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Of course, all questions are easy if you know them and hard if you don’t. Benjamin knows that Majuro is the capital of the Marshall Islands, which impresses the heck out of me, but records his first miss when he says that karst landscapes are shaped by volcanic activity, not water erosion. But everybody, it seems, has some blind spot here: Eric Yang of Texas misses a question on Japan’s Mount Asama, and Henry Glitz of Pennsylvania misses his question in the dreaded analogies round, which contestants shiver and tell ghost stories about. Even for the map-inclined, this round really is a nightmare; imagine if your SAT test was full of questions like

Kafue : Zambezi :: Shyok : ___________

Henry says “Mekong,” but the correct answer is “Indus.” (The Shyok River is a tributary of the Indus, just as the Kafue River flows into the Zambezi.) There are no perfect scores left in the group now; Benjamin might still have a chance.

There’s definitely one nerd here who’s way out of his league, and that’s me. I figured I was a guy with plenty of geolove and quiz-show experience to boot under his belt—surely I could hang with sixth-graders, right? But no, two or three times each round, I’ll be stumped by a question that a bee player will quickly answer in a confident little voice that hasn’t even changed yet. The Qizilqum Desert is in Uzbekistan! Guanabara used to be a state of Brazil! I feel like Richard Dreyfuss, surrounded by all those superadvanced Munchkin aliens at the end of Close Encounters.*

After the preliminary rounds are over, there’s a logjam at the top of the standings: eleven players are competing for the last seven spots in the finals. I hurry downstairs to the tiebreak round so I can cheer on Benjamin Salman—who has history on his side. The Washington champ has won the National Geographic Bee more times than any other state: five overall, one out of every four events in the bee’s history. When I asked Caitlin to explain this remarkable track record, she credited the rainy weather. “Kids here are prone to stay inside more,” she said, “and if you’re inside, you might as well look at a few maps!”—as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. Who would watch TV or play video games when you could look at maps?

An eager crowd has crammed into the hotel ballroom to watch the tiebreaker, wisps of it spilling out into the hallway beyond. I’m craning my neck to try to see the players at the front of the room as the moderator begins the first question.

“Southeast Asia’s only member of OPEC, an organization of oil-producing countries, suspended its membership last year because it had become a net importer of oil rather than a net producer. Name this country.”

Indonesia! I know this one. I try to beam Indonesian vibes in Benjamin’s direction. After fifteen seconds, the contestants reveal the answers they’ve written. Benjamin wrote “Malaysia,” eliminating himself from the finals, but he doesn’t betray any disappointment, walking stoically off the stage. But the eleven-year-old from Nevada who also missed the question looks stricken, almost sick. He bursts into tears on the way back to his seat and buries his head in his dad’s shoulder.

This boy isn’t much older than my own son, so his heartbreak is almost intolerably hard for me to watch. All fifty-five of these kids have put untold hours of preparation into the event. They may be the geographically brightest bulbs in the country, but that doesn’t matter: fifty-four of them are going to end up bounced because they missed a question, and they’re going to remember that question for the rest of their lives. Is this really a lofty educational exercise? Isn’t it more like, well, child abuse?

“Do you ever think, no geography is worth this?” I ask Mary Lee Elden after the match.

“I think they learn something from it,” she says. “Yes, they feel disappointed, but they learn to handle their disappointment.” The bee, as you might expect, attracts more than its share of kids with Asperger syndrome and other