Quiz bowl is a very fun game even if you don’t study at all, and just play based on what you know already or learn in class. However, even the smartest players won’t win very much without putting in some time to study specifically for quiz bowl. The effect is only magnified as a team climbs the ladder and plays more and more difficult tournaments against more and more difficult opponents.
Let’s say you went to your first tournament and lost- a lot. You’re probably somewhat intimidated by the top teams and wonder how they can know the answers to all those questions. You barely buzzed in, and when you heard a familiar answer, the other team probably had already gotten it right. You wound up with hardly a win to your name, if any at all.
That experience happens to every last quiz bowl player at their first tournament. This includes all the people who run the LIQBA and any other quiz bowl organization. The good news is that since everyone starts there, and you can only get better as time goes on, you can be a top player if you put in the effort.
So we’re going to assume that you’ve played enough to pick up the basic gameplay and some of the lingo. We’re also going to assume that you’re motivated to get better and want to do so, and that you like and enjoy the game.
This guide is adapted from a presentation LIQBA President Joe Feldman wrote for his alma mater, Smithtown West, in 2023. That presentation was inspired by one given by Matt Weiner to the VCU Collegiate Quizbowl team in the early 2010s.
Be sure to also view the other pages in the resource guide, as they’re packed with tons of useful information.
Part I: The Categories of Quiz Bowl Questions
Every Quizbowl tournament uses a set of questions. Each set is broken down into packets, and each packet is broken down into categories. There are fixed amounts of each category in each packet, though the order is randomized. In a distribution of subjects, each subject is listed as the number of tossups and the number of bonuses per packet. This is shown as, for example, “4/4 History”, meaning each packet will have 4 history tossups and four history bonuses. I’ll use the 2019 edition of the Harvard Fall Tournament (HFT) as an example.
2019 HFT Distribution
- 4/4 Literature
- 4/4 Science
- 4/4 History
- 3/3 Fine Arts
- 1/1 Social Science/Philosophy
- 1/1 Religion
- 1/1 Mythology
- 1/1 Geography/Current Events
- 1/1 Trash
You get the idea. Sometimes, a distribution might have a number below 1 for an item, like “.5/.5 Geography”. If this is the case, it means that it will, using the above example, appear in every other packet; .75 would mean three of every four packets; .33 one of every three; .67 two of every three; .25 one in every four, and so on and so forth.
There are two types of player: generalist and specialist. A generalist has no particular subject concentration; a specialist does. Specialists choose a subject area or two and run with just those. A team with four specialists, one in each of the major subject areas, will win constantly, provided the players are good enough. A team with four generalists will make the playoffs, but not usually win tournaments. Similarly, a team with the country’s four best History specialists will lose to a team of a decent literature player, a decent science player, and a generalist to pick up the minor categories.
The only good way to choose a specialty is to choose the thing you enjoy. Picking up a minor category for the team is not uncommon, even if it isn’t something you particularly enjoy. Try to avoid that, though. You can always switch later, by the way, if you change your mind, so don’t feel too pressured to pick “the right one”.
These categories are further broken into subcategories; we’ll get to that a little later.
Major Subject Areas
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| History | The largest category and most common specialty. Generally is 4 of 20 questions in a packet, but bleeds into other categories regularly (i.e. science biography, religious history). Much higher at NAQT events. A History specialist commonly also specializes in Current Events, Geography, and/or Social Science. |
| Literature | The second-largest category and second-most-common specialty. Generally is 4 of 20 questions in a packet. Does not bleed into other categories. A Literature specialist commonly also specializes in Mythology, and sometimes with Social Science, Religion, or Philosophy. |
| Science | The third-largest category, but the least common major specialty. Any team with a science player starts with a significant advantage. Generally is 4 of 20 questions in a packet. Does not bleed into other categories. A Science specialist generally does not specialize in anything else. |
| Fine Arts | The fourth largest category. Cleaves neatly into music and art. Generally taken as a secondary specialization by a musician/artist on the team, or split between two players on subcategory lines, but can easily be a major specialty. Generally is 3 of 20 questions in a packet. Does not bleed into other categories very often, though it occasionally eats into History as Art History. A Fine Arts specialist generally specializes in a few of the minor categories as well. |
Minor Subject Areas
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Religion | An important but uncommon minor specialty. Comes up often at NAQT events, but much less so in housewritten events, where the standard is one religion tossup per packet. The space for Religion questions is sometimes taken by another category, and the category itself is usually merged with Mythology and Philosophy in question distributions, denoted by the term “RMP”. |
| Mythology | Third most common minor specialty. Generally is 1 of 20 questions in a packet. Usually merged with Religion and Philosophy in distributions, denoted by the term “RMP”. |
| Philosophy | Uncommon minor specialty and uncommon overall at the high school level outside of the harder tournaments. Generally is merged with another category at the high school level, whether that is Religion and Mythology or Social Science. |
| Social Science | Catch-all for economics, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Not common as a specialty, but not particularly hard to learn, as the number of topics that come up is limited and repetitive. Generally is 1 or 2 of 20 questions in a packet. Sometimes merged with Philosophy in distributions. |
| Geography | Second-most common minor specialty. Easily combines with History, which is done regularly. Difficult to study per se. Generally is 1 of 20 questions in a packet, if that; far more at NAQT. Sometimes combined with Current Events in distributions. |
| Current Events | Most common minor specialty. Read the news and you’ll do great in this category. Generally is 1 of 20 questions in a packet. Sometimes will not appear at all; other times, merged with Geography in distributions. |
Other Subjects
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Pop Culture, aka “Trash” | Trash refers to all pop culture topics, sports, movies, video games, popular music, and so on. Generally 1 of 20 questions in a packet. |
| Computational Math | Computational math questions are generally short math problems that you race to solve. Local formats make much use of these, but the higher you go in competition, the less you hear them. At LIQBA events, computational math tossups are not read, but computational math bonuses are. |
| Trades/Technical/General Knowledge | Impossible to study for. Seldom appears at LIQBA events, but appears quite a lot in local leagues, and also appears at NAQT’s tournaments on occasion. |
| Spelling/Grammar | Not a specialty. We promise you’ll never hear a Spelling tossup in an LIQBA game. Grammar appears a lot in local leagues, but only very, very rarely here. |
Part II: Joe’s Four-Step Method
First, be sure to attend every practice and competition you can. That’s step one. quiz bowl is not just knowing things; there is some strategy to it that can only be learned by actually playing.
