Frauding

[quizbowlchamp1]

After watching players like Evan Ting, I’ve noticed something. Many players are able to fraud, or get questions out of category. My question is…

How can I improve my frauding?

How can I fraud at harder diffs? (Specifically 2-3 of MSNCT and 6 for HSNCT)

[Metacarpal]

Frauding isn't getting questions out of category, rather it is making educated guesses based on the clues that were given - binary association of clues is very similar to frauding

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

It sounds like you haven’t really thought enough about what you’re missing. If you know more clues you can buzz on other categories, if you study enough you can identify what answers exist, etc. I guess if you just become more clever you can be better at just guessing but that’s not really a productive suggestion since that isn’t exactly something someone can change.

[L.H.O.O.Q.]

Assuming that by "frauding" you mean "pulling an answer based on vibes and intuition rather than rote knowledge," this should be extremely low on your list of priorities. It's a technique that leads to a lot of avoidable negs, and you're better off focusing your energy towards studying so you can get questions from your actual knowledge base.

When you see someone fraud a question, they're usually making a couple different assumptions: they're thinking about the intended difficulty of the packet they're playing; considering the list of viable things to ask about in the question's subject at the packet's difficulty (the "answer space," so to speak); trying to narrow that answer space down based on what the content of question "sounds like"; and cross-referencing with their memory of what's already come up in the packet. It is a process that is derived from quiz bowl experience at every turn.

If you really want to pool resources towards "getting good at frauding," a good way to do that while also contributing to the quiz bowl community is to write questions, and think very seriously about the act of doing it. Of course, looking up clues and using them in questions is also a really good way to study for quiz bowl, but the insight that question writing gives you really does translate into more advanced quiz bowl skills. It'll help you gain a solid grasp of the "canon" of acceptable things to write about, and give you insight on the writer's intent while trying to parse clues.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

The ability to fraud will come to you naturally as you play more tournaments and gain more experience. There is zero need to study it or cultivate it, it just comes as a side effect of knowing more things and having more experiences.

Here's an example of what might go through somebody's mind when they are figuring out a question using non-knowledge heuristics.

(1) I don't recognize any of these clues, but they are clearly describing somebody who is alive during the 19th century and runs a central bank
(2) This is an easy tournament - at this level of difficulty, Nicholas Biddle is the only central banker who they would plausibly have as an answer
(3) I should buzz in and say Nicholas Biddle

Note that this requires you to BOTH have enough knowledge to contextualize the clues (for example, for you to narrow down these clues about Nicolas Biddle to the Jacksonian Era and to recognize that the things the person the tossup is about has to do with running a national bank, you presumably need SOME knowledge of these things) but ALSO you need enough meta-knowledge about what answerlines come up at which tournaments with which frequency to be able to figure out step (2). If you're just an algorithm that matches clues to answerlines, you will not be able to buzz since as long as you don't recognize the clues you will be thinking "this could be any central banker, I need to wait for more clues"

You can't study (2), and even if it were possible to study it, doing so would be a tremendous waste of your time which would be far better spent just learning things. The ability to do (2) will come to you naturally as you play more tournaments and hear more questions. Keep going to practice, keep reading questions, keep playing tournaments, and one day you will be an excellent frauder.

[IndianaMan13]

Ok so firstly, I am most honored to have been mentioned in a post by our lord and savior Russ McGlaughn. But in terms of actual advice, I basically second what most people have said about it coming with playing a lot of QB, preferably hard QB relative to your level (so in your case regs to 2 dot tournaments throughout the year). But if you want to actively improve, try to sometimes force yourself to guess while playing QBReader (diff 3,4 is the MSNCT goat), which will give you an estimate of how good your base ability at frauding is and also help you improve it over time. You should also work on being able to actively take in than remember and recall quicky context clues and weird things you notice from the question and also how it fits in relative to the set (DM me on Discord for an MSNCT finals story). But as a less tedious example, on HFT, I powered the "destruction of the One Ring" TU while knowing exactly 0 clues, only placenames and vibes, by having read The Hobbit and knowing some Tolkeinverse lore from long ago but never having read LotR by noticing that the names sounded kinda Tolkeinverse-y and noticing "what action could do harm to something that attempts it and also be talked about in almost epic poetry like language." idk if this helped but this is the best I could come up with. But mainly just play hard QB and once you feel comfortable with it actually try to fraud!

[Cheynem]

I guess you could call that frauding, but if you actually do know placenames, Tolkien lore, have read The Hobbit, and can logically deduce what the clues mean...I'm not sure if I call that fraud myself.

