What I Saw At "Quiz Olympiad II" (non-quizbowl, Poland)

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What I Saw At "Quiz Olympiad II" (non-quizbowl, Poland)

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

On November 11-14, I went to Kraków, Poland for the second ever "Quiz Olympiad." I'm writing this post to say more about the event, so those in the quizbowl community who might be interested can know more and/or look into similar future events.

The event was hosted by the International Quizzing Association, which is based out of Britain and springs largely from British Quizzing Association (which in turn owns Quizzing.com). This is the same group that writes the annual 240-question World Quizzing Championship (a thing that historically few quizbowlers have done as it's usually on the weekend of a national we're all staffing).

(If you're curious how I/we did, I put that in underline, like this.)

Game formats

Main event quizzes
Each country selected a team of 4 to represent it in the "Nations Quiz"; other attendees played in the open "Aspirational" division on teams of 4 with whomever they felt like. There was also supposed to be an Under 30 division, but due to low interest and the use of many good under-30s on Nations Quiz squads, only two teams (the USA and Belgium) contested it.

The "Nations Quiz," the Pairs Quiz, and the all-subject Individuals Quiz were conducted in "bar trivia" style -- each participating entrant had a separate table, with whole-team-conferral on every question, and written answer sheets ("papers") you'd submit after each round. The events asked 100 questions across seven rounds (12 questions in Rounds 1-5, and 20 questions in Rounds 6 and 7). After each round, you'd swap your paper with the team at the table next to you, and "mark" each other's papers.
There was no especial progression in difficulty between rounds, theming of rounds, or pre-announced distributions of categories across the game. There were occasional visual questions that made use of Powerpoint slides to display the images in a larger size in color. In many of the quizzes in this format, the last question of each round had an audio track (usually a pop song).

In the Individual Quiz I made it to the "Under-30" finals, in which the top 10 scorers played 20 additional questions at a faster pace on stage; I missed medaling after the Croatian lowbrow star got a sole get on a tough video game question, leaping up to 3rd.

I finished in 11th in the overall quiz, missing the finals on a tiebreaker about Formula One racing that was apparently an insta-get for Europeans.

Jakob Myers and I missed the "Under-30" podium for the Pairs Quiz by a single point.

Nations Quiz semifinals and finals format
a.k.a. "Wait, It's All Bouncebacks? Always Has Been."
The top four teams in the Nations Quiz cut to a different format for head-to-head semifinals and finals matches. The game is run using a macro-heavy PowerPoint, and starts by giving you a "wall" displaying 20 [for semis] or 30 [for finals] category names. For example, you might see a 4x5 grid something like:
Sample Board wrote: [Alliterative Artists] [Micronations] [Beautiful Education] [Beautiful Game] [Butterflies]
[Famous Greek] [First and Last Name] [Folk] [French Names] [Highest Islands]
[Horses] [Ireland] [Linguistics] [Linked by a first name] [Rhyme Time]
[Science Tales] [Video Women] [War] [Women's ] [You can't handle the truth]
After a coin flip to determine which team goes first, the category selection proceeds in "snaked" order (i.e. Team A picks 1st, then Team B picks 2nd and 3rd, then Team A picks 4th and 5th ... until Team A picks last).
Each category consists of three parts asked sequentially; your team has 30 seconds per part to confer and direct your final answer. If you get a part wrong, it goes to the other team for a 10 second "relay" (bounceback). There isn't always a well-delineated easy, middle, and hard part, as there would be in a standard quizbowl bonus.
In the first half of the game, the parts are worth 2 points each; in the second half they're worth 3 points each. There is theoretically some strategery that involves saving your strongest categories for the second half, but in practice the categories are vague enough, and employ misdirection often enough, that you may as well go on "just vibes" and select whatever you're feeling good about at any particular time.
The team with the most points at the end is the winner.

After losing a tough semifinal to Estonia, Team USA won the bronze-medal match over Team UK by a single point.

