Eight Upper School students will attend the national Quiz Bowl tournament on May 26, and four students will attend the state tournament.

The team going to the State Championship includes Maya Jagsi, Aaron Kuang, Nikhil Nandipati, and Kate Ponnambalam. The two teams going to nationals include the team described above, and another team including Hasan Makhani, Pratosh Raman, Iyad Mohammed, and Ayan Thombre.

Quiz Bowl is a game where two teams of no more than four compete to answer questions from all areas of knowledge including history, literature, science, sports and more.

Freshman Pratosh Raman says the competition is intense every step of the way.

While a moderator reads questions to both teams, individuals compete to answer the question both efficiently and accurately. There are four players answering the questions at one time; teams with four players or more must substitute.

There are two types of questions: toss-ups and bonuses. Toss-ups are questions where individual players can “buzz-in” and answer without conferring with team members. A bonus question is given after a team answers the toss-up correctly. Bonus questions are worth thirty points, with three individual questions weighing ten points each.

According to freshman Maya Jagsi, players prepare by practicing and reviewing the questions from past tournaments frequently from packets written by National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) for tournaments, as well as lots of studying.

Due to the wide variety of topics covered in Quiz Bowl, a team is usually made up of players with a variety of strengths.

“Usually, one or two people take each of the subjects and learn a lot about the subjects,” Jagsi said.

The 24th Annual Texas Quiz Bowl Alliance State Championship is a virtual tournament organized by the Texas Quiz Bowl Alliance. The National Quiz Bowl Championship Tournament is organized by the NAQT. Teams qualify for the National Championship by either finishing in the top 15% at a high school varsity tournament which uses NAQT questions or winning any class or division of a varsity state championship.

Jagsi says that although Quiz Bowl is very intense, “it is also a lot of fun.”