[Halinaxus]

I guess you could call that frauding, but if you actually do know placenames, Tolkien lore, have read The Hobbit, and can logically deduce what the clues mean...I'm not sure if I call that fraud myself.

There's something of a generational divide in quiz bowl today as to what is actually considered frauding. I personally would consider lateral thinking, knowing the answer space, buzzing off of "vibes," and essentially any buzz that comes from something other than actually knowing the clue to be fraud.

I gather that this isn't the prevailing view among the Olds, though.

[Cheynem]

I think a great deal of buzzes are in that vein, though (maybe not to that extreme)--if you only buzzed when you 100% recognized a clue, you'd get beat to a ton of buzzes particularly against good teams. I don't mind what you call this, of course, but "frauding" has a negative connotation. I think something what you refer to the practice as, like lateral thinking or going in on a hunch, is a better way to frame the idea.

[Liarr]

Frauding is the only proper way to get a tossup. If you buzz because you know the answer, you might as well be writing a test in school. Only frauding demonstrates the true spirit of the quizbowler who gets the questions not because they remember a fact but because they look into the soul of the question-writer and pull out the answer.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

I've played quiz bowl for a while, and buzzing when I didn't really know the answer has been a pretty core part of my game since I started. There's a spectrum to this, and different people might call different things "frauding" or not "frauding." For a few examples from my own games. I've powered an SCT tossup on hearing the indicator "these two people," Eastern European names, and something about a society being named for them (the answer being Saints Cyril and Methodius). On the other hand, I've powered a tossup on "clay" by knowing from a Sherlock Holmes story that Fuller's earth was a type of particularly useful soil and realizing that the only type of soil that would be tossed up was clay. The second of these examples involves a lot more actual knowledge than the first, but both require some guesswork.

But as others have said, none of this is something you should try to study for. I do think it's a lot easier to do lateral thinking when your studying gives you context and isn't purely binary association, since it increases the chance that a given piece of knowledge will become useful context in a related question. But ideally, your studying is not just binary association anyhow. The main thing ultimately is experience.

The main thing that helped me get experience early on was playing a lot of free-for-all, tossups-only practices without score. Such a practice format allows you to efficiently hear a lot of tossups, without locking anyone out if you neg, and without feeling any pressure to play a certain way due to the score; as such, there's basically no penalty to overshooting your aggression (within reason), and you can fine-tune my playstyle in an in-game setting. Independently of practicing aggressive play, this sort of practice also tends to get people to listen more carefully to tossups outside their own categories and is inherently faster-paced, which can make for a good change of pace.

[quizbowlchamp1]

Thank you everyone for all the advice. I just wanted to make a few comments...

The main thing that helped me get experience early on was playing a lot of free-for-all, tossups-only practices without score.

I will definitely start doing this. Sounds like a good plan.

I think a great deal of buzzes are in that vein, though (maybe not to that extreme)--if you only buzzed when you 100% recognized a clue, you'd get beat to a ton of buzzes particularly against good teams. I don't mind what you call this, of course, but "frauding" has a negative connotation. I think something what you refer to the practice as, like lateral thinking or going in on a hunch, is a better way to frame the idea.

Frauding is the only proper way to get a tossup. If you buzz because you know the answer, you might as well be writing a test in school. Only frauding demonstrates the true spirit of the quizbowler who gets the questions not because they remember a fact but because they look into the soul of the question-writer and pull out the answer.

While I definitely agree with both of these, I take a weird stance. I do think that yes, most buzzes are probably fraud. But no, I don't think you're playing QB wrong if you're not frauding.

Just generally, I don't want to focus on frauding and make it my only virtue. It's definitely better to study real quizbowl.

Also...I've noticed that a lot of frauding tips come from knowing the difficulty. So here's another question. About how big is the Regs canon?? This is probably an estimated number of unique answerlines.

BTW, Please keep the results coming!!!

[quizbowlcaptain]

A good way to fraud is to apply what you know to what you don't know. For example, take a question that begins with "This organelle..."

I have 2 organelles carded, mitochondria and ER. Using this, if I hear clues that don't correspond with these clues, I can fraud and guess something different.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

A good way to fraud is to apply what you know to what you don't know. For example, take a question that begins with "This organelle..."

I have 2 organelles carded, mitochondria and ER. Using this, if I hear clues that don't correspond with these clues, I can fraud and guess something different.

Given the limited amount of organelles that exist, might I suggest instead just learning facts about more or all of them?

