Want To Get Better At HQ Trivia? Listen To Scott Menke
It's April 11th and HQ Trivia is hosting a game with the app/quiz show hybrid's largest prize pool to date: $300,000. It's the third sponsored game in HQ's short history — in March, HQ introduced its new native advertising model to players with games supported by Nike and "Ready Player One." The $300,000 game, in support of the movie "Rampage," is also notable for its cohost, Dwayne Johnson.
Like with any average HQ game, the majority of the audience stops watching the game after they're eliminated, and those who stick around for the game's conclusion are most likely focusing on the bizarre rapport between Johnson and HQ's regular host Scott Rogowsky. However, when the list of winners (83 total, netting a little over $3600 each) appears on players' screens, a few people in the HQ chat shift their attention to a different Scott:
"Scott Menke!?!?"
"Scott menke again?"
"Scott menke is a fraud"
"SCOTT MENKE POS"
Scott Menke currently sits at #18 on HQ Trivia's all-time leaderboard with $12,300 to his name. The only folks above him are the winners of HQ's "Ready Player One" game ($250,000 split generously 12 ways) and a handful of winners of HQ's rare all-or-nothing games. Menke's the furthest up the leaderboard with multiple wins in the thousands of dollars to his name — prior to the "Rampage" game, Menke won $8,333 from splitting a previous record-setting HQ pot on Oscars night.
So yes, he wins a lot, but that's not why the HQ chat singles him out. Out of all the "Rampage" game winners, Menke's is the only whose profile picture on HQ shows him grinning next to "Quiz Daddy" himself, Scott Rogowsky.
A quick Google verifies Menke's quizzing skills — very legit, you'll learn — but I want to know how a trivia wiz like him discovered HQ, what he does to hone his talents and where he crossed paths with Rogowsky.
"I was excited to meet him," Menke explains to me over Skype the morning after his latest win. Menke and his fiance, an employee of Twitter, both attended a 2017 holiday party at Twitter's New York City office that Rogowsky happened to show up at.
"I thought it was cool that I was able to get a picture with Scott," Menke says. "What I really wanted was Scott to see me win one day and recognize me. In the Oscars game that I won, that first big amount, he glanced over the picture and said 'Hey, that's me! What's the deal?' I basically got none of the benefit of him recognizing me and a lot of heat."
Rogowsky's reaction to seeing himself in Menke's photo set off suspicious players. A little internet detective work told them that, in addition to sharing a first name, the two Scotts share an alma mater: Johns Hopkins.1 That trivia is included in a handful of profiles of Rogowsky, but Menke's notable tie to Hopkins should also assuage most fears of foul play — Menke represented the school in the 2009 "Jeopardy!" College Championship.
"I won my first game, and that was on May 5th, 2009," Menke says. "That's basically my fun fact for life. I got to semifinals, and on the semifinal round I lost on Final Jeopardy. I had the lead going into Final, and I got the question wrong. That's the question you'll never forget."2 The structure of the College Championship meant Menke, then a college senior, went home with $10,000.
Appearing on "Jeopardy!" hadn't been a long-held goal of Menke's. "The previous year, not that this is super relevant, but there was a small organization that came to campus and hosted this trivia game in the cafeteria," Menke tells me. "It was a $200 cash prize, and I won it. That was my first realization that I was quite good at trivia." Beyond that, Menke would DVR episodes of "Jeopardy!" and "Cash Cab," practicing along to the former with a click pen. When a question stumped him, he would write it down and look up the subject later.
After college, Menke moved to Las Vegas and worked at a casino. It's there in 2012 that he ended up at a casting call for another game show: "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" "Mentioning the fact that I had been on "Jeopardy!," they just ushered me through the whole process," Menke says. "I think one of their fears is that they bring someone on the show and [the contestant] won't talk out their thought process, or they've wasted their resources on someone who isn't producing something they can actually show on TV." Menke banked $40,000 on "Millionaire" before choosing to walk away, which halved his winnings to $20,000.
In New York City, where Menke lives now, friends of friends and coworkers know about his TV quiz appearances. That's how he was introduced to HQ in October of 2017, back when the game's audience numbered in the low thousands and the prizes rarely cracked $500. He's also racked up wins in HQ competitors like Beat the Q — if winning money is your aim, limiting yourself to one app is a bad way to go.
