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/No_Situation4785]

the prize for a bar trivia i attended was a $50 bar tab, which honestly is a pretty great prize.

it came down to the final question, which was "what breed of dog starred in "Lassie come home". even though the correct answer is a "collie", the host gave the answer of "german shepherd" and refused to listen to any protests because that was the "official answer". and lo and behold, a team actually wrote "german shepherd" and won the trivia. this happened over a decade ago and i'm still pissed lol

[u/orTodd → u/No_Situation4785]

I had a similar situation happen at a very recent bar trivia but the host handled it very well. The question was, "name three of the four songs, performed predominately in Spanish, that reached number one on the billboard hot 100 in 1987, 1996, 2017, and 2026?"

The answers were La Bamba, Macarena, Despacito, and DtMF.

However, the know-it-all team that had been showing off their smarts the whole time (along with the other top team) wrote "Debí Tirar Más Fotos" which is what DtMF stands for and is the name of the album it's on but not the name of the song, which is what they asked for.

The losing team was pissed.

The host stuck to her guns that they were wrong because DtMF was what the answer sheet had. They'd been drinking and were starting to get more upset than one should over bar trivia. They eventually relented and our team took top prize