IMPROVING AS A PLAYER
Practice: To improve, it is important to practice and read question sets. Many teams practice for at least 3-4 hours a week before school, after school, or during lunch and designated activities periods. Some players supplement this with work at home, often using the Quiz Bowl Packet Archive. If you want to consistently improve, you should practice on questions that are hard but not extremely difficult, so you are exposed to more new answers and clues. It is also best to practice on good questions and play both tossups and bonuses, as they often ask about different materials. Practice materials can be found on the packet archive, while past NAQT questions can be purchased here.
Recommended Sets for Practice:
For new teams (questions at or easier than regional competition level): SCOP Novice, Ladue Invitational Spring Tournament (LIST) I-IV, WHAQ, California Academic Learning Initiative (CALI)
For teams trying to improve at the regional level (questions slightly harder than regional level): Yale Bulldog High School Academic Tournament (BHSAT), Harvard Fall Tournament (HFT)
For teams trying to improve at the national level (questions at or harder than national level): PACE NSC, ACF Fall (college set), 2017 Eisenhower Memorial Tournament (college set)
Competing: Competing provides the same benefits as practicing, but also helps teams work on their gameplay: timing buzzes, communicating on bonuses, and responding to in-game situations. Information about attending tournaments can be found on our starting a team page.
Notebooks: Most top players bring notebooks to practices and competitions in order to write down clues and answers to research later.
Books: Reference works, textbooks, and standalone books (fiction and nonfiction) all contain useful information that may help you in quiz bowl, or, like many famous works of literature, may come up in questions themselves. Reading a book is excellent by its own merits as well.
Writing Questions: Writing questions can be difficult and time-consuming, but there is no better way to remember clues than to write a question using them. Writing questions in subjects where you are weak also forces you to research more information, thereby improving your knowledge.
Resources:
NAQT’s “You Gotta Know” Lists: Detailed lists about topics that come up at different levels of quiz bowl.
PACE’s “Quizbowl 101”: Guides to starting a team, improving, writing questions, hosting tournaments, and much more.
QuizDB: The most recently updated searchable database of quiz bowl questions.
Quizbowl Packet Archive: Most non-NAQT sets of all levels will be posted here once no more tournaments are using them.
The Quiz Bowl Resource Center: Many guides, tournaments, and much more can be found on the site.