Trivia Masterclass: A Quizzer Prepares

“Haha no, it’s just a lot of practice.”

Over the last few years, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve uttered this phrase in response to questions about my quizzing successes: from family, friends, (for a brief period in the wake of my Mastermind victory) strangers in the pub or on the bus, and fellow quizzers. I’ve said it so often because I genuinely think it’s true. I don’t think I have a better than average memory, and almost every quiz I do reminds me of how much I’ve forgotten. While I’ve always been pretty good at revising for tests, I’ve known many non-quizzers whose talents in that direction far exceed my own (my younger sister being one). And the ten years I’ve spent inhabiting various strata of academia, during which time I’ve racked up numerous pub quiz victories over colleagues far cleverer than myself, have abundantly revealed to me that the skills it takes to win a quiz have very little to do with any sort of academic “intelligence”. Although it may be a certain quirk in personality that generates the desire to get better at quiz, I will forever insist that absolutely anyone can do it. All it takes is a lot of practice.

However, as an answer to the question “how do you know all that stuff?”, I always feel my stock response is a little unsatisfying. For one thing, I suspect that it often sounds like infuriating false modesty – which it really shouldn’t, as in fact I take immense pride in the gradual, painstaking work I’ve put into improving as a quizzer. Moreover, I don’t think it does much to satisfy the curiosity of someone who is sincerely interested in getting better at quiz themselves. From the outside, I think people often perceive “general knowledge” as something like a gigantic encyclopaedia of lists, which “quizzers” have all memorised, and which mere mortals wouldn’t even know how to find. Indeed, I’m sadly aware that a great many people feel silently excluded from the world of competitive quiz because they worry that they aren’t strong enough on the presumed “basics” (world capitals, chemical elements, historical battles, Oscar-winners) that they imagine everyone else will expect them to know automatically. This is a great shame, and I think a fundamental misunderstanding of what quiz is and why quizzers enjoy it. For what it’s worth, I haven’t memorised a list since 2016, when I learned all the world capitals in preparation for going on University Challenge, and I’m not at all confident that I’d get all of them right today.

The weekly 100-question quiz that I’m beginning here is intended as a kind of general knowledge revision, but I want to make clear that quiz revision, for me, is a matter of learning how rather than learning that: it’s a skill that you hone, not a set of facts that you cram into your brain. Improving at quiz means learning how to parse a question, spotting where the key clues are and quickly narrowing down your options; learning how to identify specific gaps in your existing knowledge and how to address them effectively; learning how to skim a Wikipedia entry or news article to find the pithy, unique gobbets likely to catch the eye of a future question-setter; learning how to link one bit of knowledge to another, thereby making both more memorable. You learn all of this by doing, by forcing yourself outside your comfort zone, testing yourself up to and beyond your own limits, against high-quality questions and high-quality opponents. Getting better at quiz is a perpetual journey, and none of us will ever reach the end of it. The way to progress, however, is by celebrating your successes while paying attention to your mistakes.

So I can’t promise you a crib sheet, but what I will try to provide every week is a set of exercises which will help you to build up the key muscles that quiz demands, while also, I hope, being enjoyable in its own right. [This seems an opportune time, by the way, to acknowledge that I’m aware of how unbearably self-serious I’ve made all of this sound so far, including with the painfully conceited title I’ve chosen for the series. To defuse that a little, and to give a sense of the more whimsical energy that I’m hoping to bring to future quizzes, I’ll share a link to the Fry and Laurie sketch Shakespeare Masterclass: An Actor Prepares which directly inspired my title and which is maybe my favourite comedy sketch of all time.]

My aim with this series is to appeal to anyone who loves quizzes and wants to get better at them, irrespective of their current level of experience. Whether you’re a Mastermind champion or simply enjoy shouting answers at the screen, I hope that each week you’ll be proud of the answers you knew and intrigued by the ones you didn’t. How you make use of these quizzes as part of your own journey of improvement (provided such use is non-commercial) is wholly up to you. You may feel inspired to Google facts that you miss to find some more context and expand your understanding of the topic. You’re very welcome to import questions into your personal flash-card database – every online league quizzer already knows about the Anki mobile app, but for those who don’t it’s well worth exploring (if that mode of learning works for you, which it may not). As the archive builds up, you can revisit a quiz a week, month, or year later to see how much of it you still remember. Or of course you can just have a fun play-through to gauge where your game is at, to test your mettle against your friends, family, or people in the comments, or simply to kill twenty minutes over a weekend and get your brain in gear for the week ahead. I’ll endeavour to design each quiz with all of these potential uses in mind. Above all, my goal every week will be for you to have fun, learn something new, and come back next week thirsty for more.

