Q: Who found a way to crack the U. K.’ s premier quiz show?
“An extra layer of enthusiasm”
Brandon Blackwell sits in his apartment in the Jamaica section of the New York City borough of Queens, training with a collection of 30,000 homemade flashcards the way weightlifters train with barbells. Each card contains an obscure fact about the world. Which country is home to Lake Assal, the largest salt reserve on Earth? ( Djibouti.) Which metal is smelted using the Hall- Héroult process? ( Aluminum.)
It is the fall of 2016, and this 22- year- old is struggling to reach the highest echelons in the little- known world of competitive quizzing. He has earned about $ 400,000 by appearing on “Jeopardy!” Teen Tournament, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and a handful of other shows. But he fares poorly when up against top quizzers in online contests and does not exactly dazzle at the Quiz Olympiad held in Athens that year.
Blackwell wants to get better. Much, much better. He’d also like to turn quizzing into a full- time job, although how exactly that will happen is unclear. The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes that he has no choice.
He has to move to London.
“Eight of the top 20 quizzers on the planet lived there,” he said during a recent interview. “It’s the epicenter, and competing in the city was the only way I was going to improve quickly.”
To land a British visa, Blackwell — who already had a degree in computer science from New York University — needed to enroll in a British university. And if he was moving across the Atlantic, he figured he might as well finagle his way onto one of Britain’s televised quiz shows. When he searched “university” and “quiz” on Google, up it popped: “University Challenge.”
This BBC show is a cultural institution, now in its 53rd season. Each year, four- person teams from colleges around Britain compete in what is essentially a tournament of brainiacs, with episodes that air Monday nights.
Blackwell applied to just one place, Imperial College, a science and engineering school with about 20,000 students in the South Kensington section of London. It was hardly an obvious choice. Imperial had not won “University Challenge” since 2001. But he knew that when players buzz in to answer questions, the show’s unseen narrator shouts the name of the school, followed by the name of the player.
“So he would have to yell, ‘ Imperial Brandon!’” he explained. “I’m a ‘ Star Wars’ fan. I loved that.”
In September 2016, he began executing the plan: Get admitted to Imperial. Move to London. Make the school’s “University Challenge” team. Win the championsnip. Go pro.
Nothing about this seemingly long- shot scheme would be left to chance. Blackwell would study “University Challenge” like a puzzle that could be solved, dreaming up what he privately called BISQUE, the Brandon Imperial System for Quiz Efficiency. And he would apply this system with an approach that is quintessentially Amerian and decidedly out of favor among Britain’s academic elites.
He would work shamelessly. at year it,
Blackwell would spend more than a year on a selftaught crash course in British history, most of it gleaned from Wikipedia. He watched more than 100 hours of “University Challenge” on Youtube. He went through his entire set of flashcards eight times.
“When I started flashcarding 10 years ago, I was like a pariah,” he said. “People were like, ‘ Oh, he learns lists. He flashcards.’ I’m like, I’m a Black kid from the ‘ hood. Nobody I know listens to the Beatles. Nobody I know watches ‘ Friends.’”
A warm and intense 30- year- old, he was raised by a mother who is a middle school teacher and a father who is an insurance adjuster.
One day while at home watching “Jeopardy!” Teen Tournament, he told his parents that the questions were easy. They pushed him to apply for a spot on the show. He did and won $ 10,000.
In his second at
NYU, he landed on a shortlived show called “The Million Second Quiz.” He lost in the season finale to a guy who snagged $ 2.6 million.
Suddenly, quizzing looked like a potentially lucrative career. A year earlier, when he appeared on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” he netted $ 43,100, more than enough to cover a medical procedure for his grandmother, because he had learned the word for a fear of bridges ( gephyrophobia) just 12 hours before taping.
The lesson: With enough sweat, anyone could excel at quizzing.
