combination of constantly practicing on protobowl with his teammates, writing notecards based on quinterest questions, and insisting that all of his knowledge comes from real learning rather than memorization. He routinely complains about his stats being suppressed by Austin Wei's faster buzzing speed because they share a huge overlap in knowledge.

He competed in the National Geographic Bee for The Evergreen School from 6th to 8th grade, ultimately winning the Washington State title in 2014 and losing on tiebreakers at nationals for a shared 11th place. He was a study partner of National Geographic Bee Finalist Pranit Nanda, USGO Champion Kyle Yu and other high finishers in both competitions, including Ben Benjadol. During the state championship, he outplaced Austin Wei, whom he eventually teamed up with in high school to form the only geo/history team that could challenge Jonathan Tran of Westview (OR) from 2015-2017.

Andrew was scouted for Lakeside's team by then-captain Eric Zhou. His first tournament was the 2015 Washington State Championships, where Lakeside placed second and Andrew was the 7th overall scorer with 27.33 points per game. Since then, he has continued to actively play quizbowl in Washington State with Lakeside and also competes in History Bee and Bowl and USGO. He introduced NHBB to Lakeside in 2015 and since then, has won the bowl three times, the bee twice, and USGO five times. Since Andrew Ma and Austin Wei began to compete in USGO, no player in the Pacific Northwest Region has ever beaten their scores at a tournament.