I almost won $5000 this week; this FOX app has me going crazy.

It was a quiet Sunday evening when I was scrolling through my phone and decided to open up my “Fox Bet Super Six'' app to check the results of this week’s trivia quiz. When I checked on the app, not all of the answers had been calculated or verified yet, so the competition was not over. However, my eyes caught a glimpse of something they had never seen before on this app: I was “3rd out of 256k people.” If one more of my six questions was counted as correct, I had the chance of winning $5,000. Wait, hold on, what is this app again?! And how did I almost win $5,000 by answering six multiple choice questions?!

Let me give you some backstory. During the NFL season, Fox Sports promoted their application called “Fox Bet Super Six” where users would try to (for free) correctly predict the winning team and scoring range of six NFL games each Sunday. The prize for getting the most answers correct was winning anywhere from $100K to $1 million of Terry Bradshaw’s money. Although the NFL Sundays were how I became introduced to the app, Fox has figured out new ways to continue this model of giving away prize money via their “six question model.” For example, the Fox app has weekly “Quiz Shows” where it asks predictive questions about the stock market, politics, sports, or anything going on in pop culture during that week. This is where I have become addicted, and this past week, the app truly played with my emotions.

Continuing with my story at the beginning. I was playing the weekly Quiz Show Game when I realized I got so close to winning. Let me show you the questions that I had this week and the interface of the app, so you can get a better idea of how everything went down. Fox provides a nice and easy overview of the app here in case my upcoming demonstration does not do the trick.

I’ll go question by question to recap my experience. 

Question 1: I guessed John Harvick because he won the race here last year.

Question 2: This was the easiest question for me! The answer “8+” seemed like a no-brainer because that averaged to be just 2 upsets in each region.

Question 3: I figured some of these cities had similar climates, so I just went with “Tie” on a whim.

Question 4: The one that got away. Ted Cruz. What makes me so mad is I know how much Ted Cruz tweets; I somehow see his tweets a lot. But I thought “Tie” seemed like an easy guess because I thought there was a good chance the amount of tweets from one politician would be the same as another. Out of frustration, I blame Ted Cruz for this one. Shut your mouth on Twitter and maybe I would have won some money, Ted. :(

Question 5: This was a guess, but it was also the last question I found out about. I kept refreshing Twitter on-and-off for about an hour to see who won the award, and when I saw it was Ted Lasso, I screamed. It meant I had 5 out of 6 correct.

Question 6: Complete guess. But I knew I didn’t want to guess Johnson&Johnson.

And yes, these questions are mostly guesses each time, but what’s the harm in randomly guessing for money. By laws of probability, chances are slim, but a free chance is better than paying for a lottery ticket if you’re into that type of thing.

As you can see, from last week’s questions, I got five out of six correct, which means tied 2nd place out of 256k people!!

The tricky thing about this app is that it is all relative to how many other people guess the top number of correct answers. It turns out (see final leaderboard above) that only one person got 6 out of 6 correct for last week’s questions, so they got the entire $10,000 pot to themselves. If I had answered that politician tweeting question correctly, I would have also been in first place with 6 out of 6, and we would have split the pot $5,000 each. Now, let’s say that the highest anyone got for the week was 5 out of 6 questions. There would have been 32 people tied for first, which would mean $10,000 / 32 = ~$312 each. This is still a nice sum!

Why did I share this interesting little story with you? Well, truthfully, I just needed to rant. I still can’t believe how close I was... I’m still not over it… and I’m still irrationally mad at Ted Cruz. Also, I do think the questions are fun to answer, and what’s the harm? Just taking a minute to answer six questions could win you some serious dough. And it’s completely free, minus the cost of crushing my hopes and dreams every now and then. I hope you find some fun or success on the app if you chose to play! Good luck!