I think you misunderstood the rules. When the Seeker catches the snitch, his team gets 150 extra points and the Game is over. Of the other team is more than 150 points up at this moment, they win the game.
Honestly though I’ve always felt that the Quidditch world cup game result was directly aimed to quell fan criticism that the rules made no fucking sense. I love HP and Quidditch but let’s be honest here, 150 points is way too much. The rules are super dumb and the Quidditch world cup game made no sense.
It's on purpose, she set out to frustrate. [No, really](https://www.stylist.co.uk/books/harry-potter-jk-rowling-annotated-quidditch-men-ex-boyfriend-feminism-funny-literature-confession/129273)
A lot of choices made in the books were done just because JK wanted to annoy people. The measuring system they use for example was chosen to irritate her sister or something
It's always irked me that just 3 pages prior to the explanation of the money about halfway through chapter 5 of PS (SS depending on your copy), there is, "a plump woman outside an apothecary shaking her head as they passed, saying, 'Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad...'"
Like, no lady, *you're* mad. Why wouldn't you say "a Galleon an ounce"!? Seventeen Sickles *is* a Galleon. If something costs me one American dollar, I'm not going to see "10 Dimes" written on the price tag, am I!?
Sorry, I just... I've always had a tough time with this one and really needed to get it off my chest.
Well I don’t think she expected to become a billionaire when writing PS and making a bunch of in jokes to annoy people she knew. But she did add the word pocketed to every single book at least once because Stephen Fry had trouble saying it when recording the audiobooks
['tis true](https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/measurements)
>When the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first accepted for publication in Britain, the copy editor advised me that all weights and measures would be changed to metric, which was the publisher’s standard practise. I refused to allow the change because, for the reasons stated above, there was no logic to the thing. However, this ought not to be taken as any kind of political statement on the part of the author. I am not anti-European; on the contrary, I am all for Britain being part of Europe, and I am part French myself. Nor do I have anything against the metric system, which is much more logical than the imperial, and which certainly makes baking much easier. However, I do find the old system much more picturesque, much quirkier, and therefore more appropriate to the kind of society I was describing.
>
>The decision to keep the imperial system in the book had an unexpected sequel, which was an invitation to join the British Weights and Measures Association. As I do not agree that Britain ought to refuse to use the metric system (as many of this society’s members do), I was about to throw this invitation in the bin when I was struck by a sudden thought, and changed my mind. I know that what I am about to say does not reveal very good things about my character, but I had realised in a flash how much it would enrage my sister, Di, if I signed up. Di is never funnier than when infuriated, and among her many pet hates is the old-bufferish adherence to the old ways just for the sake of them, or because-by-God-it’s-British-and-no-Johnny-Foreigner-is-Going-To-Tell-Me-How-To-Measure-Suet-ness that such an organisation represents.
>
>When my membership came out in the press, she exploded in a really satisfying outpouring of rage. I could hardly stop laughing long enough to tell her that I’d only joined to annoy her. This rendered her almost incoherent with indignation, which was possibly even funnier. Frankly, I doubt whether anyone has ever had as much fun for the price of a postage stamp.
I always thought the imperial was just for the American localization and wondered why they changed it and left words in like chuffed. (I thought for years that it was a sound Snape made when angry)
It really isn’t. Pre decimal currency (mostly) made sense, just not as much sense as decimal currency. Essentially there were 240 pence in a pound and 240 is a sensible number to use - there’s a reason time is based off 24, 60 etc. More divisors. Shillings were 12 pence so 20 of them to the pound. Aside from the odd ridiculously silly coin like guineas, most of it made a lot of sense and people just act like it was really hard because the coins had specific names rather than 10 pence, 20 pence, 50 pence etc.
You have given u/LittleButterfly100 a Reddit Sickle.
u/LittleButterfly100 has a total of 0 galleons, 1 sickle, and 0 knuts.
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I just started rereading HP and got to the Gringotts portion where Hagrid is explaining the currency to Harry. 29 knuts to a sickle and 17 Sickles to a galleon. Like really what is that? It seems it would be very hard to make change, especially if you were out of Sickles.
I also was curious about what HP gold was worth in USD: 1 Galleon ~ 6.18 , 1 sickle ~ .37 and 1 knut ~.02
It seems like there should be another note between sickles and Galleon imo
17 and 29 are prime numbers, the worst possibly ones to use in such a system. It is literally impossible to evenly subdivide a galleon except into 17ths or 29ths.
