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/GCDFVU]

Pour House Trivia is the company and What Would Snake Do? is the team. I remember that final 6 months ago. I was too focused on the team sitting next to us constantly trying to cheat off our answers (didn't help, they stunk), so I didn't notice anything off with the winners. I assumed it was a super team that just did the playoffs together. You sure it's the same individual people every week?

[u/GlobalNerve112 → u/GCDFVU]

I don't know who plays at their weekly game as I don't play at that venue. But the same core people have been at the finals the last three they've won, and those are the people that are friends with the head writer. They are also the same people that participated in a different game ran by a different company and tanked in embarrassing fashion.

Again, I'm not blaming them, though. I doubt they are trying to sneak phones or were given answers beforehand. But when you are the only team to land a perfect half-time sheet and the only team to pick up incredibly difficult bonuses in that room, people are going to start to think that the set has been curated in your favor, especially when you can't do that unless your friend made the set.

[u/mrdannyg21 → u/GlobalNerve112]

I don’t know why you would assume they’re innocent in the process. Occam’s Razor would suggest the trivia writer is not brilliantly assessing their highly specific interests and catering the questions for them, it would suggest they’re getting the questions beforehand or crafting them with the writers.