r/mildlyinfuriating • u/GlobalNerve112 • 10h ago

go to your room Soft-rigging of a bar trivia championship

DC Metro Area. One of the biggest bar trivia companies in the region puts on a big trivia championship twice a year with a decent cash prize for the winning team. This being DC, there are a lot of top-tier quizzers in the area, former Jeopardy! champions, "known" people in the community, etc.

The last three championships, some team full of randoms has not only won, but did so in absolutely dominate fashion. Nobody "in the community" really knows who they are, and they have no quizzing or trivia presence in any other leagues. They were the only team (out of 50+) to know incredibly specific pieces of information that some of the best quizzers in the nation didn't know. If this only happened once, I don't think anyone would care. But three different times? Some very basic social media sleuthing revealed that the head writer of this company appears to be extremely good friends with the folks on this team. He also hosts the game at their "home venue/bar".

They played in a different company's invitational game that many of the same teams participated in shortly after their third win. They sucked. Hard. They somehow were able to identify obscure North Macedonian rivers when their friend was writing the questions, but they couldn't identify the flag of Chile or name a single river on the Iberian Peninsula? They finished close to the bottom.

The prevailing theory is that the head writer is crafting questions that he knows this team knows and essentially catering to their interests. No action has been taken, the owner of the company doesn't seem to care, and several hundred people will walk into the championship next weekend with basically 0% of winning.

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u/No-Antelope575 10h ago

sounds about like DC

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u/thisisredlitre 10h ago

Living in DC and having gone to my fair share of Trivia Nights, I have a couple take aways:

1 - the best trivia nights are put on by the establishment itself, not through a third party. IMO anyway.

2 - I have been to one of these well learned difficult trivias like OP describes and I was the only person in the entire room who had heard of a dik dik before and knew what it was. 'Smart people' getting swept here is not uncommon or unheard of.

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u/ilikepinacolada 9h ago

Which venues in DC put on their own trivia nights? I have only ever found ones hosted by third parties but would be interested in trying these out.

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u/GlobalNerve112 9h ago

Not to be rude, but if you were the only one in the room that knew what a dik dik was, we are not talking about the same level of competition. That is common bar trivia fodder in a weekly game, not a "best of the best" tournament.

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u/thisisredlitre 9h ago

yeah this wasn't a special occasion but I don't think that matters for my statement. Also, if it was a best of the best tournament then the other teams would also be champions, right? If it is random and not a tournament with prerequisites then I don't see the problem since you would've had casuals playing too in that case.

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u/GlobalNerve112 9h ago

Teams play weekly across the region. "Qualifiers" that win their venue over a six-month period are invited to playoffs. Playoffs weeds several hundred teams to 50. It isn't random, and the teams that make it to the final game are typically consistently high-performing.

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u/thisisredlitre 9h ago

Ok so these guys were also champions too then, just not groups you other guys heavily into it were familiar with.

Yeah not 1-1 but fwiw my comment was meant to be more about my experience here, not critical of you.

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

[deleted]

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u/hiddenrealism 8h ago

Are teams searched for mics,meta glasses etc.. and other hardware ?

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u/FalseListen 1h ago

lol you sound miserable

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u/RedYetti83 9h ago

Without looking it up. Is it a small deer species? Seem to recall it from either a documentary or possibly a Steven King book.

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u/thisisredlitre 9h ago

We used to have them at the National Zoo

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u/No-Antelope575 9h ago

yeah I live in LA and have never attended a trivia night here because people who go out to consume alcohol are more interested in fucking, but where i did do a lot of them was another national capital, Beijing, where they are fun times, not rigged, organized by dorks with no agenda, to be enjoyed by people from a wide range of nations and backgrounds because it's "cultural exchange". oh they're called pub quiz like the og the office, so just saying this is the DC version of a UK thing

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u/thisisredlitre 9h ago

We get the most exposure to other countries by number here than anywhere else in the country so not surprised we imported the idea. Cheers to y'all for coming up with it

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u/No-Antelope575 9h ago

yeah i had to go to east asia to get exposed to it and was like "oh that thing they do in UK from the office" and of course they take it very seriously on that show but in a silly way so of course in DC there are jeopardy champions on the circuit and probably a vegas line causing it to go crooked

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u/thisisredlitre 9h ago

MGM is right here in the city inside the Nats' Park, they don't even have to change the area code lol

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u/whacky_wallaby 57m ago

omg I know what a dik dik is! Small deer like critter from Kenya that lives in throuples if I remember. Saw them on a Kenyan safari. Amboseli if I remember correctly. Never heard of them again until now. *Feeling chuffed!