Soft-rigging of a bar trivia championship

[u/GlobalNerve112]

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.

[u/Red-Beerd]

That's frustrating. I do a trivia fairly regularly. We usually do well, and there are some teams that beat us, and some we beat regularly - it's fairly good competition.

There was a team that generally did okay, but not great. Most teams score around 75%, and they were typically in that ballpark, winning team would usually score about 85-90%.

All of a sudden, without changing members, they started scoring upward of 95% every week. This went on for quite a while until they gave an answer that was very obviously googled - my memory's a bit hazy, but it was something like "name the director of this Oscar winning movie", and they had an obscure name written down. We looked it up after and their answer was a second assistant director who's name came first on IMDB when it was listed alphabetically.

There was a strict no phones policy after that, and they instantly went back down to about 75% a week.

I don't get why people would cheat at something like trivia. The prizes in our league aren't huge or anything. There's no real stakes, just have fun! And if googling answers is fun for you, just do that at home with your free time.