2035. Patricia's parents read the latest issue of For 10 points, fix this community, which is about the Russian five-year plan for quiz bowl. Which leaves some questions unanswered to some people in the West questioning the plan's feasibility. Including, but not limited to, Patricia.

During Memorial Day, Patricia's parents host a party with their friends to come to their home and question her about why she even picked Tulane to go to college. They never mentioned it to them beforehand.

"I'm going to Tulane University next fall" Patricia answers, matter-of-factly.

"Tulane? Why are you going to Tulane for college?" Bohdan, an Ukrainian first-generation immigrant, asks her.

"Two reasons: quiz bowl and I would be getting more out of my education if I left the Midwest. Sure, Tulane is still running around twenty-five grand per year, even with the scholarship..." Patricia explains herself.

"I hope it's a better financial deal than attending Ivies for you..." Bohdan sighs.

"That's precisely what people assumed at school when I announced I was going to play quiz bowl for the Green Wave. Yet For ten points, fix this community seemed to be implying the Russians had talent but no quiz bowl circuit. And Tulane was apparently aiming for the World Cup"

"You must understand that Russian team interscholastic quizzing competition is dominated by two formats: ChGK and brain ring, and school teams typically do both"

"ChGK?" Patricia asks, clueless about what it even means.

"Chto, gde, kogda. Or What, where, when in English"

And then Bohdan goes on to explain that a typical interscholastic ChGK season has 7 tournaments, 2 games per tournament, 12 questions per game, and 60 seconds per question, starting from the end of the question reading. In Russia, the top 3 teams per federal subject (oblasts, krais and so on), determined based on the best five tournaments, would then attend the ChGK equivalent of the MSNCT or HSNCT, depending on grade brackets. Which are not the same as for the NAQT nationals.

"I guess this is where their talent for quiz bowl comes from. But tossup/bonus as played under NAQT is foreign to them"

"I think you should try playing ChGK at some point; maybe even tonight. You seem to have a lot of erudition so you should play the game"

"One more question: what is the question distribution like in ChGK? Scholar bowl and NAQT subject distributions usually attempt to balance subjects" Patricia asks.

"If you aim for the ChGK world championship, assuming you have sufficient Russian language proficiency, you should have a balance between your six players because the ChGK Worlds, as well as their qualifiers, have a variety of question areas. Typically, the United States don't do very well at the ChGK Worlds. Often lower-level open tournaments will focus mostly on one area. Online anyway. But here if you wanted to host an in-person ChGK tournament, you don't have a choice: in Kansas, there's only one yearly tournament, and the winner goes on to the US qualifiers. This means the packet must have roughly the same distribution as at the Worlds" Bohdan lectures Patricia.

Man am I learning so much about quizzing around the world. But wait a minute; 60 seconds per question? Just wait for the game... this is so not going to play out like scholars bowl or NAQT quiz bowl... Patricia thought while the first ChGK game of the day starts after dinner; the guests intend to play the packet in full.

"First question" Patricia's mother reads the packet provided by the attendee that had this conversation about ChGK with Patricia to shed some light on the FTPFTC article about the Russian quiz bowl ambitions. "In many folk stories, tears are compared to gems. Russians compared them to pearls, Aztecs to turquoise. What do the Lithuanians compare them to?"

"Don't forget, Patricia. Here we can confer for sixty seconds" Bohdan explains to Patricia, but the other four players already know that rule of the game.

"I seem to remember about how the Amber Room was built using amber sourced from not only Poland but also neighboring Lithuania. It's the only kind of gem I can remember Lithuania even have on its territory" Patricia, the youngest of the six players, tells the group.

"The Amber Room required a lot of amber to build. But at the time, Poland and Lithuania was one country" another player comments about the logistics of building the Amber Room.

"Do we all accept that it's amber?" Bohdan asks his teammates.

"Yes" the other players tell in unison.

"Our answer is amber"

"Correct. Second question..." Patricia's mother reads that question.

This is not like quiz bowl questions at all. And a lot more confusing too. This feels more like a riddle competition, but I would love to know more about Russian brain ring and how it differs from NAQT quiz bowl, Patricia ruminates as her mother reads the second question. Which is about literature or history. Quiz bowl totally have the longest questions; I wrote over half of our packet of 35 questions for our last season of scholars bowl and they discouraged the stuff that made quiz bowl tossups what they are: obscure facts at the start, then requiring less background information the longer you wait, but with significant answer lines.

