After my failure on Millionaire, I immersed myself in my career. Five years later, hoping to rekindle my love of trivia, I joined a pub quiz meetup in New York. There, the leader tried to explain women’s breasts and the Japanese language (my college minor) to me. Then came a question about the periodic table:

What chemical element takes its name from the Latin word stannum?

Having studied Latin for six years, I answered tin. He overruled me, claiming that “tin isn’t an element,” going with bronze instead. I did not return. 

Other than watching Jeopardy! and joining friends at the occasional bar trivia night, I drifted away from quizzing. My new job as a creative director left little time for much else. 

And then, in March 2020, everything shut down. 

My friend Shannon and her parents, Kirk and Kathy, organized a weekly Zoom trivia night. For the first time, I wrote my own trivia questions and found I had a knack for it. I rejoined LearnedLeague, a referral-based online quiz league where I had previously languished in the lowest levels. Trivia became my lifeline to the world.

That fall, I moved with my then-husband to Washington, D.C., where I struggled to make friends amid the pandemic. While I was visiting Harrisburg for the first time in a year, my mother introduced me to the game show The Chase. She showed me the legendary episode starring a pre-Jeopardy! fame James Holzhauer, alongside D.C.-based contestant Jeff King.

“You should play trivia with Jeff,” my mom said.

“Mom, I’m not going to track down a random stranger and invite him to bar trivia.”

“Bet you guys would win.”

Although I didn’t contact him, I got involved with trivia meetups again. But two years later, my marriage was falling apart, and burnt out by 60-hour work weeks, I left my job. Biweekly trivia nights could only help so much.

In September 2022, I saw a promotion for SporcleCon, a trivia convention in D.C. On a whim, I bought a ticket and sought teammates for the main events on social media.

Jeopardy! alum Amanda Graves invited me to join her team, and that night I went to the SporcleCon welcome party with her friends from the Women of Jeopardy community. When I told them how the disturbing messages I received after Millionaire deterred me from auditioning for another game show, they shared their own stories. The ubiquity of these experiences drove the founding of the group.

Over the next three days, I participated in a whirlwind of trivia events. I didn’t do particularly well at them, but for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had found my people, and I was in the midst of quizzing legends.

After watching my trivia idol Victoria Groce become the first woman to win the LearnedLeague Live competition, I went out into the lobby. There, I spotted a familiar face in the crowd. “Are you Jeff King?” I said to the stranger. “My mom says we should play trivia together.” If he was taken aback by a random stranger recognizing him from an eight-year-old episode of The Chase, Jeff did a pretty good job of hiding it. We grabbed dinner with two other D.C.-based quizzers, swapping stories about colorful characters in the scene. Jeff talked about how he used the spaced repetition method to get better at trivia. 

After the convention, Matthew Marcus, one of the many quizzers I had met, invited me to join OQL. I read about the online league, where teams of four faced off, answering questions ranging from gentle (“Which of the New Seven Wonders of the World is located in Agra, India?”) to brutally hard (“Who was the last Empress of Ethiopia, ruling from 1916-1930?”). It seemed too rich for my blood, so I said I would consider it.

Two months later, I separated from my husband, moved into a fourth-floor walkup in Logan Circle, and adopted a dog. Raising a puppy made it difficult to attend trivia nights, so I joined Matthew’s OQL team as a temporary distraction while I applied for jobs and pieced my personal life back together. 

Little did I know that the first match I played was not a diversion but a baptismal font—an initiation into an underground world that I didn’t even know existed. In February 2023, I made my OQL debut. By the end of the summer, I was competing in seven online leagues and individual competitions. 

My various teams competed in the top divisions, where I encountered game show stars, quiz bowl legends, and walking encyclopedias. Not wanting to let my teammates down, I developed a detailed study plan to tackle my weak areas. I downloaded the flashcard app Anki and started with high ROI topics (world capitals, the periodic table, bodies of water). When I missed a question, I researched it and added it to my card deck. Meanwhile, I continued to host trivia nights, and every week I gave feedback on unofficial “friendly” sets written by members of the community. 

The studying paid off. Although I was far from the best player, I no longer felt like the dumbest person in the Zoom room. When I started playing LearnedLeague, I was getting 20–35% of geography, history, science, and classical music questions. Now I was averaging over 70% in these categories, and I rose from the bottom level to the top.

In August, once my puppy was grown, I decided it was time to get out of the house. A week after playing Jeff King’s team in OQL USA, I slid into his DMs: “Hey! Do you want to play trivia in DC or Maryland sometime this month? I desperately need to do non-online trivia. I like OQL but I signed up for too many leagues at once and it has consumed my life.” 

“I know the feeling well,” Jeff replied. “And I’d be happy to.” Jeff, I later learned, competed in even more leagues than I did, so he didn’t even remember destroying my team the week before. He thought I was just being creepy again. But either way, we went to a trivia night hosted by his teammate and BPTrivia owner Bill Patschak. My mom was delighted, and her prediction about us winning was correct.

As SporcleCon 2023 approached, I spent the next month going to various trivia nights with Jeff. For the first time since college, I took the Jeopardy! online test, getting 40-odd questions out of 50 correct. After taking another test over Zoom, I was invited to an in-person audition at SporcleCon. The night before my audition, Jeff invited me to a small party where various Jeopardy! alums could give me pointers. 

The host of the shindig was Victoria Groce, and I found myself among trivia royalty. I met her teammates from Neutral MILF Hotel, easily the best trivia team in the country. (Two of the Milves would later join my own team in QuiP, a new inclusion-driven quiz league.) After holding my own in a series of quizzes Victoria wrote, I was raring to go for my audition.

On Saturday, September 9, I donned a Diane von Furstenberg sheath dress and Lanvin flats—an outfit I had spent hours deliberating over—and did one last practice interview with Jeff. Based on conversations with past contestants, I knew they would ask about my career and what I would do with the money. The straightforward answers (“I’m unemployed and I would use the money to pay my rent”) were not exactly compelling, so I crafted a more memorable narrative, telling the truth but telling it slant.

That afternoon, I filed into a small room in the Washington Hilton with a dozen Jeopardy! hopefuls. As with past game show auditions, women were underrepresented (I was one of two), and I had played against half  in various quiz leagues. When they asked who had auditioned before, I was the only person who didn’t raise my hand.

The objective of the mock game isn’t to “win” in the traditional sense. Money values are assigned arbitrarily (one of the top-level clues in my game was a very difficult opera question), and scores aren’t displayed. Buzzer speed doesn’t matter; because they want to hear from everyone, they don’t always call on the first person to buzz in. What they’re looking for is a sense of how TV-ready you are.

Nevertheless, I knew firsthand what fierce competitors the quizzers in the room were, so I waited nervously until my turn. The board seemed custom-made for me: women authors, opera, Shakespeare, film. I buzzed in on almost every clue, ran the opera category, and didn’t get anything wrong. When they asked me what I did, I gave the answer I had rehearsed: After working as a creative director for years, I was part of the Great Resignation, leaving my job to travel through South America and do freelance work.

After the last mock game finished, they told us we would be in the contestant pool for two years. Throughout 2024, several people who had auditioned the same day appeared on the show. With each passing month, I grew less optimistic.

And then in December 2024, I received a call from a Culver City area code.

Continued in my next post.