User:Scott Blish

Scott Blish is a professional backgammon and poker player and tax accountant/IRS Enrolled Agent originally from Elmira Heights, NY, and currently living in Newfield, New York (a village just south of Ithaca). He began playing quizbowl in his 7th grade year at Thomas A. Edison High School in Elmira Heights, became team captain as a freshman, and led the Spartan Quizbowl team to 5 consecutive Twin Tiers Quiz League (1986-1990) and 3 consecutive Central New York Academic Challenge (1988-1990) championships as a player, and was the #1 overall scorer in the 1988 ASCN National Academic Tournament in Lake Forest, Illinois, in which Edison lost on the last question of a quarterfinal against eventual tournament champion Savannah (MO). He played quizbowl at Cornell University from 1990-92, and again as an extramural student at Cornell in 1997, and, as a freshman, was the alternate on the 1991 Cornell CBI runner-up team which lost to Rice for that year's national championship. Scott holds a bachelor's degree in history from Cornell University (1998) and a master's degree in comparative literature from the Flinders University of South Australia in Adelaide (2001).

Since 2011, Scott has served as a moderator at various local, regional and national tournaments (including 3 times at NAQT HSNCT, twice at PACE NSC and NAQT MSNCT, and once each at NHBB Nationals and NAQT SSNCT), as well as tournament director of various regional NHBB tournaments, and is the founder and tournament director of upstate New York's largest pyramidal tossup-bonus quizbowl tournament, BrainBusters Fall. In May of 2015, Scott will serve as tournament director of the revived American Academic Challenge, to be held at the Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel in Chattanooga, TN, as well as continuing to moderate at the highest levels for NAQT, PACE and NHBB, as well as (almost) anybody else who asks.