How We Make Money Playing HQ Trivia

Side gigs come in many shapes and sizes. Some people make jewelry, some people write a blog, some people even sell paintings depicting scenes from Nintendo games. But what they should all have in common is that you enjoy doing them, and that they make a nominal-to-substantial amount of money. So is what I’m about to tell you about a legitimate side gig? I don’t know, but I’m gonna tell you all about it anyway!

So, have you heard of the trivia app HQ? It’s a live trivia game you play on your phone. It’s got a host, is usually twelve questions long and looks and feels like games you’re already familiar with like You Don’t Know Jack.

It’s free to play, but if you get all of the questions right, you win actual money.  Yes, it sounds like a scam, but it’s not.  (Since you’re curious, there is venture capital money invested in the app, and also sometimes they do advertisements, so that’s where the money comes from)

The game really started taking off in popularity near the end of 2017. Now it’s not uncommon to see that you’re playing against a million other people. The prize is split amongst all of the players who get every question right. So if the prize is $5,000 (pretty standard) and 5,000 players get every question, they each get $1.00. Fewer winners means more $$$.

I believe 40,000 people chose Franklysses K. Nixmore.

Since we started playing in May, we’ve gotten a little obsessed. We stop whatever we’re doing at 9:00 PM every night to play. And if we’re on the road when a game happens, we keep this in mind when planning a bathroom stop and look for wi-fi. Of course we will never use cell data to play. It takes about 50 megabytes to stream a game, which in Tracfone talk means you’re spending about 50 cents.

We’ve pulled over at a Wendy’s to get a Frosty and get on their wi-fi. We’ve stopped at a highway rest area. We took time out at an event we were attending at a restaurant, went outside and played using the restaurant’s wi-fi. Very little will stop us from our HQ addiction.

After playing for about three months, both Marge and I have won about five times each. The only difference is that she tends to win large jackpots. So somehow I have $13.10 in HQ winnings, and she has… $250!

A little quick math (each game takes 15 minutes, we play almost every day) shows that we’ve collectively spent 21 hours playing, which gives us an hourly wage of $12.38 for both of us. And we do always play together as I’ll explain in below.

It’s a lot of fun, and if there wasn’t money involved, I’d probably still play it. But the questions are tough, guys! If you want to play, first of all, sign up with my username MichaelLarson*, and use the tips below to be the best quizzer you can be!

Ridinkulous Tips for HQ

Never Overthink The First Three Questions.
The first three questions are always very stupid. I don’t know what the deal is with the first three questions. Are they trying to weed out bots? Do bots play the game? I don’t know. What I do know is that no matter how dumb the question is, some people will get it wrong. I chalk this up to people “fat-thumbing” their smartphone and hitting an answer they didn’t intend to. But there are some questions that weirdly stump a lot of people. See above, where 40,000 people thought there was a president named Franklysses K. Nixmore. Maybe they slept through U.S. History.

Play With Other People
We’ve had the best success when playing with other people around. The more people there are, the more knowledge sharing there is. Combined, Marge and I are more successful than we would be playing solo. While I might be good on geography and music, I rely on Marge for literature and fashion, and we would both benefit from having a sports expert on hand! The questions can skew both young and old, too, so the more variation in age and category specialty you have among players, the better.

Just beware the false knower, the player who seems very sure of their answer, so everyone takes their word and gets it wrong. I don’t know how to protect you from this phenomenon. I just hope it doesn’t happen to your group! (Austin is not farther north than Dallas, Dad!)

Hedge Your Bets
If you’re playing with another person, and neither of you truly knows the answer, you can hedge your bets and pick different answers. That way there’s a better chance that at least one of you will move on. We end up doing this at least once a game.

Practice With Old Tests
The website HQBuff has all of the quizzes going back to May. Go through those and run lots of practice tests to get a feel for how they ask questions and what the favorite topics are (state capitals seem to come up a lot). There is a pattern to the questions, and studying should help. For example, after I took the PSAT (practice SAT) in high school, I studied with a bunch of old SAT tests from the library and brought my score up 140 points on the actual SAT (this was 1998). I didn’t possess more knowledge. I just better understood the test.

Save Those Extra Lives Until Near The End
For the longest time, the only way to get extra lives was to invite friends. Extra lives were very valuable, so I would only use one if I made it to Question 11. It’s too risky to use it early in the game since you can only use one per game. The earlier in the game you use it, the more opportunities are still left for you to get a question wrong. Now they will give you an extra life after playing five days in a row, so I am swimming in extra lives. But I still won’t use one until about Question 8 or 9.

Know Things
I hate to say it, but the thing that helps the most on quizzes like this is just old-fashioned “knowing things.” People with a natural curiosity who read books and articles on different subjects (or go down Wikipedia and YouTube holes) will do well. I can’t tell you how many questions I’ve gotten right just because I happened to read about the topic recently. What is the most-visited National Park? The Great Smoky Mountains, obviously (thanks, Bill Bryson’s A Long Winding Path!).

High Level Trivia Concepts!

The “Feels Right” Answer Is Probably Wrong
This is the most difficult thing to describe, but is probably the most important lesson to learn to increase your odds. It’s a weird feeling when your gut instinct tells you one thing, and then your mind immediately undermines it by wanting to believe a different answer. An example for me was “Which country has the most Michelin-rated restaurants?” I was about 60% sure I had heard it was Japan, but one of the answers was France and that definitely *feels* like the right answer. The problem is you only have ten seconds to decide which of the answers that “feels right” is actually correct. This happens to me a lot. One part of me knows I’ve heard one answer, and another part of me feels like another answer is just right, prima facie. I picked France and was wrong.

The Easily Dismissed Answer Is Probably Correct
This is when one answer seems so obviously wrong that you discard it and focus on the other two. The one that couldn’t possibly right, the answer that just seems too weird, is probably the right one. Like, what item did an actor who played a captain on Star Trek sell on eBay? Toupee, phaser, or kidney stone? “Kidney stone? WTF?” you say. Since toupee and phaser seemed too obvious, I guessed kidney stone and was right. Now that image of William Shatner’s kidney stones on eBay with haunt me forever.

Another one: “In Ice Cube’s hit song, which of these was NOT a reason ‘It Was A Good Day.’ The lakers won, there was a barbeque, or he played dominoes.” Your mind dismisses “barbeque” because it seems like there was a barbeque in the video, right? So it must’ve been in the song. Hmmm, maybe it was in the video, but it was not mentioned in the song.

The Unknown Answer Is Almost Always Correct
If you don’t know the answer, but recognize the other two answers, go with the weird third option that no one has heard of. In this case, they are counting on you picking something familiar. Example: “What work does the music accompanying the ballet-dancing hippos in Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ come from? The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, or La Gioconda.” Maybe if you know classical music like Marge, you just know this. The rest of us dummies should follow the Unknown Answer rule and pick “La Gioconda.”

This could be you!

The problem with all of these tips is following them in the moment. There’s only ten seconds to react, and the toughest questions have multiple layers to them. (Something like, “Which of these films was directed by a person who won an Academy Award for screenwriting?” You need to figure out who directed each movie before considering the actual question.) So before I can even figure out what is happening, sometimes I just panic and pick an answer at random.

But follow these tips, and I think you’ll be on your way to NO WHAMMIES AND BIG BUCKS.

Where my HQties at?

* Not my real name, but the name of the most successful Press Your Luck contestant of all time. Larson figured out the pattern on the Press Your Luck board and used that information to win big. He is an inspiration to us all.

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