Next, remember that the goal of quiz bowl is for four players to get three tossups each consistently. If you do that, you got 12 of 20, and you win. That’s the point of building a team; it’s not for one guy to know everything. This sometimes comes up at the high school level and almost never at the college level. Those one-man teams (almost) never beat a good, balanced squad.
Finally, remember that you must find this enjoyable. If you don’t, forget it. Stop now and save yourself the grief.
This method is not hard and doesn’t suck up inordinate amounts of time to learn very little. It’s a very powerful method. You improve relatively quickly, so you’ll start winning sooner rather than later. If everyone on your team takes a category and studies in this way, you’ll be on top of the leaderboards in no time at all.
So how do you do it?
Simple.
- Read a Source
- Search Old Questions
- Take Notes
- Review
Step 1: Read a Source
The sources to use differ by category. What comes up in High School Quizbowl, also known as “The Canon”, changes slightly by difficulty:
- At the Easy, or Novice, level, it’s “What can I learn in a normal High School-level course on a given subject?”
- At the Moderate, or Regular, level, it’s “What can I learn in an AP course on a given subject?”
- At the Hard, or Regs-Plus, level, and the Very Hard, or Nationals, level, it’s “What can I learn in an introductory college course on a given subject?”
Start out at the Easy level, and once you get that down pat, work your way up.
For History, you want textbooks: an AP World textbook, an AP United States History textbook, an AP Euro textbook, and a few shorter books on ancient civilizations. Branch out from there to learn more specific information on given subjects.
For Literature, read Sparknotes full book summaries for novels and long poetry, the original poems and interpretations for short poetry, either full plays or Sparknotes summaries, and for short stories, just read them. Learn the WORKS, and the AUTHORS will come.
For Science, read AP-level textbooks on Biology, Physics, and Chemistry, and brush up on your earth science and astronomy. Computer Science comes up as well, but you should only study that if you have an interest in programming; a similar situation occurs with electrical engineering.
For Fine Arts, it’s a little harder. For Music, first, learn basic music theory, and then branch out into classical composers and their works. Just as in Literature, learn the works, and the composers will follow. If you’re stumped on what to study, listen to a YouTube video of “100 works you’ve heard but don’t know the name” or similar as a jumping-off point. You should also read Opera plot summaries and learn about classic Jazz and Musical Theater. For visual fine arts, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, try taking out a reference work of paintings from your local library. Once again, learn the pieces, and the artists will come naturally.
For Mythology, read books of general mythology by region: Greco-Roman, Norse, Egyptian, and Aztec are the primary ones. Once you learn those, you can branch out into other systems, like Irish, Japanese, West African, and so on.
For Religion, read about all the major world religions, their sects and practices, their beliefs, and their main figures. As you go deeper, you can also learn basic Christian theology. You should also have some familiarity with the more basic books of the Bible, such as the Gospels, Revelation, and the Pentateuch, for instance.
For Philosophy, read a basic work that summarizes the major schools and thinkers.
For Social Science, read AP texts on Economics and Psychology. Read articles on famous Anthropologists, Sociologists, Linguists, and Political Scientists.
For Geography, read an atlas and factbooks about various nations. The category has undergone a shift from simply naming places to talking about cultures as well.
For Current Events, read the news and know your major elected and appointed officials; no further action is generally required. Read sources from both the right, left, and center. Try and read longform articles whenever you can, and avoid clickbait or outragebait garbage.
For Trash, this is the one category that you can pick up simply by going about your life.
Step 2: Search Old Questions
If you’re reading a textbook, you should do this for everything that seems important, especially focusing on terms and people, since those are usually the things that are tossed up. If you’re doing literature, you should do this for every work and, if it’s a very common work, some major characters, after you finish reading the source or the sparknotes. If you’re studying mythology, look up the character; philosophy, the philosopher or school of thought; geography, the feature.
