From Today's Washington Post: "A: Quiz Bowl. Q: What Do Top Game Show Players Prize?"

[dlgood]

How sad of me is it that, instead of thinking it's neat that all the Quiz Bowl stuff is getting props, I'm annoyed that my hometown paper didn't think to call me on this one?

I did Quizbowl in college for six years, I went to Maryland, I did the gameshow, and I know everybody they quoted in the article. Though, it's great that people are actually interviewing Bob Hentzel and Eric Hilleman - because they're both great guys and I wouldn't mind seeing NAQT have some success. But, I'm irked. Local paper. Talk to a local. I can tell them plenty about Quizbowl and TV Gameshows. Hello!

Without further, excerpts from the article with my comments. Click through to the actual piece if you're interested enough to learn more.


A: Quiz Bowl. Q: What Do Top Game Show Players Prize?
By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A01

Back in college, Robert Hentzel and his teammates competed at the championship level, but victory always came without fanfare. Or fans, for that matter. As spectator sport, academic quiz bowl was a bit like watching a perpetual IQ test being given out loud, with small teams of students vying to see who could answer the most questions the quickest.

R's dad, Irvin Hentzel, is somewhat famous for doing all manner of mathematical analyses of the Monopoly Board game. Hentzel played for Iowa State, and I've played against him numerous times.

Quiz bowlers didn't merely accumulate knowledge; they stockpiled it. Fact upon fact upon small, obscure fact. Worthless information, outsiders would scoff. But the quiz bowlers' passion ran deep. And their pursuit turned out to be not so trivial.

Over the past five years alone, more than 40 former quiz bowlers have quietly infiltrated the ranks of television game-show contestants, raking in nearly $7 million, primarily from "Jeopardy!" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

I think this is very much an undercount. We're all over the place, but generally don't necessarily talk about it when we get on the shows. Plus, do you want to face the ridicule that comes if you talk about your Quizbowl experience on WWTBAM and have a disastrous performance like Nick Meyer (blew $500,000) or Martin Poteralski. ($0)

Certainly the most visible member of the underground intelligentsia these days is "Jeopardy!" phenom Ken Jennings, a 30-year-old software engineer from Salt Lake City whose pretaped winning streak is the longest and richest in that show's history, and is rumored to be more than half over. And while "Jeopardy!" questions are less complicated than quiz bowl's elaborate clues, Jennings said he figures that roughly 40 percent of his correct answers on "Jeopardy!" came from knowledge he amassed over the years via quiz bowl.

As many know, Ken played for BYU. I had to look the info up, but did play against him once when he was at BYU. In the 1996 ACF National Championship tournament, my Maryland team defeated BYU 320-70 en route to finishing second behind Georgia Tech.

Part of the price of admission to the quiz bowl tournaments of their youth was for each team to contribute a packet of roughly 100 clever questions. Nowadays, companies known as "question vendors" sell such packets to tournaments and trivia contests, with retired packets purchased by teams for practice.

At the forefront of this cottage industry is National Academic Quiz Tournaments, which Robert Hentzel runs full time from his Minnesota rambler. Olmstead and Jennings belong to the 14-member board and are active both in crafting questions and editing those submitted by freelancers, who earn $1.65 a shot. Olmstead also coaches and advises college teams, and Jennings occasionally moderates tournaments NAQT organizes across the country. Some 300 colleges field serious teams, Hentzel estimates, and thousands of high schools compete on the junior level.

Olmstead was the faculty sponsor for the U. of Michigan QB team while I was there. He's a nice guy, but not much of a player. So I'm surprised that he, of all people, won the biggest prize.

I flirted with maintaining some NAQT involvement after I stopped playing, but I never had a ton of fun writing questions or studying solely for QB. I mostly wanted to just show up and win, and for the most part I could. (In no small part because I had teammates to coattail.) At this stage of life, I'm not going to give up my weekends for these sorts of things. My last tourney was the TRASH (pop culture format) National Championships in Boston a few years ago where I finished a disappointing sixth.

The shows that have become the de facto quiz bowl payroll respond to the presence of semipro ringers amid the unsuspecting ranks of housewives from Jersey and lawyers from St. Louis with bemusement, admiration or, in the case of "Jeopardy!" -- complete silence.

On "Millionaire," the quiz bowl tentacles reach behind the scenes as well, with quiz bowl contestants using one another as their phone-a-friend "lifelines," a strategy that paid off handsomely for Olmstead, among others.

Davies already is fantasizing about a match between Olmstead and Jennings, "like 'Alien vs. Predator.' "

Clearly, I have to call ABC again. KenJen would punk the crap out of Olmstead. Rusty as I am, I stand a better shot. (Witness the Maryland Quizbowl Ego) Plus, I want that Cash Money.