Specialist quizzes
Day 2 was a day of individual specialist-category quizzes. The day had six time slots, with two quizzes running concurrently: in each time slot: you could pick EITHER a "Highbrow" (academic) or "Populist" (trash / pop culture) category.
Highbrow categories: Literature, Science, History, Visual Arts, Performing Arts (what we'd call "auditory fine arts" plus some theater etc.), Geography
Populist categories: Business, Sport [sic], Pop Music, Film, Television, "Digital" (memes, video games, tech, etc.)
The individual questions consisted of 50 questions overall, asked as 25-question halves with 18 minutes per half. Each player wrote down their own answers on their own answer sheet, then swapped with a player next to them to mark their papers for each half. The second half was usually harder than the first.
The three top scorers for each quiz would medal; ties were left unbroken, so it was possible for there to be, say, two golds and two bronzes. There were some pretty basic questions on each quiz but the difficulty ramped up fast and about half the questions in each quiz were genuinely hard by college quizbowl regular difficulty standards. Almost nobody ever scores 40 points or more on any of these quizzes, and in most years a score above 35 puts you in decent contention for a medal.

I decided to do all "Highbrow," unsurprisingly, and netted bronzes in Literature, Performing Arts, Science (!!!) and History. I also got the gold for best total performance across all Highbrow quizzes.

Novelty events
There was also a "Knockout Quiz" that proceeded as a very quick, giant single-elimination tournament among all participants. The way it worked is, everyone was head-to-head with a person in front of them, and each round consisted of 5 questions and a numerical ("closest-to-the-pin"/"nearest-to-the-bull") tiebreaker, which you had a short amount of time to answer as best you could. If you got more of the 5 questions than your opponent, or tied them with a closer numerical tiebreaker, you won. Using something similar to the card system, winners would keep advancing to a smaller number of tables, and losing players would be eliminated after a single loss.
I got three-ish rounds in before I faced off against a European on a round with a German pop music question and got bounced.

There was also a silly-fun event called the "Speed Quiz". There were two qualifying rounds, of 2 minutes each; during each round, each player got a handout of way more easy multiple-choice questions than it is possible to answer in 2 minutes. The task is to barrel through as fast as possible, circling the correct answer(s) for one point per question. (Some had multiple correct answers and you needed ALL correct to get the ONE point!).
After the timer dinged, everyone stood up; the event director called out increasingly high numbers, asking you to sit down when a number was read that was higher than your overall score. (Out of 80 questions on the handout, the players who made the finals had a cutoff score around 33 or 34 correct.) The top three non-overlapping players from each qualifying round played a six-person final round under similar conditions, with the top-scoring player in the final crowned the winner.
Unsurprisingly, given the importance of reaction time, many of the best players at this were relatively young people with experience at quizbowl and/or buzzer-based shows.
I came within 1 point of making the finals in the second qualifying round.

Several U.S. players affiliated with the weekly quiz at O'Briens Irish Pub in Santa Monica, CA presented a "Franken-quiz" of greatest hits from their archive.
I came in 3rd. I had to recuse myself from some questions I'd seen before during online quizzes I did with them over the past year+.

How I ended up doing this thing

For hopefully appreciable reasons, I was pretty severely burned out on quizbowl by the summer of 2015. I was then pretty burned out on the idea of answering any kind of questions at all by the end of 2015.

I started dipping my toe back into other parts of the question-answering world in the spring of 2019. Through the Jeopardy All-Star Games taping experience, I met some people who do non-quizbowl trivia pretty intensely in LA. Those folks invited me to a thing in Las Vegas called Geek Bowl, where I in turn heard about a conference-style event, also in Las Vegas, called Trivia Nationals. I haven't written more fully about my experiences at either of those events yet -- and I probably should ...there's certainly some interesting compare-contrast between that community and this one.

At any rate, some Brits from the International Quizzing Association hosted events as honored guests at Trivia Nationals, and I heard from them that (a) there had been a first Olympiad in Greece in 2016, timed to coincide with the Olympics (b) they were planning to do a second one in Memphis, Tennessee in 2020. (Some people I was familiar with, such as former Bellarmine/Berkeley quizbowler Tanay Kothari and some guy named Ken Jennings, had done the first one.)

Also at Trivia Nationals, I heard about a thing called the Ed Toutant ("TOO"- tahnt) Intellectual Competition Fund. Ed Toutant was a game show and trivia conference super-attendee and collector of memorabilia, perhaps most famous for successfully protesting an erroneous ruling on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, netting him a return appearance on the show...in which he won the $1 million. He had died of cancer in 2018, and some people who knew him had just set up a fund in his memory to support trivia and related endeavors. The first thing they said they were doing was funding a team from Liberia to attend the upcoming Quiz Olympiad. Seeing a potential ally for qb growth, I also got them in touch with PACE, which seems to now be bearing fruit.

