Generalist

A generalist is a player whose knowledge extends to most of the distribution, and thus is capable of buzzing on a wide variety of subjects. Good generalists are often among the scoring leaders at invitational tournaments and tend to be captains of their teams.

A surface generalist has a good command of giveaways, binary matching, and easy clues (sometimes called "FTP merchants"), leading to high individual scores, without any deep knowledge on any subject. The surface generalist approach, popular among many high school players, doesn't always extend well to the college game. However, surface generalists can still be relatively successful against weaker fields.

The more common approach to becoming a generalist at the college level involves acquiring depth in one or two topics, then branching out into other areas. In strong fields with strong teammates, these players have the advantage of being able to scale, "turtling" around their categories while occasionally striking outside of their knowledge base.

Another type of generalist, best exemplified by Matt Weiner, has decent-to-good depth on a wide variety of subjects, but is not considered dominant on any given subject.

The distinction between generalist and specialist isn't well established. Some generalists tend to have specialist-level knowledge in their areas while being able to consistently buzz on the last few clues of most other categories; for example Jordan Brownstein was considered both the best history and and best literature player in 2016 and 2017.

Supergeneralists

The term supergeneralist is commonly-used but poorly-defined, but refers to the very best generalists who are threats across the entire distribution (or were, at their peak). Depending on who is asked, players with this designation include:

• Matt Bollinger
• Jordan Brownstein
• Matt Jackson
• Andrew Yaphe
• Seth Teitler
• Eric Mukherjee
• Matthew Lehmann
• Jacob Reed
• Will Alston
• Tracy Mirkin
• Jakob Myers
• Itamar Naveh-Benjamin
• Amogh Kulkarni
• Arya Karthik

Of these, Bollinger, Brownstein, Jackson, and Yaphe are completely uncontroversial, given their status as the best players of all time.