[Sit Quietly, Alone]

About how big is the Regs canon?? This is probably an estimated number of unique answerlines.

the low four figures, perhaps? if one includes all the commonlinks & variations on the theme that writers use to, well, avoid frauding. it's not, in my opinon, realistic to simply memorize every answerline, because there's nothing in particular stopping a writer or editor from expanding the canon. they may widen it by cluing new knowledge or deepen it by combining already-canonical knowledge in new ways. that can mean commonlinks, or a question on a book that's often clued for its author, or various other things. the result is that frauding directly on the indicator is often a fool's errand. you fraud better by knowing more things.

(i'd also like to note how funny it is to see brothers replying to each other's posts on this forum rather than, like, knocking on the other's door.)

[quizbowlcaptain]

A good way to fraud is to apply what you know to what you don't know. For example, take a question that begins with "This organelle..."

I have 2 organelles carded, mitochondria and ER. Using this, if I hear clues that don't correspond with these clues, I can fraud and guess something different.

Given the limited amount of organelles that exist, might I suggest instead just learning facts about more or all of them?

That's the plan, but I'm currently working on chemistry.

[quizbowlchamp1]

(i'd also like to note how funny it is to see brothers replying to each other's posts on this forum rather than, like, knocking on the other's door.)

Yeah, it must be so hard to walk 15 ft to my room

[quizbowlcaptain]

For real, I'm too lazy to walk from my room across the hall to tell him something.

[The Stately Rhododendron]

The best practice I ever had at what some call "frauding" was through doing every other word bowl. That's where you read every other word in a tossup and try to get it.

Of course this isn't a real game play scenario. And that's why I think people who claim fraud are barking up the wrong tree. When you guess the correct answer through context clues and process of elimination, you are playing quizbowl. That's just how it works.
When others claim they got a question right through frauding what they tend to mean is "I didn't card that." Aka they broke out of their normal style of play and (imo) switched to a better style that didn't rely on binary association as much.

What this means is you need to figure out how to get into that focus where you think holistically and not through binary associations. Do that and you will be a star.

[Jacksondahammerbidney]

deleted on a mistake I made

[Somewhere in the Stratosphere]

The best practice I ever had at what some call "frauding" was through doing every other word bowl. That's where you read every other word in a tossup and try to get it.

Of course this isn't a real game play scenario. And that's why I think people who claim fraud are barking up the wrong tree. When you guess the correct answer through context clues and process of elimination, you are playing quizbowl. That's just how it works.
When others claim they got a question right through frauding what they tend to mean is "I didn't card that." Aka they broke out of their normal style of play and (imo) switched to a better style that didn't rely on binary association as much.

What this means is you need to figure out how to get into that focus where you think holistically and not through binary associations. Do that and you will be a star.

This. "Frauding" tends to just be a matter of knowing enough to guess with 70% certainty an answer line without having actually learned a specific fact.

[Metacarpal]

Frauding imo isn’t as dependent on how good you are as how ready you are to neg/how aggressive you are and how much experience you have

[Metacarpal]

Honestly frauding relies totally on how good you are. I think I’ve only frauded [answer line redacted --Mgmt.], and we were blowing out our competitor

was this after august this year, if so delete

[Jacksondahammerbidney]

Fixed it, just realized I screwed up. Thanks for the heads up!

[quizbowlchamp1]

In the words of Sinecio Morales: "All buzzes can become powers if we have the courage to neg".

[Jacksondahammerbidney]

yeah... but I'm not going to fraud a power, it would be a last line, a FTP type buzz time in

[Metacarpal]

Frauding in power is probably the best way to fraud but it does get one a lot of negs, it's good to fraud under tight circumstances though

[Jacksondahammerbidney]

It makes sense to do it, the team I normally play on doesn't cover science at all so I do sometimes have to "present" myself as a fraud. But I think we all scoop just enough things in qb to know things like the 4 seasons are summer, winter, spring and fall even though all we study is current events.

[Somewhere in the Stratosphere]

It makes sense to do it, the team I normally play on doesn't cover science at all so I do sometimes have to "present" myself as a fraud. But I think we all scoop just enough things in qb to know things like the 4 seasons are summer, winter, spring and fall even though all we study is current events.

Well yeah, I think anyone who's ever had a chair on a competitive team could answer a giveaway TU on Vivaldi's Four Seasons even if they only card science

[Jacksondahammerbidney]

it depends, on A sets it's never that way with the best teams in MN. Mostly powers are all you're gonna get against the ebst teams on A set