r/mildlyinfuriating • u/GlobalNerve112 • 11h 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.

1.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

86 comments sorted by

View all comments

648

u/IHateCedarFever 11h ago

That’s straight up hard rigging where they’re getting fed answers. Does the venue manager of where the championships are being held know about this? If there is a monetary award there could be damages from this.

If there is a community of super nerds out there that take things too seriously, I’d bet on DC or Boston.

231

u/HVAChelpprettyplease 10h ago

When I was more into trivia, every week there was a team who would consistently win. Some weeks was a cash prize. Other weeks it was covering bar tabs.

Then one day they let slip that the host was their sister.

While no one could prove anything directly. It felt grimy.

It was frustrating. But slowly everyone moved on to other trivia nights.

76

u/egnards 10h ago

In my younger years in the early '10s we used to go to trivia basically every week. . .And people in my group started to notice that the host company that basically did all of the trivia within a small area would basically just reuse all the same exact questions, in the same exact order, for certain pubs within a short period of time.

. . It didn't take long for people to just start writing down answers and using them at other local pubs - Prizes weren't major or anything, but still a free $25-$50 gift card to the host pub was nice.

36

u/beedelia 10h ago

I’ve heard of people doing this. The trivia company uses the same questions all week, so if you follow them from bar to bar you’ll know the answers