I had enjoyed Trivia Nationals a lot, and was looking forward to adding at least two trivia conference-type events to my life in 2020. Then came COVID canceling everything. Much like the actual Olympics, the Quiz Olympiad was delayed for a year, to a time when hopefully COVID would be behind us. Unlike the actual Olympics, the Quiz Olympiad was relocated -- to a location more central for the largely European field.

G. Paul Bailey, a leading Trivia Nationals guy and Toutant Fund overseer, sent out some messages to trivia conference attendee types and LearnedLeague members -- do you want to represent the USA at Quiz Olympiad? What the heck, I thought. Worse come to worst, it's a trip to an interesting place I haven't been yet. And many competitors from the last Olympiad were going to be absent, due to COVID-related travel uncertainties or other reasons -- maybe I'd get a medal here or there depending on field strength and qb-friendliness of the content.

About 15 people total responded total to form the USA contingent. Across the entire field, there were between 150-200 competitors total from about 20 countries, including some singletons.

Overall gameplay impressions

The pace feels very slow for a U.S. quizbowler. And that is by design, as for many of the participants English is their second, third, fourth, or fifth language. If you enjoy racking your brain to pull things, you have way more time to do that in this format.

To state the obvious: It's not quizbowl. While many of the easier topics in these quizzes overlap heavily with the qb canon, the harder ones can be quite divergent. The IQA "canon," such as it is, is extremely wide and not especially deep -- you'll almost always get the point for merely having heard of the answer. Their standards for including a topic even in the "highbrow" quizzes are not weighted as heavily toward academic importance (as compared to, say, historical curiosity, bestseller status, representation of a wide number of countries, hilarity, etc.) There isn't really a concept of "difficulty control" or "conversion targets" -- or if there was, I was new enough that I didn't pick up on the expectations in that regard; some hard questions were extremely hard. And things like clue length and presence/absence of "hints" varied pretty widely from question to question.

That said, having good coverage of Regionals level hard parts or Nationals level tossup answers in a qb category is going to be good enough to get you to a score of 30+/50 (which is usually top 10 or so) in the corresponding "highbrow" category with little to no additional prep. The exception is Geography, which is "almanac clues" (minor rivers and islands etc.) all the way down, though nothing a former middle school Nat Geo "Geobeast" can't handle. (One such person, Shane Whitlock [who graduated HS in the early 1990s and played proto-quizbowl in Arkansas], netted the U.S. a GeoBronze.)

Like qb, these quizzes can be studied for, and the best players do study for them. Many of the top European quizzers seem to have all but made carding into a way of life. I talked to one participant who deliberately chose a Master's program in a different country, with easy reqs and lots of overlap with their undergrad degree -- just so they could spend the year getting better at quizzing in a place with more quiz on offer. You may recognize some names; Daoud Jackson of the recent Oxford team absolutely tore up at this event, in part beause he cards especially for this stuff, and others who focus on this kind of quizzing, such as Ian Bayley and Raj Dhuwalia, do or did play hard quizbowl tournaments.

It's genuinely hard to smooth out the idiosyncratic knowledge bases of over a dozen participating countries. They do a pretty good job of this in a few ways. For one, the easy questions often focus on "global monoculture" phenomena (think BTS, Olivia Rodrigo). For two, they deliberately try to cover as many nations as possible -- if you want to goose your score in literature and film, try learning the top three most famous authors/directors from every country, because that Mauritanian director will come up someday. Also, in Sports, they focus extensively on events like the Olympics, the World Cup, and Formula One, that have multi-national audiences. (Though you'll sometimes get a lone gimme on an NBA player or a quarterback. I did talk to a Dane and a Brit at the event who said they really enjoy watching the NFL and college football respectively, so maybe those are actually gettable for non-Americans, what do I know.)

In some categories, especially Science, the content will feel like a "throwback" to people who came up in contemporary qb (i.e. kinda resemble quizbowl from 1997, but more current with recent discoveries like oganesson). It helped me get a better sense of where academic quizbowl lies in the greater phylogenetic tree of "trivia" (a term the Europeans dislike) and "quizzing" (a term they use more proudly).

Some social observations

In general, the crowd is much older. The IQA is REALLY eager to get more "Under-30s" into the room; as it was, maybe an eighth of the field was under 30. It's interesting to me that North American quizbowl skews much younger demographically than most other forms of trivia and quizzing, in part because it's one of the few kinds you can start before legal drinking age.

