Pho with Scott Blish

 By Tim Rich

I recently caught up with Scott Blish of Taco Belly Rubs. He is The Man in the quizzing world, having led OQLUSA in scoring on seven occasions. I’ve played in friendlies and league matches against his team and it's astounding how many facts the man knows. In Week 5, he posted a 25(7) although I would’ve settled for the eye pleasing 24(7). I caught up with him in Ybor city recently and we had virtual pho while chatting about trivia.

Rich: When did you first get into trivia? 

Blish: When I was in seventh grade, the school librarian at Thomas Edison Junior-Senior HS in Elmira Heights, NY, who doubled as the school academic team coach, came and grabbed me out of a classroom and bundled me onto a bus with a bunch of seniors to attend our local televised regional academic tournament. I was very surprised when he designated me as a starter, and even more surprised when I answered half the questions in the game and we defeated a school five times our size for our first win in the event for ten years. For the rest of middle and high school, quiz was my extracurricular focus, as we won two overall regional championships despite being close to the smallest school in the competition, and made the semifinals of the National Academic Championship (at the time, the premier high school quiz championship), becoming the smallest public school to ever do so (we graduated 55 kids my senior year). I played some in college at Cornell, including on the teams that finished 2nd and 4th at CBI Nationals in 1991 and 1992, respectively, but took time off for personal and medical reasons after that and figured I didn’t need the quizbowl distraction when I went back to school.

For the next 20 or so years, my quizzing consisted of playing a lot of NTN/Buzztime trivia when hanging out at bars or restaurants that had it, doing occasional pub quizzes, and following the rise of the nascent modern HS and college quizbowl circuits online and reading through the question sets. Basically, though, for these two decades, I didn’t take quizzing seriously, although as it turned out, I was preparing for my future in quizzing without really knowing it, as it was my goal to try to read every book ever written that piqued my interest. Some of my quiz friends today say that they don’t really see me read much. They’re right. I don’t much, anymore. I did all of that groundwork from 1995-2010. Until Becky and I got married in 2004, in fact, I don’t even think I OWNED a television.I basically just read every book I could get my hands on.

I got BACK into quizzing in an interesting way. When my oldest, Elijah, was a baby, we also had foster children (who later moved to an adoptive home), and one day we took them swimming at the local community college, which happened to be the site of the tournament I had been taken out of school to attend decades earlier. My foster daughter went to the locker room to change, and when she came back, she asked me, “Dad, why is your name on a plaque on the wall over there?” Good question. I didn’t know.  It turns out that Brooks Sanders, the man who ran the tournament, was still running it after 30+ years and had named me to the all-time Hall of Fame for the event. I e-mailed him to belatedly thank him for that, and he asked if I would be interested in helping write for the next tournament, which was coming up in a couple of months. That led to me getting involved in quizbowl again, which led to NAQT event staffing, yadda yadda yadda, and here I am today.

RIch: Please tell us how you first got into OQL? How did you come to join Taco Belly Rubs? - 

Blish: When OQL started, I got PMs from 10 or 11 prospective team captains asking me to join their team, since I wanted to play but I didn’t really have a set group to play with. Rachel Shuman asked first, and I had met and liked Rachel IRL before COVID started, both in Tampa and at Geek Bowl in Vegas, so I joined up with them. I knew all the other players on the team online and liked them as well, and they were the first to ask, basically.

Rich: What other online leagues do you play in and which is your favorite? - 

Blish: My play since COVID has been almost exclusively online, since work and family obligations as well as a limited discretionary income budget for things not family-related (Becky is not really into quizzing so any trips I make would be for and by myself, using the family money, which is not really fair to her or the boys). I also play Mimir’s Well, OQL Regions with the Tampa Bay Cigar City Rollers, Pop Solos, ICC and Quiz Nations, have joined with some of my OQL teammates and friends to play in the Irish Quiz League, and am planning to play PCC in the future when my schedule is a little less hectic. I played LearnedLeague for 6 or 7 years and won 2 scarves in 2015 and 2017, but haven’t played in a couple years as I find these other contests to be a more enjoyable and social use of my limited quiz budget and I think I have accomplished about all I can in that particular competition. I did play with the all-American Lovecraft in the Time of Cholera in OQL UK with Victoria, Troy, Tim, Brandon, et al, but after the dissolution of that team I haven’t been able to return since in my current family situation, 3 pm my time on Wednesdays is close to the worst time in my week for me to try to play a quiz.

