HQ is a live online trivia game for iPhone only. It takes place at noon and 6pm PT. My family plays every night, along with hundreds of thousands of other people. In each game, 12 questions are asked. You have 10 seconds to answer each question (by clicking on 1 of 3 possible answers). If you guess all 12 correctly, you split a prize pool between $1.000 to $15,000. The best my family has done is getting 10 questions right.
NY Mag asked Paul Paquet, who runs the Trivia Hall of Fame, for some some tips on improving your chances.
Do you have any sort of advice or any sort of strategy for playing it? It happens so quickly.
I have to admit I have a leg up because it’s literally what I do for a living, so I have a leg up in that way. Extra lives really help. I’ve gone all the way about a half-dozen times now, and I think I’ve only managed it once without an extra life. So that’s important. And the other thing, I’ve noticed especially in the questions six to ten area, if you’re just guessing randomly anyway, to go counterintuitive and pick the thing that you think might be the least likely. That’s often what they’re doing now, in that middle block they’ll have what they call the Savage Question, where people who went with the likeliest possibility turn out to be wrong.