In their free time and between events, people (we Americans very much included) tended to stick to their own team and talk to each other in their home country's language. So I didn't have many long interactions with people from other places. I should have done more to pursue them. That said, people were friendly when they did interact, if sometimes a bit eccentric (one competitor offered to photograph others with their beloved stuffed animal, which has apparently traveled to many a quiz competition!).

One moment I wasn't expecting: With little warning, in the middle of a round of the Pairs Quiz, we were all asked to rise from our seats and observe a moment of silence as an Olympiad participant played "Taps" (!) on a trumpet that he brought with him (!!). As it turns out, it was 11 AM local time, and that's when the British observe a moment of silence for "Remembrance Sunday." And they've been doing this at quiz events held on this weekend for many years.

Team Liberia

As mentioned above, Liberia, led by attorney and sometime Liberian Senate candidate Phil Dixon, was planning to make its first international appearance at Quiz Olympiad. From what I can gather, the country has a pretty developed quizzing scene taking after the British model. They also play a unique buzzer-based format, where you can interrupt the question, but if you do you have to accurately state what the unread portion of the question is going to say before you give your own answer. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to try that!

Through the Toutant Fund, they connected with Jakob Myers, who was selected largely due to their academic interest in African history (...of a part of Africa thousands of miles from Liberia, but hey why turn down the offer) to coach and advise the team in the month leading up to the Olympiad.

Unfortunately, the Liberian team didn't get to come to the event. I don't have all the details, but as I understand it, the team was repeatedly given bureaucratic hurdles by Polish customs authorities, who demanded that they come to the Polish consulate in Abuja, Nigeria to get their visas (hundreds of miles away!), cited COVID concerns (when Liberia had one-tenth the case load of Poland -- it's worse in the Poland direction now), then denied their visas with mere days to go on the grounds that the Quiz Olympiad wasn't a real event (despite already receiving documentation and details showing it very much is). I don't believe there's an innocent explanation for this pattern of behavior.

Out of solidarity, Team USA wore Liberia flag pins to the event. With the IQA's blessing, and the hotel's A/V setup, we also arranged a match over Zoom between Team USA and Team Liberia (using questions in the "Oops, All Bouncebacks" format from a previous year's IQA finals). Five members of team USA (myself, Jakob Myers, Brandon Blackwell, Aidan Leahy, and Carlo Aiello) faced off against seven members of Team Liberia, who connected from one of their homes in Monrovia from a phone and a laptop, likely powered by a gas generator in a time of rolling blackouts. Though we lost connection several times, we (okay I'm gonna be cheesy) made an international connection that will long endure.
Team USA won the match, 76-18. Liberia had impressive "insta-gets" on several subjects, including life sciences, World Cup football, colleges/universities, and horses.)

So, this isn't quizbowl. Why should I care?

Well, you don't have to! It's at least as different as, idk, tennis is from badminton, what's sports analogies precious. There are some things this type of quizzing will never do the same as qb. I haven't come across any form of trivia or quizzing ouside qb that routinely tests depth of knowledge, or rewards rich textual engagement with core works and concepts. It is totally okay to be an ACF purist or an NAQT road warrior and leave it at that.

At minimum, it's another thing to do, and it's a challenge that offers you new frontiers to explore if you feel like you've gone as far as you want to go learning our canon. I can think of several quizbowlers who might find this interesting the way Michael Jordan found minor league baseball interesting after winning three NBA titles, or be actually good at it like, idk, who's a Guy who became goat tier in a different sport instead, please send sports analogy help.

There are also some realms and kinds of knowledge that will come up a lot more -- if you know a lot about international pop music, or sports, or film, or miss "almanac" style geography in this era of "interesting geography" or bust, or like wacky biographical details about the Father of [old scientific practice], you may enjoy getting more of a chance to be rewarded for those things.

If you're interested in doing some international travel and have the means to do so, these events provide good reason to book a trip.

If you're interested in conference management logistics, one advantage these events have is they need far fewer rooms and less staff than comparable qb event. Just throw 200 people in a medium-size conference room with a bunch of tables and you're good to go, with little need to worry about soundproofing.

...and if I do care, how do I sign up?