Structure

Before we get started, a note of explanation on what to expect each week. Each quiz will consist of 100 questions divided into five rounds, with each round having a slightly different methodology.

Round 1 is intended to be the ‘Warm-Up’, with questions a little gentler in difficulty than in the subsequent rounds (my internal benchmark is a question that would score at least 30 on Pointless, with some questions falling substantially above that and some closer to it). Don’t worry at all if you find yourself dropping points in this round – everyone’s knowledge distribution is different and any question is easy if you know it. Equally, however, these are also bits of knowledge that are likely to come up pretty frequently in standard quizzes, so if you do miss anything in this round, you’re very likely to be rewarded for remembering it in the future.

Round 2 will cover ‘The Fundamentals’, i.e. topics that are likely to be tested in pretty much any serious quiz you play. Quite subjectively, I’ve chosen ten such topics (The Arts, Geography, History, Literature, Science, TV, Film, Lifestyle, Pop Music, and Sport), and each week I’ll ask you twenty questions on one of them. I’ll try to make these questions as eclectic as possible, and to cover quite a wide range of difficulty – however, they will all be facts that I can as good as guarantee you will benefit from knowing if you quiz regularly. For almost any quizzer, there are bound to be some topics that are easier to learn than others, but I’m a great believer in at least trying to be an all-rounder. What I’ve found is that the effort of trying to learn and remember even a few discrete facts about a topic that you don’t know very well helps you build up a broader understanding of that topic, a vocabulary for making sense of it, and an appreciation for what makes certain facts notable – all of which then makes it easier to incorporate new bits of knowledge. It’s a cumulative process, and my knowledge of science and sport is still patchy to say the least, but I’ve found addressing my own weaknesses to be a surprisingly enjoyable enterprise and I hope you will too.

Round 3 is ‘A Deeper Dive’, where each week I select a narrower topic that won’t come up in every quiz you do, but does comes up often enough that not knowing anything about it at all will likely register as a weakness in the long run. Again these questions will be fairly wide-ranging in difficulty, although there won’t be anything like the level of granular detail that you’d expect in a Mastermind Specialist Subject round – my goal is to write questions that could conceivably be asked in a standard GK quiz, and which even someone less fully versed in the topic would benefit from remembering. The nature of this round means that some weeks will be far more congenial for some players than others, and indeed I’m going to make an effort to choose topics that a lot of quizzers (including myself) find troublesome. However, I’ll endeavour at least to make the terms of all the questions intelligible to all, and hopefully even if one week’s set doesn’t suit you, it’ll whet your appetite to learn more about the subject.

Round 4 is titled ‘Themes and Trends’. These questions will lean slightly towards the tougher end of the Round 2/3 spectrum, and will cover all ten of the topics listed above (see Round 2) and sometimes more. Rather than being linked by topic, they will be more loosely linked by what I would call “genre”. For example, you might get twenty GK questions all themed around a particular country or decade, or all with a similar format (e.g. hidden connection, highbrow/lowbrow, shared names, picture questions). You’ll hopefully get more of a sense of what this round is all about as the weeks progress, and in full disclosure I’m slightly making it up as I go. Ultimately it’s just a bit of fun, although you could think of it as my attempt to puzzle out the central philosophical dilemma of quiz: “what is it about a fact that makes it a quiz fact?”

Round 5 I have called ‘No Pain, No Gain’ – as with Rounds 1 and 4, this will span all major GK topics. As its title suggests, the questions in this round are intended to be really quite challenging, and I would likely get a lot of them wrong myself, so you shouldn’t be at all disheartened if your Round 5 score is on the very low side. However, the “gain” end of the equation is that I’m never going to ask a question that I would never seriously expect to be asked in any other quiz. Obscurantism is one of the easiest traps for quiz-setters to fall into, and I can’t promise that I’ll avoid it entirely. However, I’m going to make a sincere effort to fill this round with facts that have some inherent interest, are memorable in their own right even if you don’t know a huge amount about the topic they concern, and, if you do remember them, could likely result in you picking up a satisfying correct answer in a future quiz.

So there you have it. Week 1’s quiz will be published simultaneously with this introduction, with subsequent quizzes appearing at 8am (UK time) every Saturday from 31 May onwards. Dive in!