"These people have put together a wonderful show for all my friends to win money," Hillemann said. "Two weeks wouldn't go by that there wasn't someone I didn't know on."

And while quiz bowl undoubtedly gives people "a tremendous advantage" on TV game shows, Hillemann acknowledged, "it's not an unfair one." They're more like professional tennis players who go on to win Olympic medals than sprinters on steroids, he noted.

Still, quiz bowlers do not generally volunteer their expertise on game-show applications. "Conventional wisdom is that it's best not to mention it," Hillemann said, a sentiment echoed by several others.

I've discussed the Quizbowlers on gameshows before and it's a definite advantage. It's not like the steriods, but Hilleman's metaphor is inexact. It's like a Tennis Pro going up against an amatuer who's pretty good at their own country club, but has never actually played in a tournament. It's a pretty huge advantage.

"If you drink alcohol, stop. There's nothing worse than being hung over when you need your reflexes on 'Jeopardy!' " Block said. On the set, he advised, be prepared for tight security.

If you smoke weed, stop. That stuff will kill your memory, and you'll need that. Heck - Michigan won a title the year after I left, in no small part because a few of our better players stopped smoking.

"Certainly there is a segment of the community dismayed by game shows and the questions they ask and that Ken Jennings or Kevin Olmstead, whom they don't perceive as the best quiz bowlers or the most knowledgeable, are rewarded so much," Hentzel said. "It's like authors of serious fiction looking at J.K. Rowling and saying, this isn't fair, these aren't great books, yet she's richer than the Queen of England."

I'm sure that's true to some extent. But prior to my own TV experience, I wasn't particularly jealous. I just wanted my shot.

Comments

me, I stick to bar trivia these days

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

have won me many O's tickets. with a little massive amount of help from my friends.

hey, you're totally the first person I would have called. The Post is teh suck!

And I'm sure he's a wonderful person and all that, but Martin Poteralski's Millionaire show was about the funniest thing I have ever seen.

Another reason not to talk about QB when you're on a game show is that it's not a very unique experience -- I used to bitch when people talked about their prior game show appearances, too, but when I did "Millionaire" they pretty much MADE me talk about being in the J! Teen Tournament a gazillion years ago. It's like they want to brag about how many J! alums they have on their show. I don't know that I've ever heard J! make somebody talk about Millionaire. I'm sure I didn't put QB down when I was applying for Millionaire, but that was mostly because I figured it wasn't unique, not because I thought they'd blackball me. (Honestly probably less of a prospect for a female, because female QB players are relatively rare).

Funny that I must have played against the KenJen BYU team as well, but I don't remember him. Jeff & Jenny, yeah, but not Ken.

It probably is a good point that, for most people, WRITING questions for QB is a bigger factor in quiz show success than the actual competition. I wouldn't necessarily be surprised that someone who wasn't a great QB player
went all the way on Millionaire. They draw on some of the same skills but not all. It's not a speed game, aside from fastest finger, and that's not really the same kind of speed as in QB. On the other hand, I do remember
Olmstead's run of questions being on the easy side. Wasn't he the one who had "Sikorsky" for the million dollar question?

I certainly remember more things b/c I wrote questions about them than because I drilled them for competition. I guess that's all the brilliance of ACF. On the other hand, writing questions was SO time consuming -- would probably be easier now with the web, but still, I bet $1.65 per question doesn't beat minimum wage.

Having a fandom moment, I have actually discussed with friends my opinion

I don't remember being that impressed with NAQT packets, but it was just getting off the ground when I was getting out of the game.

Re: me, I stick to bar trivia these days

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

As I remember, Martin was kind of a tool, and watching him was very amusing.

Funny that I must have played against the KenJen BYU team as well, but I don't remember him. Jeff & Jenny, yeah, but not Ken.

Exactly. And I remember Bryce Inouye as well. I needed reminders to recognize Ken. That, and Matt Colvin and Adam Fine's rather anal statkeeping on the old MAQT webpage.

Writing is definitely a big benefit - that's how guys like Subash turned into world beaters. It's also how you can remember all that random junk because the game shows have such a broad range.

And yeah -- Olmstead's were easy. I can't believe he won - I've known him for awhile, and he'd just not any good.

On the other hand, writing questions was SO time consuming

Yup. Which is why I never did nearly as much of it as Colving or Zeke or other folks did.

I don't remember being that impressed with NAQT packets

I had my qualms about NAQT too. Relative to CBI, it was great, though certainly not the quality of good ACF. But it has a clock, and it's the sort of format that could get marketed - which ACF isn't.