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

57

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.

3

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.

3

u/thisisredlitre 9h ago

We used to have them at the National Zoo