I enjoy them all and they all have different things about them that are great, but I’m probably most partial to OQL and to ICC - I still managed to win Tier 2 in ICC 6 even though during the regular season I had a 3-game run where pretty much anything that could have gone wrong did go wrong for me.

Rich: Do you play bar trivia where you live? If so, which is your favorite place to play? - 

Blish: Very occasionally. Despite my accomplishments in other forms of quizzing, I am not any sort of world-beater at bar quizzes. They don’t really play to my strengths, and many of the quizmasters here, whether intentionally or because they’re just not experienced at writing good quizzes, include far too many “equalizer” questions cribbed from websites or dealing with subjective material that remove all or most of a good player’s advantages. Most of the ones around here will go quite deep on modern pop culture, but if they cover academic material at all, it’s at entry level, which neutralizes what would be my big advantage if they used the OQL or Mimir category distributions. Long story short: if I play it for anything other than social reasons and enjoyment, or care anything about the result, I’m not going to have a very good time, so I try to shut off the competitive part of my personality when doing bar trivia.

I try not to be a jerk about it or show it too much during games, but I’m a competitive person by nature and somewhat of a perfectionist - luckily for people in my games, those two qualities are almost completely directed towards myself. I don’t get angry at my teammates for missing questions, but I’ll beat myself up over missing something I know I should have known for days.

That being said, I do and have played with prominent Tampa Bay quiz players like the Sizemore brothers, Jeremy Rasmussen, Charbel Barakat and Eric Backes when we get the opportunity. McKinnie and Charbel and I are OQL Regions teammates as well. Troy Meyer and Genevieve Sheehan also live in the area, but due mostly probably to conflicting schedules and the fact that we both have families that lead us to lead pretty busy lives, we haven’t had a chance to play with them at anything live yet.

I played a lot of Buzztime and bar trivia when I lived in Ithaca, especially at Bulldog Bob Smith’s contests in the Elmira-Corning area, but that was at the time I mentioned above when it was close to the only quizzing I did. We still go back and play in Bob’s contests when we visit New York since he became a very good friend to us over the years.

Rich: What are your top five highlights in quizzing, either as a team or an individual?

Blish: Winning ICC 5, especially in the manner I did, being in last place after question 56 of 60, and winning the title on question 60 after never having led the entire game, and doing it against Evan Lynch, Daoud Jackson and Mark Grant, only 3 of the greatest quizzers who have ever lived. I was quite emotional at the end as you can see when watching the video, because I really thought all game that I was dead in the water and it was going to be close but no cigar again, and suddenly, everything turned in my favor.

1. The two LearnedLeague scarf wins in 2015 and 2017. 2015 was probably bigger for me, since it was my first, and while I had an idea I might have had a chance to win it in 2017, in 2015 it took me completely by surprise. I was among the top players in regular season question percentage, but not right at the very top.

2. The 2021 Spring Pop Solos win. I got lucky with some wheelhouse categories in the final (Negro League Hall of Famers who weren’t Paige or Gibson, African-American punk rockers, Philip K. Dick novels), but I surprised myself considerably that whole season, especially since I had the reputation as a strong academic player who was just adequate at trash - encyclopedic knowledge of some things, complete ignorance in others. Turns out that in doing my flashcarding for OQL/Mimir/etc., most of my big trash weaknesses had disappeared without me really realizing it, until this tournament.

3. A public school in a small Rust Belt village that graduated 55 kids making the semifinals of a national championship is something I’m still proud of years later. It wasn’t all me, of course, but I was a key part of that team.

4. The result was nowhere near what I would have liked (even if I hadn’t drawn one of the all-time greats, Alex Jacob, with 5 games buzzer experience, I may not have won on that question set and I was just not getting the hang of the buzzer), but having been a contestant on Jeopardy! has to rank in anybody’s top 5. I just chose the worst possible time to have one of my worst days as a quiz player, and at least at that time, you only ever got one opportunity.

The one thing that probably wouldn’t make the list is my 7 OQL USA individual scoring titles, since 1) it’s a team game, so my contribution is only one part of our team success, and 2) especially when it comes to my overall average, our team dynamic and the fact that my teammates tend to defer to me a lot, sometimes maybe even more than is optimal, inflates those numbers somewhat - this is especially prevalent when we’re playing in a no free guess league and I have 5 fingers or a fist up.

Rich: Have you tried out for any current game shows? 

