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Two hundred fifty-one high school and middle school students from across the country came to the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont, Illinois, on Sunday, April 6, to compete in a quiz bowl championship. The Individual Player National Championship Tournament, unlike most forms of quiz bowl, is a competition pitting players against each other without the support of their teammates.

Ella Wells, a student from Happy Valley High School in Elizabethton, competed in the 2025 IPNCT. She finished in 231st place out of a field of 251.

Players competed in six seeding rounds, playing a series of tossup questions with the goal to correctly answer a sufficient number of questions in the fewest number of questions. Nine of the 251 competitors who accomplished that task were then placed in the final round, where the lowest-scoring player after each cycle of questions was eliminated.

The final nine competitors (and their high schools) were:
Andrew Peuster (Mexico Senior High School, Mexico, Missouri)
Tate Osborne (Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering, Huntsville, Alabama)
Spencer Manning (Adlai E. Stevenson High School, Lincolnshire, Illinois)
Daniel Merida (American School of Guatemala, Guatemala, Guatemala)
Omkar Marathe (William Fremd High School, Palatine, Illinois)
Sreekar Vajjha (Classen School of Advanced Studies at Northeast, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)
Joshua Koch (Grosse Pointe South High School, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan)
Shishir Bharadwaj (Lexington High School, Lexington, Massachusetts)
Janani Gollapalli (Lightridge High School, Aldie, Virginia)

Tate Osborne stayed ahead of all the players for most of the final round. With five questions to go, Peuster pulled even with Osborne and then leapt ahead. With one question to go, Peuster was 15 points ahead of Osborne — the amount possible if you power a question, answering correctly early enough in the question. The final cycle of questions saw Osborne answer correctly, one word out of power, to score only 10.

This is the seventh championship of its kind. Simultaneous with the overall contest, players are scored on their performance in several academic categories. Top performances in each category are also awarded.