What is quizbowl? The short answer: quizbowl is an attempt to bring trivia from the world of recreation into the world of competition. The long answer is more complicated, so we will start with an easier question: why is quizbowl?

Imagine that you are watching a game of Jeopardy!, and you happen to know all of the contestants. Sean is a literature specialist, but he has watched a lot of Jeopardy! and is pretty good at guessing things outside of his category. Shreya has read mountains of American history texts, but she is a bit slow at the buzzer. On the other hand, Nia only knows sports well, but she is by far the fastest at buzzing in.

You read the question on the screen.

What would happen if you read that question to these contestants? Or, which one of them would you expect to answer that question?

This is not a trick question. You would expect it to be Nia (or maybe Sean), who would easily win the buzzer race. And this is not really unfair either. Everyone knows that Jeopardy! is partially a test of speed. But if we want to accurately test knowledge here, we really want Shreya to be answering the question. This is, after all, her area of expertise.

“Now look”, you say. “That was not a good example. A good Jeopardy! question would not be that easy; of course Sean and Nia know who George Washington is. How is Shreya supposed to show off her history knowledge with such an easy question?”

That is a fair point. How about we try something harder?

Most people would agree that this question is “fairer”, in a sense. In this scenario, Shreya is the only one who has any chance of answering the question. But it is also a risky question to ask. What if Shreya knows less about George Washington specifically? Or what if she does know about George Washington, but just not that specific fact? In either case, we get a worse situation than before: the question goes dead, and everyone is demoralized.

And this is the problem that inspired quizbowl. Trivia is just too hard to get right! Most of the time, trivia is a crapshoot. Questions overshoot or undershoot difficulty all the time, which is fine as long as people are having fun. But what if you want to host a serious competition to determine who knows the most about American history? Even the best trivia questions in the world struggle to capture differences in knowledge. You could try to cover everything with thousands of questions, but that would not be very fun.

Let's think about it. Instead of trying to "guess" the perfect question that Shreya knows but Sean doesn't, what if you just had more content? In other words, what if you asked the harder question and then only asked the easier question if Shreya doesn't answer? That way, we can "reserve" Shreya's chance to answer without forcing a dead question. We can make this easier for ourselves by rephrasing the second question so that both questions have the same answer. Let's throw in a middle clue for good measure. And hey, what if we made the earlier clues worth more points? That sounds like it could make the game fairer too. Here's what we get:

Together, we have just created the ancestor to the model quizbowl question: the 30-20-10. The 30-20-10 has a lot of clear advantages over the standard trivia question. It gives Shreya more of a fighting chance, even though she is not the fastest player of the bunch. But it is also more forgiving: even if all of the players do not know the answer to a part of the question, they can still get points! Overall, this question format feels like a slightly more "fair" experience.

But can we do better? The answer turns out to be yes, as we shall see in Part II: The Pyramid.