Like many people here, I love trivia and dream of winning big on Jeopardy, and one of the trivia sites I sometimes go to is Sporcle. They are having a TriviaCon in Las Vegas next year, and it sounds like something I might enjoy, but one thing watching the video about the Con really stuck out- they say that “professional trivia players” will be playing against amateurs, and I really want to know if that’s really a thing. Partly because that sounds like a dream job to me, but also just out of curiosity.
I’ve been to a lot of bar trivia competitions and am actually co-hosting one now, but every one I’ve been to you can only win credit to spend at that bar, it’s not exactly money to live off of. There are a lot of trivia apps that you can theoretically win money on but from those I’ve seen you could maybe win a few dollars after spending many hours on them. Winning from game shows seems the most profitable but I don’t know if that’s what they are talking about, or if you could call doing that being a professional trivia player.
Does anyone have any idea of what professional trivia player means? Or has anyone been to the Sporcle TriviaCon, or any others like it?
There are trivia experts who make money at it. But they generally make money developing and hosting quizzes, not hustling for $100 grand prizes in bars.
That makes sense. As a co-host for bar trivia, I have been writing trivia questions and I love doing it, but the main host does more of the work and makes more of the money. He said to me once that he could host trivia at more places on other nights rather than our bar just on Wednesdays, but that it takes a lot of work and that’s time he could spend on his real job. But I could see someone just hosting trivia and making a small but livable wage.
There are different kinds of trivia tournaments. The ones that I’ve gone to are quiz bowl tournaments, which have teams of four people. They use the style of questions of College Bowl or University Challenge. These have toss-up questions which anyone can buzz in to answer, followed by bonus questions if someone correctly answers that question. Bonus questions can be answered by anyone on that team. The quiz bowl tournaments are usually divided into academic question ones and pop culture question ones:
I’ve been hosting trivia games in bars, restaurants, and clubs for years … but I consider myself a professional trivia host, not a professional trivia player.
Yes, I started doing it because I love answering pointless questions. I usually do pretty well when I play, at least on the local level. But that isn’t necessarily true of all trivia hosts.
I’ve played plenty of games where the host was clearly reading questions they got from someone else (i.e., their employer), wouldn’t have known the answer if it weren’t provided, and sometimes didn’t even understand the question. (Just last week, I had a host announce the category (politics) as “puh-LIT-iks.”)
My point is that professional hosting is not the same thing as professional playing. The only professional trivia players I can think of offhand are those Geek people and the Beast.
But there could be plenty I’m not aware of. What do I know?
“Professional” might be a slippery term as there are probably no people who make a long-term regular full-time living playing trivia games, if you take a professional to be someone who approaches trivia as a serious pursuit and earns more than their costs to play on average, then many winning Jeopardy contestants probably qualify.
Certainly the ones who regularly get invited back to championship tournaments and winning more money qualify. You could maybe argue that Holzhauer isn’t a professional because he just won big once (I wouldn’t make that argument, but somebody might), but assuming he follows in the path of Rutter and Jennings and continues to earn big payouts every few years, that sounds like it ticks all the boxes.
Someone who wins the lottery once isn’t a professional lottery player. Someone who figures out how to break a lottery and wins regular amounts for years is. I’m not saying that game-show winners are lucky. Obviously skill matters. Just saying that continuing to profit from that skill might be the difference between a talented amateur and a professional.