One of the questions in Ken Jennings‘ Tuesday Trivia CXII (Sept. 2):

Despite its diminutive name, what is, by area, the largest state in Mexico?

I think it’s just about a perfect geography question. Why?

1) It’s short. Thirteen words contain the basic question, and add a hint.

2) It’s unambiguous. Myself, I almost always assume “largest” in geography means area. But not everyone does — maybe it could be population. He’s got the “by area” clarification in there. And the question ends with what he’s asking for: The name of a Mexican state.

3) There’s a hint. “What’s the largest state in Mexico?” is a valid trivia question, but a dull one. Either you know it or you don’t. (I didn’t.) Throw in the info that it’s got a “diminutive name,” though, and you’ve got a bit of a lifeline.

4) But the hint doesn’t give it away. Sometimes at trivia you’ve figured out the answer to the question the host is asking — then they add another piece of information that means everyone has figured out the answer. A deflating moment. Jennings’ hint rewards lateral thinking. You could be literal and think of a Mexican state with a short name — Baja? — but that’s not where it’s going.

Because the answer (which I guessed, but looked up to be sure) is Chihuahua, a word most commonly used in US English to describe a diminutive dog, not El Estado Grande.

This caliber of question isn’t unusual for Jennings — he’s been doing this for a while, and studying the masters who write for Jeopardy! for longer — but this is one of the pithiest examples I’ve seen for a while.

(And if you don’t subscribe to Tuesday Trivia, you really should.)

A few of the snap decisions I had to make on last Tuesday’s quiz:

Question: According to legend, Laocoon and Cassandra both warned against accepting what large gift?
Correct answer: the Trojan Horse
Team asked: Can we have credit for “horse”? They didn’t call it the Trojan Horse.
Verdict: No. Too general. I would’ve given credit for “big wooden horse” or something, but not just horse.
In the cold light of day: I probably should’ve given them the point. In Quiz Bowl or on Jeopardy!, no, but for pub quiz, probably OK.

Question: In Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty, what present does Carabosse give Princess Aurora on her sixteenth birthday?
Correct answer: spindle
Team asked: What about “spinning wheel”?
Verdict: OK.
In the cold light of day: I’m still OK with it, though a friend of mine noted that they aren’t the same thing.

Question: In the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi,” Jim sells his watch so he can buy what present for his wife Della?
Correct answer: combs
Team asked: Will you take “brush”?
Verdict: No, because they’re not the kind of combs you use to comb your hair, so a brush is a different kind of thing altogether.
In the cold light of day: Good call.

Question: Bob Dylan tells Mr. Jones — rather than Mr. or Mrs. Charles — that “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is” in what song?
Correct answer: “Ballad of a Thin Man”
Team asked: What about just “Thin Man”?
Verdict: No, because a) that just capitalizes on my hint, and b) it’s not the complete title.
In the cold light of day: Good call.

As I mentioned on Seattlest, I passed the in-person Jeopardy! audition in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. Now I officially have about a 1 in 6 chance of appearing on the show in the next couple of years. I’m coming out ahead regardless — I won a Jeopardy! home game when bwouns from the Ken Jennings Message Board misremembered what year the show came back on the air.

One thing the Jeopardy! people said that stuck with me: The people on the show want you to win money. They’re not there as your adversary — your fellow contestants are your adversaries.

When I started writing quizzes, I had to learn that. In my first few quizzes, I deliberately included questions that I knew would be difficult, possibly even stumpers. At least one per round, sometimes two.

Why? I had in the back of my head that I was competing with the players. Somehow it was points for me if I stumped them.

It took reading some other people’s advice on writing questions — particularly Jennings in Brainiac, and the guys at the Trivia Hall of Fame.

Turns out it’s a lot more fun to host when you try to write questions that a lot of people can answer. I definitely still try to challenge players — a great question rewards lateral thinking. But stumping them isn’t that hard to do, and it’s not much fun when you’re on a team with a half-empty answer sheet.

I’m not there to beat the players. I’m there to give teams a good playing field where they can compete with each other.

