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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
Entertainment
Katie Cunningham

‘I’ve never driven a car. I can’t cook. I’m a lost cause’: meet Australia’s top quizzers

‘I treat it as an eight-hour job’: champion quizzer Issa Schultz.
‘I treat it as an eight-hour job – a full-time day’: champion quizzer Issa Schultz. Photograph: Jamila Filippone/The Guardian

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.

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