(Courtesy of Brian Lipinski)
A D.C. resident won $100,000 from HQ Trivia, the popular live trivia game app, during a special Emmy Awards-themed episode earlier this week.
Brian Lipinski, a 32-year-old environmental researcher, won the special round of “One Winner-Takes-All” trivia, where he and other contestants were asked Emmy-themed questions until one winner remained.
“I was more stunned than anything,” Lipinski says. “I was sitting next to my boyfriend and sort of jumped up and down a little bit and I was really just in shock, and not long after the host called me and started talking to me about it. It still is really surreal.”
Normally, HQ Trivia players compete in a round of 12 questions and the final remaining players split a cash prize. For this special Emmy Awards episode, contestants played until there was one winning player remaining.
In total, there were 22 questions, of which Lipinski says he felt confident of about 20 of them. The winning question was about which documentary topic Audrey Hepburn won an Emmy for narrating, and he immediately knew the answer: gardening.
“I watch entirely too much TV,” he says. “And I’ve always been able to retain weird little bits of knowledge about awards shows and things like that.”
Lipinski suspects that another factor for his big win was that he hosts bi-weekly trivia show Tuesday nights at Cafe Saint-Ex on 14th Street in Northwest. “Probably a lot of what I got right in the game is something that I came across when I was trying to make my own questions for [my trivia show],” he says.
Lipinski plans to spend his prize paying off “ridiculous student loans,” taking a vacation, and buying his boyfriend and family some “pretty awesome Christmas presents this year,” he said in a release. In a DCist interview, he mentioned a possible trip to Spain for a friend’s wedding, but doesn’t want this money to get to his head.
Still, the celebrations were immediate. After answering that final question correctly, Lipinski says his boyfriend ran to the fridge to pop some champagne (turns out, they didn’t have any).
“It was a big moment of mostly joy and a little of ‘Did that really just happen?’”
