Multi-life contest

What a multi-life contest is

A multi-life contest is the Speed Survivor format that forgives a mistake or two. You start with a set number of lives, stated on the contest page before you enter. Each wrong answer costs one life. When you lose your last one, you are eliminated. Until then you keep answering and keep adding points.

The alternative is the single-life contest, where the first wrong answer ends your run. Both formats share everything else: the twelve live questions, speed points, cuts and the split.

An example

In a hypothetical multi-life contest, a player misses the first question of the night on a quick read of a play-action pass. In a single-life board that would be the end. Here it costs one life, and the player settles in, answers the next nine correctly and finishes near the top of the leaderboard. The early miss scored nothing and cost a life, but it did not cost the contest.

Strategy with lives in hand

Spare lives make aggressive answering more affordable. A player with lives in reserve can commit early on a close call to chase the speed bonus, knowing a miss is survivable. As lives run out, the calculation shifts back toward caution.

In Speed Survivor

Lives do not protect you from a cut. At each cut the bottom of the field by points is removed regardless of lives left, so a player who keeps missing and keeps surviving on lives can still fall below the line. How it works explains both formats and where the cut falls.