A friend of mine who’s hosting at the Old Pequilar next week corralled me before last week’s quiz. “What do you think of Person X for the movie round?” she asked.

Brief explanation: the movie round at the OP always involves nine questions with movie titles as the answer. Question 10 is always “Who appeared in all of these movies?” So constructing a round involves picking out an actor or actress and working backwards from there.

I won’t share Person X’s name, in case my friend uses them next week. But her question made me consider what my movie round rules of thumb are.

“Hmm,” I said. “I think it’s a good idea, but I don’t know if people will know the name.” And that’s the key: to be fair, the movie round’s common denominator needs to be someone who players not only recognize, but can name.

I call it the David Warner rule. Another friend of mine wanted to write the quiz one week. He wrote a movie round using David Warner for question 10. I probably would’ve let it go, but the two people I shared the host slot with vetoed it. “I’ve subscribed to Entertainment Weekly for five years and I’ve never head of David Warner,” said one of them. He knew all the movies in question, and (when prompted) recognized Warner’s face, but had no idea what the guy’s name was.

My friend rewrote the round using Luis Guzman, who probably pushed the envelope a little bit, but enough teams got the question that it proved OK.

These days, when I want to make the movie round tricky but still playable, I look for people who are pretty famous but not necessarily for their film roles. Three examples: August 7, January 29, and April 10. That last one probably pushed the envelope again; if I used that person again, I might make the other nine questions even easier.

Of course, the challenge is part of the fun of the movie round. The David Warners of the world may be too obscure — and the Amrish Puris of the world are right out, at least in an average US bar — but I don’t think it’s much fun to have the answer be Brad Pitt or George Clooney, either. When you can guess the answer within two movies, even if you don’t regularly see 100+ movies a year, you could use a little more challenge.

Here’s what I do: When I’ve got an actor in mind, I ask my wife if she’s heard of them. If so, yay. If not, I usually scrap the idea.

Random closing thought: I really wanted to do a round with John Waters in the Q10 slot, but he hasn’t appeared in enough movies to make it work well. Take more acting gigs in other people’s films, John!

I’ve been hosting quiz nights for just about a year. And just when I think I’ve got a handle on what I’m doing, along comes last Tuesday night.

In short: the quiz was too hard, which means people weren’t having as much fun as I’d have liked. I know there are quiz hosts who delight in making really hard quizzes, but after a few early quizzes, I came to realize that people have more fun playing the quiz when they get a decent number of answers right. The penny dropped for me when I read it on the Trivia Hall of Fame’s Question Writing Clinic: “Mystifying people is bad. I find that people like to get between two thirds and three quarters of the questions. However, trivia writers have a bad habit of writing questions that entertain or challenge them, instead of their audiences.”

Twenty teams played the Old Pequilar’s quiz on Tuesday night. Scores ranged from 16 to 57 — which means even the winning team didn’t quite get 75% of the questions right. Second place was a point behind them — then third place got 48 points. Only half the teams got 40 or more questions right, or 50%.

My dream spread is more like a low of 20 and a high of 65, with most of the teams scoring over 40 points. Frustration isn’t fun.

We always start with Geography, which is always one of the harder rounds. This week, though, the average score was 3.3. Ouch. It was after Round 2, A Fine Romance, that I knew things weren’t going well. Average score that round was 3.8. Those ended up being the two hardest rounds, but none of the verbal question rounds had an average above 5 points, and usually I’d consider a 5-point average round acceptable but low.

I was tempted to call Tuesday a fiasco, but really, it wasn’t a complete failure. For one thing, I didn’t gloat. I apologized, starting with round 3, and was sincere about it. And when I read the first question of Round 5, Voices, I got a lucky setup. The question: From 1944 to 2001, Smokey Bear said “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Since April, 2001, Smokey says “only you can prevent” what?

Someone yelled out “Syphilis!” And I responded, without much thinking about it, “No, that’s Smokey Beaver. I’m asking about Smokey Bear.” The entire bar cracked up in a tension-relieving mass laugh. From there, people had more fun. I kept apologizing (while keeping it light), and the rounds got somewhat easier, which helped.

