Brandon Blackwell, 22, earned about $400,000 after appearing on “Jeopardy!” Teen Tournament, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and other shows, The New York Times reported.
Blackwell aspires to become even better, wanting to turn quizzes into a full time job. The more he thought about it, the more he realised that he would have to move to London.
“Eight of the top 20 quizzers on the planet lived there. It’s the epicenter and competing in the city was the only way I was going to improve quickly.”
Blackwell, who has a degree in computer science from New York University, applied to Imperial College, a science and engineering school with about 20,000 students, located in the South Kensington section of London. Imperial had not won the “University Challenge” since 2001, but Blackwell knew that when players entered to answer questions, the name of the school was revealed, followed by the player’s name.
So he would have to yell ‘Imperial Brandon!’ I’m a ‘Star Wars’ fan. I loved that.
In September 2016, he set the plan in motion. Blackwell would study “Challenge” like a puzzle that could be solved, coming up with what he called BISQUE, the Brandon Imperial System for Quiz Efficiency. And he would apply this system with an approach that is typically American and clearly not popular with the British academic elite.
Blackwell spent more than a year on a crash course in British history, much of it drawn from Wikipedia. He has watched over 100 hours of University Challenge on YouTube. He reviewed his entire set of cards eight times – the same strategy he followed for years as he prepared for performances and competitions.
“When I started flash carding 10 years ago, I was like a pariah. People were like, ‘Oh he learns lists. He flash cards.’ I’m like, I’m a Black kid from the ‘hood. Nobody I know listens to the Beatles. Nobody I know watches ‘Friends.’”
Once, when he was watching “Jeopardy!” at home. Teen Tournament, he told his parents that the questions were easy. They encouraged him to apply to be on the show. He did and won $10,000.
In his second year at NYU, he ended up on a short-lived show called “The Million Second Quiz.” He lost in the season finale to a guy who won $2.6 million.
Suddenly, hosting quiz shows was looking like a potentially lucrative career. A year earlier, when he appeared on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” he earned $43,100 and paid for a medical procedure for his grandmother. Blackwell learnt the word for fear of bridges just 12 hours before taping (gephyrophobia) when he printed out a list of phobias from the internet, deciding that knowing words with Latin and Greek roots was essential to succeed on the show.
By the time the college selected him for the University Challenge in October 2017, he was training 80 hours a week. To his unpleasant surprise, the students in charge of the process didn’t seem interested in building a better team.
They’d only told their friends about the tryouts. Plus, they’d pick people who scored the highest on the test, rather than looking for specialists in different areas.
Blackwell has left Imperial, at least temporarily. “University Challenge” only allows students to appear on the show once, and he didn’t want to waste his one chance with a group he thought was doomed because the BBC hadn’t chosen his team to compete.
Then the real work began. The team met once a week for practice games, usually an online edition of University Challenge, which they watched using an e-call system borrowed from the school quiz. The University Challenge format has “starter” questions worth 10 points that any team can buzz in and answer. The winner of these points then gets three bonus questions on a niche topic worth five points each, which only that team can answer.
In February 2019, the team travelled to a studio in Manchester where episodes are filmed. In the first round Imperial defeated Brasenose College, Oxford by a score of 255 to 70.
Social media in Britain was filled with comments about this extremely expressive American. He was fidgety and impatient, a lively response to the Oxbridge ethos of “effortless superiority,” which considers open-minded endeavour a bit clumsy.
“University Challenge” is the longest-running of Britain’s quiz institutes. The show, which started on another network in 1962, is actually an anglicised version of “College Bowl”, which began as an NBC radio programme in 1953 and became a Sunday night staple on American television.
“Challenge” regularly draws an audience of three million. Viewers are not so much competing for wit as marvelling at the fact that everyone can answer the questions. Others wait for the quiet reassurance that a new generation will soon take on the world’s problems.
Every year, hundreds of schools apply for the show. Only 28 are selected, and only after a personal interview, known among the players as a charisma test. Some teams approach it with a plan, like Nikita Trojanskis, a 26-year-old Latvian who played this season for Balliol College, Oxford.
I was the dark Russian, saying eerie things in an exotic accent. And we decided our British guy would speak in elegant, enchanting sentences that didn’t really make sense, with long pauses, so you didn’t know if he was done speaking.
Imperial and Blackwell rampaged through the tournament in 2020 with some of the most lopsided results in the show’s history. By the time the final against Corpus Christi, Cambridge, aired in April, isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic had raised the show’s profile and Blackwell had reached national character status. The final score was 275 to 105. The Times of London wrote:
“The triumph burnishes Blackwell’s credentials as one of the sharpest quizzers in the English-speaking world. Brandon Blackwell’s Imperial Rout Rivals.”
Blackwell left England in November 2019. His methods have been adopted and refined at Imperial over the years. If Imperial defeats University College London on Monday, it will have won three of the last five years and become the best winning 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.
Adverts for tryouts are now everywhere. Instead of selecting the top four scorers, players with in-depth knowledge in several topics are selected, taking care to avoid duplication, like Fatima Sheriff, who was on Imperial’s winning team in 2022.
“It’s better to have three specialists and one generalist than four generalists. I wasn’t the highest scorer on the test, but I was strong on film, literature and anatomy.”
In November, Blackwell flew to Spain for a quiz and planned a visit to London for a special dinner. He invited all the players from recent Challenge teams to Imperial for dinner. He wanted to recognise everyone’s success and, importantly, to foster camaraderie.
Blackwell has managed to turn quizzing into a full time profession. He now appears in both the American 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.
He is the only on-staff Chaser on both shows, a character the producers call “The Lightning Bolt”. He regularly steals over $100,000 from contestants, and he does it ruthlessly.
It’s not all that different than being on ‘University Challenge’. The idea is the same – make someone else go home unhappy.