Blish: Of the currently-airing game shows, the only one I’ve tried out for was The Chase. I got a couple of steps into the process and thought I did quite well, but never heard back from them. I never really know what these shows are looking for, to be honest, or whether I have it. Whenever I see “high energy” or other synonymous terms in casting calls for game shows, I am pretty sure that it’s not going to be a show for a diabetic, depressed fat dude in his early 50s, and I’m not that great an actor, frankly. While I have had an “interesting” (sometimes more in the Chinese insult sense of the word, to be fair) adult life and have what contestant coordinators would call a “story”, it’s long and involved enough where it’s not something a game show host could deal with in a 45 second soundbite. My ideal position on a game show would probably be not as a contestant, but as a Chaser or equivalent position, but those spots are taken and the people in them are doing a great job, so I ain’t exactly waiting by the phone.

Rich: Besides, trivia: what are your other interests and hobbies? 

Blish: I am a part-time cricket umpire in the local Tampa Bay 35-over league, although issues with my health and weekend family obligations have caused me to cut back on that a little. I play jazz piano and saxophone, and also play bass and guitar, but in my current state of practice the piano is about the only instrument I would want anyone outside my family to hear me play - my main influences as a player are McCoy Tyner, especially his approach to voicings and his highly chordal style of play, Thelonious Monk and my former neighbor, Chick Corea. Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson are two more of my favorites, but I can’t really call them “influences” because I can’t come close to doing the things they could do on a piano.

My family and I like to play board games and cards - Wingspan, Codenames, Gloomhaven, Azul, Twilight Struggle, and Labyrinth: The War on Terror are some of our current favorites. We all love playing Open Face Chinese Poker (both regular and lowball-in-the-middle variations), and my older son, Elijah, has gotten good enough at my best game, gin rummy, where I’ve stopped giving him the handicap of always dealing to him and showing him the bottom card of the deck each hand and he still wins some games. We also enjoy backgammon and chess - Elijah is good enough at chess where he is capable of beating me if I don’t play my best, but the old man still has s substantial advantage over him at backgammon.

In the pre-UIGEA days, I made a decent living at playing online poker (specializing in heads up no limit hold ‘em sit and gos, one-table NL sit and gos, 6-max limit hold em, and full table stud and stud-8), but I don’t really play much anymore. To me, poker isn’t actually that fun of a game unless you play it for enough money to make it sting a little if you lose.

Other than that, like most parents, my interests dovetail closely with what my kids are doing and what they’re interested in, which at their ages (15 and 11) can change from week to week or day to day. Keeps me on my toes.

Rich: What sports teams are you a fan of and what are your top five highlights as a fan? 

Blish:  Fanatic Arsenal fan in the English Premier League, Australia cricket and rugby union, Harlequins in English Premiership club rugby, Adelaide Crows in Aussie rules. Rays and Botts in baseball and hockey. I was once an American football fan and was a Bills fan when I was, but s lot of things about that game, the CTE chief among them, have made it so that now I only follow the sport because I have to for quiz purposes. I wasn’t really a fan of a basketball TEAM, I was a fan of Larry Bird growing up. When he retired, my interest in watching the game waned. Jokic reminds me a lot of a 7-foot version of him, so if he’s on and I have nothing better to do I might watch the Nuggets.

Rich: If you could play trivia and have dinner with any five guests, dead or alive, who would you choose?

Blish: 

1)My grandfather, Jack Terry, who was the main spur behind my love of learning and the greatest positive influence on my life. My reason for putting him #1 has nothing to do with trivia. He died at age 90 in 2006 after a long, difficult battle with dementia and Alzheimer’s, although he was a brilliant man, and I just miss him and want to see him again, even if it’s only for a few minutes or hours.

2. William F. Buckley, Jr., would have been an outstanding quiz player, I think, and even though I disagreed with him on politics a minimum of 90% of the time, he was always one of my favorite political writers and I used to collect used copies of his books at Ithaca bookstores. He was wrong a lot, but he was entertainingly wrong and he was usually wrong with style. I would have liked to have met him.

3. Stu Ungar, for his tips on card-playing and especially gin, although he was such a natural genius that I don’t think he could have explained to me what he did or how he could do things like call your hand in gin card-for-card after seeing 4 discards.

4.Louis Armstrong. I have directed my family that if I predecease them, I want his music played at my funeral. And man, I’ll bet THAT guy had some road stories and then some. Also, we would probably be eating Cajun delicacies in New Orleans if he or I had any choice in the matter.

5. Barack Obama. Again, I think he’d be a good player, and would be by far the most interesting President to converse with.

Rich: What is your take on the 2024 Grammys? Do you listen to any of the current winners? 

