This Saturday, September 19 at 8 pm, Kaiser Kuo will host the China 10 Game Show, a Jeopardy!-style competition that pits four foreign correspondents against one another in a three-round, multi-category free-for-all. Winner takes home pride and a J visa. What kind of questions can we expect?

The categories:

ROUND 1

Celebrating 5000 10 Years

Pet the Grass Mud Horse

Hurting the Feelings of the Chinese People

I’ve Read All Four of Your Novels

LAOWAI! HEY! LAOWAI!

ROUND 2

The Countryside Surrounds the City 

One Dream

SAPPRFT May Disapprove

Stinking Ninth Category

The Situation is Excellent

LIGHTNING ROUND

Rapid-fire questions in all categories, where anything can happen

Interspersed will be plenty of audience questions about Beijing, China, The Bookworm, books, journalism, current events, and so much more, with prizes in the form of drink tickets.

And now, your contestants:

Ian Johnson

Pulitzer-Prize winning correspondent who writes for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and other publications. Ian is also the advising editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and a senior policy fellow at Merics, a Berlin foundation specializing in China. We fully expect him to gobble up the literature and politics questions, but is he hip enough to avoid failing miserably in the slang and pop culture?

Odds to win: 3/1

Ben Blanchard

Reuters correspondent who began in 2002 following equities in Shanghai before moving to Beijing in 2005. A Chinese ethnic minority expert, which is too bad because we nixed an ethnic minority category. Will he pick up those lost points? Should excel in foreign policy questions and current events. Considering his only public picture is this zoomed-out one from LinkedIn (above), we’re going to go ahead and call Blancard a wildcard. Bet on him only if you have a gambling problem. He could as easily finish first as last.

Odds to win: 9/2

Lucy Hornby

Lucy Hornby is a Financial Times reporter whose first China destination was Wuhan, where she was an English teacher in 1995. She covers commodities, energy policy, and markets. In other words, her areas of expertise will not be represented at all in our quiz, because we prefer non-boring subjects. This is interesting though: she has traveled to the North Korean border and a kilometer below the earth’s surface. That’s, like, practically the same thing.

Odds to win: 5/1

Anthony Kuhn

Kaiser’s odds-on favorite to win, but don’t let that mean anything. Actually, let it mean avoid picking him: no one likes bandwagoners. Anthony is NPR’s international correspondent. He opened the company’s first bureau in Jakarta in 2010 before traveling around Southeast Asia and eventually finding his way to Beijing. He has the least China experience out of any of these contestants, which means he theoretically should be terrible. But, you know, Kaiser’s pick and all.

Odds to win: 5/2

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Buy you ticket at The Bookworm, reserve via [email protected] or 6503 2050, or purchase online. Anthony Tao will be taking money bets on the odds above, 20 RMB maximum, 20-50 percent vig, depending on betting volume.

Saturday, September 19, 8 pm

50 RMB (40 RMB members)

UPDATE, 9/23: Congratulations to the winner, Ben Blanchard! It was a very competitive game, and we’ll have video of it up sometime soon — much to Ian Johnson’s dismay, we’re guessing.