Abigail Tan

Abigail Tan
Noted subjects	History
Current college	Cambridge (2020-2023)
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Abigail Tan is a player for Cambridge and has been playing quizbowl since 2020. Abigail is primarily a history specialist, particularly in ancient history. She played for Cambridge A in the 2022-23 academic year.

University Career

In her first year (2020-21), Abigail played mostly as a novice science specialist, which generally involved picking up science tossups very late when playing against teams without scientists. Notable games included a match in her first tournament (IKEA 2020) in which she was on an entirely-novice Cambridge C team which ran Oxford A close until the last four tossups, being tied going into TU17. Abigail played on Cambridge C again at BSQC 2021, ending on a 20th place finish. In the 2021 Cambridge-Oxford Varsity match, Abigail played on both the Cambridge Committee team and the Cambridge A team.

Abigail won her first tournament at ACF Fall 2021 after a 310-285 final against Oxford A. Abigail started trying to switch specialisms to (mostly non-20th century) history from late 2021, putting in a lot of effort to learn most things effectively from scratch after only having incidentally learnt some interesting non-quiz oriented ancient history during the summer earlier that year. After ACF Regionals 2022, she “formally announced” her retirement from quizbowl science, despite still attempting to cover it when playing on teams without science students. Abigail played on Cambridge B at BSQC 2022, finishing in 6th place overall. At Varsity 2022, she played for Cambridge B again, winning 375-250 against Oxford B.

In her third year, Abigail played for Cambridge A as a putative though occasionally inconsistent and modernity-despising history specialist. With Harrison Whitaker, Liam Hughes, and Krishnan Mulholland, she won ACF Winter 2022 after an advantaged final against Oxford B. At both ARCADIA 2022 and ACF Regionals 2023, she played on A teams that placed 2nd after Imperial A. At BSQC 2023, one of the closest recent iterations of that tournament, Abigail played on Cambridge A with teammates Harrison Whitaker, Liam Hughes, and Oscar Despard. They eventually placed 3rd while also being two protest-resolution replacement tossups away from clearing the field; Cambridge A won their prelims bracket and won 9 out of 11 games, only losing on replacement tossups to Imperial A and to Oxford A, where Abigail managed to neg a history replacement in front of a large audience on a clue she knew by forgetting the question’s indicator and saying the wrong type of answer. Abigail played on the same A team for Varsity 2023, securing a Cambridge victory over Oxford for the first time in 4 years with final scores of 310-280. At MRNA II in June, she played on a team that eventually finished 2nd after Imperial A, while being one of only two teams (the other being Edinburgh A at BSQC) to win a match against Imperial A since the beginning of 2023, having done so 375-175 during the tournament playoffs.

Abigail has done a large amount of quizbowl writing; she has written several hard history vanity packets such as COHORT, The Last 1022 Years Were Boring Anyway, and Adjectivally Byzantine. She also edited the pre-1600 history for the 2023 Cambridge and Oxford Open Tournament (COOT), and will be head-editing the 2024 edition of that tournament.