"Jeopardy! questions are broad but not terribly deep," she says later, in an e-mail. "Whereas in quiz bowl, people write questions on their specialty — they aren't writing these questions so that laymen should even have a hope of getting them. Often you really need to study a subject to get questions on it."
"The level of play and the quality of the top teams has continued to rise since 1992," says Hentzel. "It's really unbelievable. The quality of questions and quality of moderation is better today than ever — mostly it's because of ease of communication."
Hentzel recalls a time in the mid-'90s, when someone wrote the first quiz-bowl question ever about the Russian composer Mussorgsky. Most people had no idea who that was — Tchaikovsky was their go-to Russian composer — but quiz bowlers remembered that question, made notes to study up on Mussorgsky, and now the composer is a common part of the quiz-bowl canon.
"That sort of exposure to new questions all the time drives people to learn about new things," says Hentzel. Many quiz-bowl questions are available online after tournaments, and, with the easily accessed data provided by Wikipedia and Google, preparing for quiz-bowl tournaments is not necessarily easier, but certainly more feasible than in the pre-Internet days.
The Harvard team has certainly benefited from modern technologies — Wikipedia and Spark Notes top their list of must-have quiz-bowl prep tools during our lunchtime conversation — but they've also strengthened their game writing quiz-bowl questions, the result of hosting tournaments, which requires the host team to compose some of the puzzlers.
Quiz-bowl question writing is an art unto itself, based on the concept of "pyramidality." Each question starts off general, then slowly, establishes context with each phrase adding information. The idea is that it's easier to answer the completed question than to anticipate its direction. Only the most agile and knowledgeable player can buzz in and guess an answer based on the first clues.
"I would say successful quiz bowlers need a certain degree of self-confidence," says freshman Dallas Simons, a former high school quiz-bowl star and the Harvard team's newest celeb. "Playing styles in quiz bowl run the gamut of people who buzz on impulse to people who buzz only when they are 100 percent certain they are right.
"Though it may be a little extreme, an old coach once told me that a player 'has to think they know everything,' " he says. "And I think that holds true."
Caitlin E. Curran now knows that Socialist Party of America candidate Eugene Debs won three percent of the popular vote against Roosevelt in 1904. She can be quizzed further at onegoodthing@gmail.com.