What happened? I misjudged the difficulty of a lot of my questions, getting wrapped up in presenting interesting info without doing enough to make the questions answerable to someone who wasn’t surfing Wikipedia. And, because the bar is really worried about finishing by 10:00 whenever they have the porch open, I included two quick-to-read rounds (A Fine Romance and The Loyal Opposition). They work great for keeping things moving, but there’s no real context to the clues, so it turns into a round of “you know it or you don’t.” And a lot of people didn’t.

Fortunately, this was an aberration — for the last several months, at least, my average scores were closer to my ideal, with high scores approaching 70. I find that there’s a couple of teams every week doomed to score 20 or fewer points, no matter what I ask, but that it’s definitely possible to raise the scores of most teams with solid question construction.

Next time — August 14, mark your calendars — it’ll be easier. Cross my fingers.

The total land area of Japan is closest to the total land area of which state: California, Michigan, Montana, or Oregon?

Correct answer: Montana.

Out of 22 teams, though, none got it right. Four teams guessed Oregon, eight guessed California, and ten guessed Michigan.

I wanted to make it tricky, of course, but I never want to shut teams out. (Honestly!) If every team were randomly guessing, five or six should’ve gotten it.

My theory: California and Montana get lumped together as “big states,” and California seems like a likelier match for Japan. If nothing else, it’s similarly vertical. Michigan is the smallest state of the four, so attracts the people who want to lowball the answer.

But if anyone else wants to shed some psychological insight, I’m all ears.

It’s an esseintial part of hosting, but I hate having to make judgment calls. I can sympathize with both sides — it’s frustrating to be denied credit for knowing the right answer but not articulating it correctly, but it’s also frustrating to see people get credit for something you remembered accurately and they didn’t.

Last night, for some reason, was rich in arbitration opportunities. The three I remember:

1: Geography
I screwed up when I wrote a question. At some point while futzing with word order, I dropped “the longest” from “What river forms part of the border between Ontario and New York?”

The answer I wanted, and read as correct: the St. Lawrence. Another correct answer: Niagara.

A couple of teams came up to ask about that, and I thought I remembered the Niagara being part of the St. Lawrence. But I opted to give them their points. Unfortunately several other teams who wrote Niagara didn’t ask me about it, and I was delegating data entry to someone else, so several teams didn’t get credit for a correct answer.

Happily, this morning I discovered that adjusting all the scores to give credit for Niagara didn’t affect the final standings. Whew.

Lesson learned: announce any inclusion decisions — “Did you write Niagara? Come up and let me know.” — and take advantage of a data entry person to double-check that. Double-checking all the answers is a lot harder when I’m hosting solo, though.

2a: Name the bride (picture round)
The picture: Uma Thurman in Kill Bill v. 1.

The controversy: I wanted “Beatrix Kiddo” as the answer. A number of teams said “The Bride.”

Result: I gave credit for “the bride,” then heard a (justifiable) mass outcry from teams that had the correct correct answer. So teams that answered “Beatrix Kiddo” got 2 points, while “The Bride” got 1.

If I were doing it over again, I’d be a hardass and only give the point for Kiddo. And I’d write “not ‘the Bride’” on the answer sheets. Including the Bride of Frankenstein as a possible answer opened up a can of worms on what I meant by “name,” so I understand the confusion, but I also remember, as a player, being annoyed when teams got credit for answers that weren’t as good as mine.

In short, the team that wrote “James=pussy” by Uma was right.

2b: Name the bride (picture round)
Controversy: A photo of JFK and Jackie post-ceremony, cutting their wedding cake. I accepted “Jackie Bouvier” or “Jackie Kennedy” as correct answers, but nixed “Jackie Onassis.”

I stand by this one. It’s obvious from the photo who Jackie just married; she wasn’t Jackie Onassis when the photo was taken. Yeah, teams who wrote “Jackie O” knew who I was talking about, but accuracy counts on quiz night.

I’m also not sorry in retrospect for not accepting Twin Peaks as an acceptable substitute for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.