With the competitive spirit of March Madness fading, another kind of tournament has captivated a group of Stanford students: the Quiz Bowl National Championship.

Stanford’s Quiz Bowl team competed in the 2025 National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) Intercollegiate Championship Tournament this weekend in Chicago, bringing home a fourth and tenth place win.

The competition has two divisions for ‘A’ and ‘B’ teams. Each team consists of four members.

“In the tiebreaker games, we swept the floor with two teams we played against,” said Denis Liu M.S. ’26 and player for the B team, referring to wins against Vanderbilt University and the University of Chicago. The win was particularly gratifying given that the B team had lost or won by a small margin to these teams in recent games. 

Speed and curiosity are vital to Quiz Bowl performance. “Quiz Bowl is the ultimate brain sport — imagine Jeopardy, but faster and more chaotic,” said Andrew Zeng ’26, Stanford Quiz Bowl president and an editor for The Daily. 

Team members buzz in, interrupting the moderator of the match in order to answer questions covering topics from “Shakespeare to biology, to basketball, to analytic philosophy and everything in between,” said Zeng.

Liu explained that the process of studying for the Quiz Bowl — pivotal to qualifying for the national competition — differs from person to person. 

“The studying process is what you make it,” Liu said. “It really is up to your character. Can you memorize stuff?”

Liu’s studying process — for which he consulted an art history textbook —  enabled him to answer a question about Jean-Michel Basquiat and other artists. However, other members of the Quiz Bowl, such as Ryan Fang ’28, review differently.

For Fang, “The biggest resource is Wikipedia.” The website allows users to enter a “tunnel … clicking hyperlink to hyperlink,” said Fang.

Fang, who has competed in Quiz Bowl since middle school, said that he was motivated to join because he was “information-hungry”. 

Despite — or possibly, because of — the adrenaline rush that comes with answering these questions, the highlight of the weekend was “going through the play-off rounds and winning close game after close game,” Liu said. 

“It’s one of my favorite things about Quiz Bowl,” Liu added. “It rewards you for learning, which is really fun.”