Blish: I have to keep up on modern pop music for quizzing purposes, but to be fair, I don’t listen to a lot of music in the modern pop charts. Music doesn’t tend to get into my playlist until it’s stood the test of time a bit. Most of the current music that I like the most doesn’t come close to being nominated, or winning if it somehow is. This sort of thing is what happens when you take a break from Cornell because of depression and substance abuse issues and it’s jazz, blues and underground music that end up literally saving your life. Even at age 51, I stick with the stuff that got me through the roughest patch of my life, which is why if you drive by me on the highway there is a good chance you will see me in my car headbanging to Slayer’s God Hates Us All or Godflesh’s Streetcleaner.

That being said, the Tracy Chapman performance at this year’s ceremony was transcendentally good. That performance actually inspired me to re-listen to what was my favorite album by her in my formative years, Crossroads, and it’s just as good as I remember it being in 1990. 

Rich: What movies did you watch in 2023? Did any deserve Academy Awards?  

Blish: Again, I’m not a big movie person anymore although I follow it for quiz purposes. I did see Oppenheimer, but not Barbie, which cost me some points in a Pop Solos game a couple months back. I did see Zone of Interest, which as is to be expected was extremely powerful and wearing - one of those films like Schindler’s List that I had to see once, but don’t know that I want to see again.

Rich: Who is your favorite actor and actress? -

Blish: I don’t know that I have a real favorite, per se, but I’ve never disliked John Malkovich in any role I’ve ever seen him in. My favorite actress you probably have to go way, way back for - I might actually choose Margaret Dumont, the foil in the Marx Brothers movies. She did her job about as perfectly as any actress ever could - the Marx Brothers would not have been half as funny as they were without her to play off of.

Rich: What is your favorite food and beverage? Have you dined at any of the Tampa Bay restaurants that have made the Michelin Guide?

Blish: I drink way more Pepsi Zero than a diabetic should even though it’s sugar free. I’m picky about alcohol - about the only beer I like the taste of is Guinness, I like hard apple cider, most wines, martinis, sake, Bloody Marys and sazeracs. That’s about it.

As far as food goes, some of my favorites are lamb roganjosh with keema naan, spicy tuna and spicy salmon rolls, pho, banh mi, spicy Thai green curry, Beef Wellington, steak Lyonnaise with mustard and shallots, lamb chops, Buffalo Wild Wings Thai Curry wings, authentic upstate Buffalo wings, Nick Tahou garbage plates, Beef bourgignon, and classic English fish pie and steak and ale pie.

Three Tampa Bay restaurants got Michelin stars when they started awarding them to Florida restaurants this year (every place in the state that got them got 1 star except for Joel Robuchon’s place in Miami Beach, which got a second star, probably mostly because Robuchon’s name is on the outside), but I haven;t eaten at any of them yet. The Japanese place I probably won’t, because it only seats 10-12 people like Jiro’s restaurant in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and is only open a few hours a week. Charbel knows the owners and tells me there’s another, much larger place they own on Channelside that is 80% as good, for half the price. We’ll probably try there sometime. Ever since they got awarded the stars, the other two places have nine-month waiting lists, so we’ll pass for now.

Rich: One thing I admire greatly about you is that you adopted your son and his brother. I am an adoptee myself. What is the best thing about fatherhood? 

Blish: One of the best things about it is that we got two awesome boys out of what were bad situations for them at the time and were able to improve their lives. They are both still close with their birth parents (they have the same mother, but different fathers) - in fact, when we adopted Elijah, our attorney remarked to us that our visitation agreement with the parents was the most liberal one she had seen in 20 years in family law - basically, if they’re not doing anything dangerous or around anyone dangerous, they can see Elijah or Kai whenever they want, although that has become much tougher since they’re still in NY and we’ve been in Florida for over five years now. Although they are half-siblings, they are very, very different people, enough so that it causes a lot of tension that Becky and I have to be on top of in order to defuse, and they’re both getting used to having a sibling around all the time, especially since E. tends to think that he is the father sometimes, rather than the slightly older brother, and Kai usually isn’t having it. Both of them have good hearts, though, and are growing up to be good people, and we couldn’t ask for better kids.

And before anyone asks, neither one seems to be very interested in quizzing at all, so I might not have anyone to leave the Anki flashcard set to in my will. 

( I had always been intimidated to ask Scott to play friendlies or play test, as I was in awe of his quizzing prowess and it's always hard to relate to Division 1 players. But he is quite affable and I’m glad I had the confidence to ask him for this interview.

I also thank my Regions teammate and our mutual friend Jillian for her valuable advice and encouragement.)