Academic Quiz Bowl: Guide for Beginners

Quiz Bowl is a challenging academic competition that involves a mixture of skill, speed, and most of all, strength of mind. Like its more famous sibling Jeopardy!, Quiz Bowl features a format that challenges the competitor to think quickly on his or her feet and answer using not only his or her formidable memory but also his or her quick buzzer finger. If you have ever watched Jeopardy, you'd know what I was talking about.

Questions in Quiz Bowl are provided by several companies, but a overwhelming consensus arises in the community that NAQT, or National Academic Quiz Tournaments, produces the best and highest quality of questions available. Questions follow a pyramidal format, with harder clues towards the beginning of the questions with simpler ones going in a sequence towards the end. By that time, someone would usually have gotten it correct. Unlike Jeopardy, players can buzz in to answer at any time instead of waiting for the question to end. This provides a edge to the game, a tension that televised quiz shows tend to lack.

NAQT quiz bowl is played in medium length rounds of around 30 minutes, but if we use the national competition as an example, two halves of 9 minutes each are played. As many competitive buzz-in questions named tossups are read per half, with usually a total of 20 occurring in an entire game. Each tossup correctly answered by a team of four players would also entitle that team to a bonus, a set of usually 3 questions that that team has the sole right to answer. The members may confer amongst themselves and then give an answer to the moderator afterwards. Points are scored for all correct answers; an early correct answer on a tossup is called a power and scores additional points. At the end of the game, the team with the highest score will win.

Questions in Quiz Bowl tend to come from a wide variety of topics, but several general genres are the most common in the game. Literature questions are one of the mainstays of academic Quiz Bowl, featuring questions about Shakespearean works and famous works of literature such as The Canterbury Tales and The Odyssey. Other prominent genres can be further inferred from the above example. Science, history, sociology, mythology, philosophy, art history, all of which come up often in tournaments, each of which a player should familiarize him or herself with if he or she wants to do well. However, a team of four players do not need each player to be an expert at everything, a jack of all trades. Specialization produces gains from trade, as the economists say; thus by having each player focus him or herself on one particular topic can indeed pay off. That player would be an expert on that topic and would likely get questions from that subject very easily. This way, with each player having prodigious skill at something or another, we remove overlap of abilities and allow the team to work as a unified and synergious whole.

Studying for Quiz Bowl can take on several forms. One is to write questions on subjects that are in your preferred field. Another is to read works of literature, if that is your inclination, or to study review books and encyclopedias to boost your knowledge of the topic. Several works that I will recommend in this Concise Guide is Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia and An Incomplete Education. Both have aided me greatly in literature and general knowledge, respectively. I would suggest an aspiring lit expert to acquaint him or herself with these two works of genius.

Quiz Bowl is a highly rewarding and very fun sport. I would hope that all who have read my introduction to it find a way to join it and experience the joy of powering a question on the first 5 words.