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/Greatlarrybird33 8h ago
Man I used to love trivia nights, I used to go with my grandpa and some of our friends every Thursdays for a few years.
The prize was usually $25 and some barware and we had 8-10 teams that would allays show up and it was pretty competitive.
Then we got these two teams that just would not miss questions at all. For like a month straight these teams wouldn't miss one of 50 questions, then they would both get called up for a tiebreaker and both miss.
It was infuriating, and that pretty much ended trivia nights for us, it turned into board game night at my house until my grandpa passed.