A self- described ascetic, Blackwell has lived a nofrills life off his quiz- show profits since his college days, and aside from freelance quiz- related writing gigs, he has never had another job. The funds bankrolled his move to London and tuition at Imperial, where he studied for a master’s degree in computer science. By the time of the college’s tryouts for “University Challenge,” in October 2017, he was training 80 hours a week. But the students in charge of the process didn’t seem interested in assembling the best team.
Blackwell quit Imperial, at least temporarily. “University Challenge” allows students to appear on the show just once, and he didn’t want to waste his sole shot with a group that he considered doomed. ( That team wasn’t picked by the BBC to compete.) After putting his belongings in storage, he headed back to Queens, but not before telling the student union that the people running the “University Challenge” tryouts were a disaster.
When Blackwell returned to London in 2018, the selection system was not exactly overhauled, but his complaint seemed to persuade the school to publicize tryouts more widely. He made the team again, this time with three people — Richard Brooks, Caleb Rich and Conor Mcmeel — who didn’t balk when Blackwell suggested that they immediately spend a couple of hours in the library plotting how to train. They had three months to prepare.
“There was definitely an extra layer of enthusiasm there,” said Mcmeel. “I was a little worried that I’d roped myself into some version of a hyperserious sports movie.”
During the meeting, the four figured out their strengths ( Nobel Prizes, the periodic table, British castles) and wrote down their blind spots ( sports and biology). Those topics were divvied up and assigned to different players.
Then the real work began. The team gathered once a week for practice games, typically an online episode of “University Challenge,” which they watched with an electronic buzzer system borrowed from the school’s quiz society. In the “University Challenge” format, there are “starter” questions worth 10 points, which either team can buzz in and answer. The winner of those points then gets three bonus questions on a niche topic — say, events that lasted 44 days, or monarchs nicknamed “the conqueror” — worth five points apiece, which only that team can answer.
Teams are given about 15 seconds for a quiet huddle about those bonus questions. Blackwell proposed a rule to his teammates
Suraiya Haddad, current captain of Imperial College’s “University Challenge” team, who says Brandon Blackwell is “the father” of the school’s recent dominance on the quiz show, in Edinburgh, Scotland, March 23. about how to confer during matches: The person with the most expertise was not allowed to speak first. That way, the nonexperts would get a chance to offer an idea.
In February 2019, the team traveled to a studio in Manchester where episodes are filmed.
In the opening round, Imperial crushed Brasenose College, Oxford by a score of 255- 70. Blackwell stood out immediately.
Social media in Britain lit up with commentary about this wildly expressive American. He was fidgety and eager, a living retort to the Oxbridge ethos of “effortless superiority.” Although much of the online feedback was supportive, some was racist and plenty of it was critical.
Brandon is no longer competing for the school, he looms large over its quizzing tactics. In the years since, his methods have been adopted and tweaked at Imperial.
On April 8, Imperial prevailed against University College London, becoming the winningest school in the show’s history.
Suraiya Haddad, the team’s captain, called Blackwell “the father of this dynasty.”
“He came in and said, ‘ You guys need to play more strategically,’” she said.
Ads for tryouts are now ubiquitous. Instead of choosing the four top scorers, players with deep knowledge of a few topics are sought, with care to prevent overlap.
“It’s better to have three specialists and one generalist than four generalists,” said Fatima Sheriff, who was on Imperial’s winning team in 2022.
In the years since his victory, Blackwell has fulfilled his improbable ambition to turn quizzing into a fulltime profession. He now appears on both the U. S. and Australian versions of “The Chase,” nationally syndicated shows in which a group of mortals play for cash, which they keep unless a somewhat villainous character called the Chaser outplays them. Blackwell is the only on- staff Chaser on both shows, a dapper and deadpan figure called the Lightning Bolt by producers. He regularly swipes more than $ 100,000 from contestants.
“It’s not all that different than being on ‘ University Challenge,’” he said. “The idea is the same — make someone else go home unhappy.”