Menke's grateful for the prize money, but it isn't the sole reason why he plays. He feels that while he's good by "Jeopardy!" or HQ standards, he's far from total trivia dominance. "There's this other website called LearnedLeague. It's like the Cadillac of online trivia," Menke explains. "Everyone gets 6 questions per day, and you're in a 'rundle.' These rundles are organized by your trivia strength[…] I've done it for 3 or 4 seasons and I've been in rundle E, one of the lowest rundles in LearnedLeague. There are so many people out there who have way, way more ability than me."
LearnedLeague operates on the honor system, but HQ does not. Menke says has never utilized any of the bots that started to crop up late last year, but he's confident that his trivia knowledge combined with quick, savvy Googling gives him an edge.
There's been a lot of hemming and hawing over whether Googling for HQ answers is fair or even practical, but Menke has tips for those who haven't found success in it. He explains with an example:
A question that came up recently is 'Which of the following pairs of countries use the same currency?' The third [pair] was 'India and Seychelles.' It would be very hard to just type this natural language question into Google and get a response, but someone who's capable at trivia would first recognize that the currency of India is the rupee. That's a more well-known currency than some of the others on the page. So at that point you should be Googling 'Seychelles currency.' That's a short string that can be done in 2 or 3 seconds, it pops up Rupee, and then you immediately know it's 'C.'
Menke also recommends having a second tab open for Google Maps since HQ and its brethren like to throw out tricky geography questions. Still, there's only so much you can do with Google's assistance in 10 seconds, and the harder questions are essentially search-proof. A query like "the French word for cake sounds like the Spanish word for what?" is more than complicated enough to trip up bots and clueless Googlers alike.
Both of Menke's big HQ wins were on games with themed questions, but Menke doesn't believe that helped his odds. "The domain of knowledge on these few sponsored games they've had doesn't correspond with my strengths, so I've found it actually harder," Menke says. He didn't make it far into the Nike and "Ready Player One" games before being foiled by questions targeted for sneakerheads and gamers. Menke's more of a generalist, and he likes it that way. "I think Ken Jennings put it best in his book when he said that building trivia knowledge is like putting a sieve in part of your brain," Menke adds. "You're enhancing your understanding of the world that way. My whole reason for continuing [with trivia] is that when I'm in a conversation with someone, I want to be able to find common ground with them. I want to know what they're talking about and be excited about it."
On the subject of excitement, Menke doesn't want his HQ wins to take away from other players' enthusiasm. "I actually have changed my profile picture," Menke says. "I changed it last night because I realize that, especially for someone who hasn't been playing long, their immediate reaction is going to be that something is wrong[…] it must be frustrating to see me grinning with Scott, so I get it. That's why I don't want to stir the pot anymore."
Shortly after the "Rampage" game, the frontpage of r/HQTrivia was flush with distrustful posts about Menke… despite the fact that Menke took to the subreddit a month earlier for a candid AMA. "Both times after I won a large amount there's been a torrent of upset people tweeting at me, and it is a scary feeling," Menke says. "In the immediate aftermath of the wins, there has been this sense of dread that comes over. I just have to let this play out and there's nothing I can do to stop this rolling boulder that's coming at me."
Though the mob is intimidating, Menke feels his one-on-one interactions online have ended positively. "I've made an effort to respond to every single person that tweets at me," Menke notes. "I'm a regular, nice guy I think, and once I interact with someone [accusing me of cheating] and say 'hey, I understand how you're feeling, that's not true' and say that I feel lucky to have won, people soften up a lot. Their responses invariably after that are normal and cool."
I'm glad to know that Menke hasn't faced the full force of the internet's fury, though he and I agree that he's lucky in that regard thanks to his TV appearances. "I've been thankful that I have video evidence I can point to," Menke says. "If I didn't have that I wouldn't have a leg to stand on when I say 'oh I just met Scott at a party randomly, it's no big deal!' I've got the Trebek chainmail, and that's a relief."
Rogowsky graduated in 2007, two years before Menke. The two did not know each other in college, though Menke did see Rogowsky perform standup on campus. Johns Hopkins has about 20,000 undergraduate students.
"Before its use in journalism, it meant a boundary beyond which straying prisoners would be shot." The answer? What is "deadline?"
