Issa Schultz has a daily schedule that not many could compete with.“I get up, I make a coffee, I go on the computer and I do quizzes. I take a break for lunch and then get back on the computer for more quizzes,” he says. “It sounds like an illness, and others may diagnose it as that, but I am that obsessed. It’s not an exaggeration to say I treat it as an eight-hour job – a full-time day.”
Schultz is Australia’s #1 ranked quizzer, the name for the people who take trivia very seriously. It’s a hobby he’s structured his entire life around. For about six weeks a year, Schultz films the Channel 7 show The Chase Australia, where he serves as one of the quizshow’s “chasers” – the experts whom contestants must topple if they want to take home the prize money (his nickname on the show, fittingly, is The Supernerd). The rest of the time, he’s just brushing up on his African capitals, AFL drafts or Academy Award winners.“What I should be doing is going out and doing other work, like a normal human being,” he laughs. “But hey, I’m a single man. I don’t have a family. I have no responsibilities … I’m in this unique situation where I have the time.”Schultz as the Supernerd on the Channel 7 show The Chase Australia. Photograph: The ChaseAnd it could be worse: “There are people, especially in the UK and USA, who are devoting even more hours to this than I am.”Quizzing is a niche but global pursuit, undertaken everywhere from North America to Europe and India, where it’s particularly popular. You might think of it as a step above pub trivia, particularly in terms of difficulty: Schultz used to play in pub teams seven days a week before levelling up. “When you get to international quizzing, pub trivia just isn’t obscure enough,” he says.In quizzing, typical questions might span the relatively straightforward (“Who was the military dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990?”) through to more cryptic tasks, like naming the word that links a series of seemingly disparate images.