To look up old questions, use qbreader.org/db. You can put in a query: for example, George Washington or The Catcher in the Rye. Set the difficulty to 1-5. Ignore set name. Set the categories to the ones you’re targeting. Change it from all text to Answer (you can use Question for more advanced study later, once you pick up the basics). Then, hit search.
Steps 3-4: Take Notes and Review
Take your favorite notebook (physical notes tend to work better) and make an outline of the topic. Write down the basics, what comes up a lot in the questions you looked up, and other useful information.
Once you’ve done that, review what you’ve done so you remember it better, and keep reviewing it occasionally as you add new topics.
One other thing you can do, if you like, is to write a question on the topic. Even if it’s poor, the process can help commit things to memory.
And that’s it! That’s all you need to do. Do this for a few weeks, for however long or short you want, and you’ll see very noticeable improvement.
Whenever you want to learn more about a topic, or a book, or whatever, you can dig into it as much as you’d like. For example, if you read the summary for the Great Gatsby, and you found it to be amazing, read the whole book! That’s part of the fun: you’ll find all sorts of new things to expand your horizons.
Checking Progress
How do you check your progress? Well, there’s a few ways: the obvious one is to see how you do in practice or in a tournament, but protobowl is good for that too. It sucks for studying, but it’s great for progress. If you have a Discord account, you can use what’s called the PK bot, which reads you bonuses one part at a time. It’s very useful. You can also use QBReader, the same site where you looked questions up: it has a bonus and tossup reader.
Part III: What Not to Do
1. Study excessively deeply
Don’t study anything excessively deeply (unless you so desire to for reasons outside Quizbowl). You should be able to power a tossup on Andrew Jackson; you do not need to write a book on his life and times, or write a piece of literary criticism on a work of fiction. Most topics can be learned about relatively quickly; a novel, for instance, should take about 15 minutes maximum.
2. Use Flashcards
Flashcards are both the most common and, unless done very, very well, the most useless study method out there. The problem with flashcards is that they contain very little information: you usually put, say, a author on the front and a book title on the back, or a painting on the front and an artist on the back. This is good for getting tossups at the very end and not much else. Part of being a good team is being able to obtain answers from their descriptions; if you don’t, you’ll never, ever, beat a team who can. Binary matching like this never works and is awful for your mind.
There are some players who have “carded” their way to the top, or close to it. This was very common before the 1990s, and became less and less common until the mid-2010s, when flashcards experienced a bit of a renaissance; now, there are some top-tier quiz bowlers who do use Flashcards to study.
But, in spite of that, studying with flashcards is miserable drudgery. Studying other ways is far more fun and effective.
3. Use Protobowl to Study
Protobowl is not a studying tool and should never be used as one. What Protobowl is good for, aside from being fun, is that it is an excellent way to check your progress. Make your own room and see how you do; you can test how well you recall the things you studied in a game-like setting.
You can also easily hold practices as a team, since you can all join the same room.
But to reiterate: It is not useful for studying, only for checking progress!
4. Use Osmosis as a Sole Method
This is doing nothing and hoping you’ll get better by learning things in class, from the world around you, by hearing answerlines at practices, etc. This is the default study method. Most teams solely use this. If you use any other method you’ll pass them in six months. If you use solely this method, you’ll never get any better and will be at the bottom of the individual standings forever. It might be great for English or History class, but it doesn’t work for quiz bowl. Note that we all learn some things by osmosis, but it’s not a studying method.
5. Sitting in Practice
This is similar to Osmosis except in a practice room, and usually consists of writing down answerlines you miss and googling them on the ride home. While you’ll learn a few things, it’s not very targeted and only a few answerlines come up in any given practice, sharply limiting the amount you’ll learn. Also, be honest: you spend half of practice cracking jokes with your teammates and bragging about how you’re going to beat your rivals at the next tournament, as well you should. So either way, don’t worry about writing down answerlines; just ask for a copy of the packet at the end of practice and study the tossups. Note that going to practice is very important, but for different reasons; it’s just not a studying tool.
6. Cram
Much as cramming for tests doesn’t work, it also doesn’t work for quiz bowl. Not only will it make you miserable, it will also not work at all, leaving you even more miserable when you can’t remember anything at the next event. Adopt a slow-and-steady study plan and you’re golden (Feel free to go wild over the Summer and on Christmas Break, though!)
Part IV: Final Notes
Results don’t lie. If you aren’t hitting your goals, reevaluate and ask for advice; try a different method. Don’t fall in love with a single clue and declare yourself an expert. Confront what you don’t know and be realistic. At the same time, don’t be worried if you bomb a tournament. It’s a small sample size; every quiz bowler has bombed one at some point. But if you bomb a whole bunch of tournaments, it’s time to reevaluate.
Set measurable, attainable goals for improvement at each tournament. Bear in mind the difficulties of the sets.
Put in the work and you’ll reap the rewards.
And, finally, if you absolutely love this game, much like we all did, try not to study in such excess that your grades drop more than a letter or you neglect other important things.
Of course, if you neglect unimportant things, that’s just an added benefit, no?