HOW TO KICKSTART QUIZZING CAREER

How to Approach Quizzing as a Career

Hello guys I am back with a second Sunday Post to help you kickstart your quizzing career. Many people wish to start quizzing, especially in college but don't have the know-how. These series of posts are targetting those people only. The thinking the quizzing is only for nerds or you need to be studious and good at remembering facts for being a good quizzer needs to be busted. While it is true, that people remembering facts can do good at quizzes, but they are NOT the only people who can do good at quizzing. 

Allow me to add something with the help of this grid: (this analogy has been taken from one, Mr. Ankit Sethi, who was a good quizzer in his own time)

Tanks can be defined as the quizzers who would be able to answer most typical quiz questions. Snipers are the specialists, the ones who would get the most answers that no one else could get.
The seat of these respective classes' powers can lie in either their strength of Knowledge or Intuition.

This gives rise to 4 broad varieties of quizzers:

1. The Knowledge Tank: They read constantly, know a lot of information on pretty much all subjects and retain most or all of what they come across. Motivations of Knowledge tanks may vary: some might be doing it because they genuinely find everything around them fascinating, while some just might remember every tiny detail by default and being good at quizzing is a mere by-product for them. Their in-discriminatory nature is the key marker.
   
2. The Intuition Tank: Different from Knowledge Tanks in how they go about absorbing the vast quantities of information they read or view. They go about it in a meta sort of way. They specifically filter whatever they come across through the lens of a quizzer -- They ask themselves, could this appear in a quiz? Does this information have any relevance to popular fundaes in quizzes? They are good at spotting facts in the news that could become important for cracking quizzes. They remain Tanks, i.e., generalists but usually shape their notion of "general" based on the demands of the quizzing circuit.
   
3. The Knowledge Snipers: These are the kind of quizzers who usually know one or two things well, and when I say well, I mean REALLY well. Think: the lit nerds or the movie buffs.They are basically helpless (apart from simplistic guesswork) in other fields except when they can use domain-specific mastery as a springboard, for example: answering a History question because you saw some fact in the question mentioned in a movie/book.
   
4. The Intuition Snipers: These are the ones who have a decent knowledge base, nothing extraordinary, but who have the inscrutable ability to pull answers out of their ass during crunch times. They can learn to read past the actual details in the question and intuit what the answer to this "sort of" question "should" be. At times the feeling can be so vague that they themselves might not know how or why they feel they have the right answer, only that it is correct. This is one factor that you either have or you don't. And even then, it comes in handy maybe once or twice in a quiz. But those are the one you remember. An important distinction between Intuitive Snipers and Intuitive Tanks is that the latter, at the height of their gifts, can elicit responses like "Great crack!" whereas it is the Intuitive Snipers who get "Answer of the Day!" Again, a Tank can do this by luck, but only an IS can manage to do this regularly.

While these boundaries are porous, most quizzers I have come across fall neatly into one category or the other.

Now, the reason for all this blabbering is two-fold:
1) When you start out on your journey to be a quizzer, know that there are various ways to success. Quizzing is mostly a team sport and a truly great team has both tanks and snipers; knowledge and intuition. It might be the case that Tanks do better in Lone Wolfs(or solo quizzes), but Snipers can have healthy careers as part of a quiz team, and you're amply compensated by the admiring looks you get when you answer something no one else could get.

2) The other reason is that you should be looking for these attributes in your team-mates. It helps immensely. You need this information at crucial moments of the game, when a Tank team-mate feels he/she has an informed guess because they read blah blah somewhere while a Sniper is saying he/she KNOWS (!) the right answer. You need to be able to back off and let your team-mate do his/her thing. Conversely, you need to be able to assert yourself when you know your team-mates aren't on the right track and it's you who have the answer.

The right teammate is as necessary a component of your success as your knowledge and instincts are. 

Hope you all find it helpful and all the best for all budding quizzers out there. "Flow of Knowledge" is my mantra, reiterating once again. 

One announcement needs to be made, My school friends and quizzing companions, Sourav Madanpuri and Kumar Himanshu have also joined the blog with the same objective of documenting questions of their lives. Both are still very active in college quizzing circuit and we can certainly expect a lot of intriguing and interesting questions from their side. 

Next article will be on Next Sunday when it will be 30 days to this blog. Till Then keep loving, keep sharing and keep spreading. Sayonara from supremeKAI