Chicken

Chicken, also called buzzer chicken or playing (against) the packet, is a game-within-a-game. In this game, players recognize the most obvious answer from a clue or set of clues and then must decide whether or not to buzz. It takes its name from the real game of chicken, in which participants drive cars at each other and must choose to veer away.

Games of chicken are very common at tournaments where the difficulty is highly variable or at tournaments with a critical mass of hoses, transparent questions, or just plain bad questions. In most "good" tournaments, a team can change its strategy to become more aggressive or more passive depending on how hard or easy the questions appear to be - games of chicken occur when there is no clear indicator on how a team should adapt.

Jerry Vinokurov is known to have exclaimed, "The packet wins again!" after losing battles with the packet through games of chicken, regardless of the final outcome.