True or false? Beechview man pays off student loan with a game of trivia
Acouple of months into playing Givling, a trivia app that pitches itself as a crowdfunder to pay off student debt, Dustin Gabler had won 187 bucks without having to kick in a dime.
“I honestly didn’t think any money was going to come,” Mr. Gabler, 27, of Beechview, said. He was just playing around. Then the check came — and cleared. Pretty cool.
That was four years ago. The checks kept coming and growing. He began buying extra playing time and would play as much 25 or 30 games a day, as many as 15 hours a week. It was like a second job. And this week, Givling sent out a news release with this grabber of a headline: “Pittsburgh Man Pays Off Entire $40,000 Student Loan Debt Through Playing Trivia Game.”
So Mr. Gabler could buy his own drink when we met at the Muddy Cup in Beechview on Thursday afternoon.
By then, I’d read a CNBC story from June about others who’d poured thousands of dollars into this site, hoping for the big payoff. The odds are long and — though the for-profit company has added what’s become known as “the Free Queue” since — founder and CEO Lizbeth Pratt told CNBC then, “When you’re playing Givling, you’re paying off someone else’s loan. If you’re here to get your loan paid off and that’s your only reason, then you’re mad.”
Mr. Gabler is the furthest thing from mad. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014 and makes his living as a words guy for numbers people: He’s a proposal writer for PwC, also known as PricewaterhouseCoopers, and works from home. When he emailed details of his winnings at my request, my only quibble was that he forgot to punctuate his list with the word “Ka-ching.”
His winnings: November 2015, $187.50; January 2018, $320.50; April 2018, $87.33; October 2018, $17,045.35; December 2018, $8,391.26; February 2019, $9,706.87; and this month, $4,612. Mr. Gabler guesses he’s spent “$250 to $400 tops” on the 50-cent coins one can buy to play an additional game beyond the two free ones a day.
Givling says it has given out more than $4.5 million to 5,000 Americans such as Mr. Gabler. But with more than 450,000 in the running for prizes, there are relatively few like him. Givling is no more the solution for making a serious dent in the nation’s reported $1.5 trillion in student loan debt than “Jeopardy!” is for bridging the wealth gap. So all I really wanted to know was how Mr. Gabler beat the odds.
He did it by sticking a toe in to test the waters, not diving in. He began with only the two free plays a day.
The questions are easier than those on “Jeopardy!,” he said, at least most of the time. They’re all general, true-false and, if he gets one like “Heinz Field is located in Pittsburgh, Pa.,” well, “it’s a layup,” he said. If he’s asked whether a certain someone won an Academy Award in 1946, he can only guess.
It’s an old saw in the casinos that gamblers play to lose, but not Mr. Gabler. Even after he won the 17 grand last year and was playing with house money, he played conservatively, as you might expect from a man raised in New Bethlehem.
A new game commences every Wednesday at 5 p.m., and players get thrown in with two partners they don’t know, with their teammates getting questions they don’t see. Your points are your own, but if Mr. Gabler sees someone else with an extraordinarily high score and the potential jackpot is low early in a week, he’ll save his coins to play the following week.
Winners split the pot three ways, with even shares. Most of the times he’s done really well, he’s been on a team with another person who has scored high and another who just got lucky being paired with two trivia whizzes. The only downside of winning — and it’s a small one — is that Givling puts winners on hiatus to spread the wealth.
After his $17,000 win a year ago, Mr. Gabler was put on a 60-day hiatus and had another two-month wait after the $8,000-plus win last December. After the $9,700 win in February, he had to wait 120 days to play. This month’s win got him both publicity and a 180-day hiatus until April.
Winners are free to spend their winnings on whatever they like, but Mr. Gabler has been steadily paying down his loan, which had once been $40,000. He and his wife, Kate Gillen (they married in May), decided to take the most recent winnings and some savings and pay his loan off altogether. When he resumes play in April with his usual two hours a night, he’ll be seeking the down payment on a house.
I’d never heard of Givling until last week, and I’ve talked extensively only with a big winner, so I won’t endorse this as a way out of debt any more than I would the Pennsylvania Lottery. A Givling spokesman said Friday its new Yellow Queue offers a path to prizes up to $50,000 at no cost, by watching video ads, playing free trivia games and completing free sponsor offers. Of course, the competition for that free lunch is fierce. A winner’s advice? “Don’t put any money into it at first.” Mr. Gabler said. “You get two free plays a day; you can watch 30 ads a day [which fund the loans]. You’re not going to immediately catch up to the people at the top of the leaderboard who have been playing for a long time.”
Though he has.
“It’s mind-blowing,” he said.