If you want to try out this format, the first thing to do is probably sign up for the annual World Quizzing Championship, which takes only a few hours on the scheduled day and is free of charge. It's required in-person proctored sites in the past (and there were very few of those, with poor geographic coverage, in the U.S.), and has often fallen on the week of an HS championship that many quizbowl people are staffing. But in the past two years they offered online proctoring, which I'd like to see substantially expand, and COVID-related reschedulings pushed it to other times.

They also have monthly quizzes you can sign up for and a backlog of questions for purchase (which they especially need to stay afloat, given revenue shortfall in 2020-21).

If you have a Facebook, there's a Facebook group called "USA Quiz Team" run by G. Paul Bailey. It has 208 members, so even if you're not hard-charging to be one of the foursome on Team USA 2024, you can definitely join just to get updates on stuff regardless of your skill level or intensity of interest.

We as a nation really don't have a recruiting pipeline the way these European countries do. There's more that could be done to create (and fund) a less ad hoc Team USA structure. We might want to, e.g. let such groups advertise here or come bringing a brochure to national tournaments -- on the full understanding that they are our guests, this is a different thing from quizbowl, and that merely showing up doesn't earn them a vote in how qb organizations run their own affairs. I think we can be welcoming and not hostile.

This same organization also ran an "EQC" (European Quiz Championships) each year. Some American "trivia people"/quiz show veteran types attended that event; the rule had been they were allowed to play, but not allowed to win any medals. Given the increasing integration of global circuits, IQA decided this was silly. So now the EQC is the UQC (Ultimate Quizzing Championship), and people from all over the world can compete on equal footing. There should be a UQC every year or so moving forward, except in Olympiad years every fourth year. The next one will be in Berlin, Germany in November 2022. Team Liberia expects to attend.


More thoughts about the disconnects between qb and "the 'trivia' community," and how and whether we want to bridge them, coming soon. (See, if I say that now, I might actually do it later...)
Last edited by Adventure Temple Trail on Thu Dec 09, 2021 10:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
Matt Jackson
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Re: What I Saw At "Quiz Olympiad II" (non-quizbowl, Poland)

Post by meebles127 »

This was extremely fascinating, thanks for posting.
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Re: What I Saw At "Quiz Olympiad II" (non-quizbowl, Poland)

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

Team Liberia has now posted a more thorough account of their experience on this webpage.
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Re: What I Saw At "Quiz Olympiad II" (non-quizbowl, Poland)

Post by Kino Noir »

I also went to this and will add a few thoughts to Matt's already comprehensive and very good summary, as someone who has never done a 'trivia' event.
Matt wrote:In general, the crowd is much older.
As far as I could tell, I (21) was the youngest person at this event. If the presence of grad students in quiz bowl is unusual, competing against 60 year olds who have been quizzing since the 90s is even more bizarre. The pop culture tried to reach into all age groups as well as nationalities: I was far too young to know 80s computer games in the Digital quiz, while the older Brits I was sitting with for the music quiz had zero overlap with my correct answers.
Matt wrote:There is theoretically some strategery that involves saving your strongest categories for the second half, but in practice the categories are vague enough, and employ misdirection often enough, that you may as well go on "just vibes" and select whatever you're feeling good about at any particular time.
This format is unbelievably scuffed and I kind of love it. There is...maybe some strategy to this, but the categories are hose-y enough (and wildly inconsistent on difficulty) that if you are close in skill to your opponents it's essentially random. We lost the U30 final because what seemed like a history category was actually about recent Olympic medal winners from Africa.

Some other things:

- The Speed Quiz is so funny and should be a staple at quiz bowl afterparties. I did quite well at this, not only because of my buzzer speed but probably because English is my first language (of the 7 finalists, 4 were American). As far as I can tell the best strategy is to skip any question that requires multiple circles and just binary associate as fast as you can until like ~20 seconds left, at which point you just Christmas tree the rest. Please mirror the speed quiz, America.

- The event has what I can only call "bar trivia sensibilities" in both style and substance. Questions will often have nine sentences when one will do. The quiz atmosphere definitely felt way more informal than a quiz bowl national tournament, which sometimes led to me feeling out of place. The national finals(!) had a question on an absolutely cursed topic I thought I had escaped after Modern World.

Overall it was a pretty fun time and I loved meeting everyone. Here is a link to support the Liberian team, if you're interested.
Aidan Leahy
UGA '23 but also UGA '24
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