ChGK in the Prairie

Chapter 2: Patricia is asked What? Where? When?

2035. Patricia's parents read the latest issue of For 10 points, fix this community, which is about the Russian five-year plan for quiz bowl. Which leaves some questions unanswered to some people in the West questioning the plan's feasibility. Including, but not limited to, Patricia.

During Memorial Day, Patricia's parents host a party with their friends to come to their home and question her about why she even picked Tulane to go to college. They never mentioned it to them beforehand.

"I'm going to Tulane University next fall" Patricia answers, matter-of-factly.

"Tulane? Why are you going to Tulane for college?" Bohdan, an Ukrainian first-generation immigrant, asks her.

"Two reasons: quiz bowl and I would be getting more out of my education if I left the Midwest. Sure, Tulane is still running around twenty-five grand per year, even with the scholarship..." Patricia explains herself.

"I hope it's a better financial deal than attending Ivies for you..." Bohdan sighs.

"That's precisely what people assumed at school when I announced I was going to play quiz bowl for the Green Wave. Yet For ten points, fix this community seemed to be implying the Russians had talent but no quiz bowl circuit. And Tulane was apparently aiming for the World Cup"

"You must understand that Russian team interscholastic quizzing competition is dominated by two formats: ChGK and brain ring, and school teams typically do both"

"ChGK?" Patricia asks, clueless about what it even means.

"Chto, gde, kogda. Or What, where, when in English"

And then Bohdan goes on to explain that a typical interscholastic ChGK season has 7 tournaments, 2 games per tournament, 12 questions per game, and 60 seconds per question, starting from the end of the question reading. In Russia, the top 3 teams per federal subject (oblasts, krais and so on), determined based on the best five tournaments, would then attend the ChGK equivalent of the MSNCT or HSNCT, depending on grade brackets. Which are not the same as for the NAQT nationals.

"I guess this is where their talent for quiz bowl comes from. But tossup/bonus as played under NAQT is foreign to them"

"I think you should try playing ChGK at some point; maybe even tonight. You seem to have a lot of erudition so you should play the game"

"One more question: what is the question distribution like in ChGK? Scholar bowl and NAQT subject distributions usually attempt to balance subjects" Patricia asks.

"If you aim for the ChGK world championship, assuming you have sufficient Russian language proficiency, you should have a balance between your six players because the ChGK Worlds, as well as their qualifiers, have a variety of question areas. Typically, the United States don't do very well at the ChGK Worlds. Often lower-level open tournaments will focus mostly on one area. Online anyway. But here if you wanted to host an in-person ChGK tournament, you don't have a choice: in Kansas, there's only one yearly tournament, and the winner goes on to the US qualifiers. This means the packet must have roughly the same distribution as at the Worlds" Bohdan lectures Patricia.

Man am I learning so much about quizzing around the world. But wait a minute; 60 seconds per question? Just wait for the game... this is so not going to play out like scholars bowl or NAQT quiz bowl... Patricia thought while the first ChGK game of the day starts after dinner; the guests intend to play the packet in full.

"First question" Patricia's mother reads the packet provided by the attendee that had this conversation about ChGK with Patricia to shed some light on the FTPFTC article about the Russian quiz bowl ambitions. "In many folk stories, tears are compared to gems. Russians compared them to pearls, Aztecs to turquoise. What do the Lithuanians compare them to?"