"This writing from a woman contains parts of a house. Name the book and its author"

"At this point we know the second part of the answer is a female writer but what kind of female author would write something about parts of a house if architecture is not a plot point in a book?" Yakiv, another first-generation Ukrainian immigrant player, asks his teammates before Patricia could answer.

"A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf" Patricia answers. "That, even though it has nothing to do with architecture"

"Damn Patricia is fast..." her mother comments about Patricia's answer, given about ten seconds in. "Correct"

If Patricia is going to be on Tulane B in Fall, it makes me wonder how good Alyssa is. Alyssa is supposed to be Tulane A's literature player, based on the Hullabaloo, as well as FTPFTC. Alyssa did win the ICT Division II, and the WNCC. At Dartmouth, Patricia would have been on the A team, notwithstanding that Dartmouth is the weakest school in Ivy League quiz bowl, Patricia's mother ponders while bewildered by how fast she answered both questions. At the end of the first half-packet, in which three players seemed to be doing almost everything...

"So it makes me wonder if any of you played in the yearly ChGK tournament" Patricia asks.

"The ChGK state championship!" Yakiv vehemently insists.

"Did you ever win anything at the Kansas State Championship then?"

"Yakiv and I are on the defending state champion team. Obviously, if you spoke Russian at an appropriate level for the ChGK Worlds, you would make our team" Bohdan tells her.

"What do you mean?" a confused Patricia rolls her eyes.

"Unlike quiz bowl, the way your parents talked about it, ChGK doesn't require that much background knowledge, and the Russian language proficiency level required for the ChGK Worlds is about high school level. Or rather at the level expected of the Unified State Exams. The graduation tests for high school in Russia, if you will" Bohdan, the Kansas ChGK state team captain, explains to Patricia. "You should know players on top teams have a lot of erudition, too, just like you"

At the US ChGK qualifiers, it's almost always these six states that do best: New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, California. As for Kansas, on a good year they can crack the top 20. Sometimes Texas, New Jersey and Alaska can beat any of these six, but it's not a given.

"How do you feel about this game?" asks Patricia's mother.

"It's much slower than quiz bowl. My brain still works hard nonetheless because, unlike quiz bowl, questions are often deliberately confusing. That's what I dislike most about playing ChGK by the way. But I am intrigued by brain ring" Patricia answers her mother's question.

"Brain ring is played head-to-head with lockout buzzers, but within it, rules, questions and format can vary wildly. I believe KSHSAA plays it in some form" Yakiv provides a brief overview of brain ring.

"Questions are usually clearer than in ChGK, but you don't have sixty seconds per question unless it's a "pencil and paper ready" math or science question" Bohdan explains to her.

"Do you have relatives playing scholars bowl?" Patricia asks the Ukrainian immigrants.

"Yes. My nephew plays it. He plays for Bishop Miège" Yakiv, the other player on the Kansas ChGK state team answers Patricia.

I'd say that brain ring translates better to quiz bowl than ChGK so whoever the Russians will align to play at the World Cup and at the ICT or ACF Nationals will have experience of brain ring, and likely ChGK too. Who am I kidding? I can't take for granted Tulane B will actually qualify for any of these things! Even if the Russians attended the ICT, they would definitely play Division II this season so, ICT-wise, for me to play the Red Army in a coed tournament, it would require Tulane B qualifying for the ICT. However, for the World Cup, which is female-only, as of right now Tulane is the favorite to clinch the US collegiate berth, Patricia reflects on the implications of past Russian quizzing experience on their prospects of playing in the major quiz bowl tournaments, and what it implies for the next Green Wave's quiz bowl season.

Then her thoughts turn to what would have happened if she chose to attend Dartmouth instead of Tulane, assuming she'd still play quiz bowl for the Big Green rather than the Green Wave. From what I could make out of the Big Green's quiz bowl roster, I would have been able to start playing on the big team from day one, too. That, even though, like Tulane, Dartmouth attracts the kind of high-achieving kids that can play quiz bowl in college. The Big Green's quiz bowl administration just isn't like Imélie... they saw in me their version of Alyssa or Imélie.