~Bible Quizzing~
Recently, my Bible Quiz qualified to take part in an annual quiz tournament hosted by the St. Louis district. Before Covid, teams throughout the country traveled to St. Louis Missouri to compete in a “Top Ten” invitational tournament. The top ten quizzers from each region would be chosen to face off against each other. However, 2020 threw a bit of a curveball. Due to strict social distancing and mask requirements, the church hosting the tournament was unable to hold the tournament in person. Instead, we’d be quizzing virtually.
My quiz team had already competed in a couple of virtual tournaments. Instead of jumping off pads, as we usually did, we used an online buzzer system called BuzzInLive. When two teams faced off, the quizzers would connect to BuzzInLive individually. A bright green buzzers would be shown on their screen, which they pressed to jump. After connecting to zoom, the quiz master would read the question, and after a jump, would call on the quizzer. As you might imagine, computer lag, buffering, and internet speed were all variables quizzer had to account for, and which would become very clear in the St. Louis Quiz.
The St. Louis quiz is split up over two days. The first day, teams are separated randomly
into three different pools. After nine rounds, the teams are sorted again, this time by their
placing. The top three teams from each pool go into the first division, the next three to the
second, and the last three to the third, so that there are again three pools of nine teams.
Originally, the churches had narrowed down the participants in St. Louis to one team of
five per region in case of an in-person quiz. Because the change to virtual happened so
suddenly, however, most regions, including our own, stuck with a single team of five. After
getting together, at around seven in the morning, we did some practice rounds using BuzzInLive. We were just starting to get comfortable with the lag when the quiz started.
To learn more about how quizzing works, just visit my earlier post (...)
The competition in St. Louis was much stiffer than we had even expected. And with the lag involved in quizzing virtually, you would have to jump before the Quiz Master had finished the preamble to the question. On a general question, you’d often have to be content with two words, and a syllable of the third. Needless to say, there were many errors involved.
After quizzing from late afternoon until nearly midnight, we got up early the next morning
to quiz for another nine rounds. We had squeaked our way into the top tier, placing ninth overall the day before. However, this meant that winning any quizzes would be much harder.
Going into St. Louis, all five people on our time had decided beforehand what questions
they would focus on. We had a Memory Verse quizzer, those who focused on General
Questions, and an According to quizzer. I had chosen to work on According to’s, and I had my
work cut out for me. Most of the According to quizzers had memorized Matthew to the verse, so
that as soon as they heard a verse, they could jump, and start listing all the possible questions
from that verse. For example, if they jumped on “According to Matthew Chapter 4:11…” they
would start listing questions like, “Who left Jesus, Who did the Devil leave, Who came and
attended to Jesus,” etc. Then they would have to answer all the questions they had asked in the
same order.
Another key part of quizzing in St. Louis is having a competent captain, who can
challenge questions, and appeal answers. A captain might challenge the answer itself, for either
being too vague, containing false information, and so forth. Or the captain might appeal an
answer that he thought was correct, or incorrect. This often changed the course of quizzes,
which were often decided by a few points. Being a captain takes both a thorough understanding
of the material, and some rhetorical skills.
Nine rounds later, we had completed St. Louis, and my head was still swimming with
Matthew questions. After the awards, we were all ready for a break.
I am thankful that I was able to take part in the St. Louis tournament. Hopefully, we’ll be
able to have an in-person tournament next year, but until then, I’ll keep working on my clicking.
No comments:
Post a Comment