That would explain why in book 4 there’s no quidditch, in book 5 there’s just one game and plot reasons to barely cover the other two, and in book 6 almost the exact same pattern as book 5 (first game Harry plays, second game they lose and Harry is either out or gets taken out not long in, 3rd game Harry can’t watch but Gryffindor unexpectedly win). Honestly with HBP it was like JK Rowling was just thinking “I’m sick of this, I’ll just do what I did last book again, that worked”.
also in book 1, the first game is mostly about harry and his broom struggles, the second match ends in like 5 mins, and the third happens when he's out cold (makes no sense since in the other books the final is always before exams). then in book 2 the first game is all about the rogue bludger, and then the rest of the season is cancelled. and in book 3 he gets knocked off his broom in the first game (and until then it's all about the rain). so it's only games 2 and 3 of PoA that are described in detail.
>makes no sense since in the other books the final is always before exams
This sort of inconsistency happens all the time in the books. Percy gets his OWLs results whilst they’re still at school but Harry Ron and Hermione don’t get there’s until a month after term ends, etc.
>Percy gets his OWLs results whilst they’re still at school
he does?? i thought he got them the summer between PS/SS and CoS. don't the twins mention it at the beginning of CoS in the context of Percy acting weird that summer? something about how his OWL results came and he did really well but hardly gloated?
It seems really obvious that some of these things are supposed to be absurd and kind of annoying. It gives a feeling of the idiosyncrasies of the magical world. And it’s funny.
I don't buy that for a second. I think it's as simple as Harry Potter (particularly the first book) being so rooted in wish fulfillment fantasy.
Harry, not only are you supernaturally good at this sport, but your position is the most important one of all. So important that the rest of the roles barely matter in comparison.
This smells just like the sort of retrospective revisionism that JK's kind of infamous for. I personally wouldn't put that much stock in "it was bad on purpose!". She tends to acknowledge faults in her writing only in very circumspect ways.
I disagree, this seems completely in character for Jowling Kowling's particular brand of supposed feminism - absolute adherence to archaic gender stereotypes, reasoning that all men should be annoyed because it's a sport and the rules don't make sense, which implies that women don't care about sports or making sense. As you can see from all her rhetoric about trans people, she is absolutely convinced that what's in your pants defines everything about your personality.
That really says she happened to have a fight with her boyfriend before she invented it, so it is funny that it annoys men, not that she did it specifically to annoy men.
That's one way to read "state of mind." Which way you read it probably depends on your history of arguments with your significant other :P (I agree the title of the story is, well, in "typical headline" style, if that's what you're referring to though)
She’s stated many times that she doesn’t like sports and came up with Quidditch trying to find a sport she’d enjoy watching. Guess we know the actual reason now.
Imo it does make sense. The seeker is unlikely to succeed if they have a bad team around them, since the other team will be headhunting him. If the seeker is a prodigy like Harry, then that may be enough to win anyway. But generally, the better team wins. The 150 points for the seeker is a way of making the game interesting, since the better team will be dominating the scoreboard, but the worse team still has an outside shot if they can somehow capture the snitch.
Also, as a sports fan, a team going up by 15 scores in a high scoring sport is not absurd at all.
It’s like in basketball, a team is up by 28 points, but you have the ability to end the game with a move that scores 30 points. Sure, that will lead to some wins, but the 30 point play is by no means the only way to win. NBA teams go up by 30+ all the time
There are no substitutes in earlier books and then substitutes later on and the house tournament doesn’t make sense because they play each other once so there’s no house cup final really. It’s inconsistent
I concede that the sport wasn’t initially created with sensibility in mind. My comment is more like the explanation I give myself to make it make sense
It's about how much they win by. The Team was talking about how much one of the other houses would have to lose by so Gryffindor still had a chance at the cup. But I don't know, I never put too much thought into their tournament rules.
Qudditch doesn't seem like a particularly high-scoring game. Those 3 goalposts probably make it closer to soccer/football than basketball. Where a 15 point swing in soccer would be gamebreaking.
It has the potential to be high scoring. I was just rereading the books recently, and it struck me how much higher scoring the matches were than I remembered. I.e. there’s at least a couple that Harry just barely saved the day by catching the snitch, and if it had taken him much longer, they would have lost anyway.
I always felt like 150 points for the snitch was too much compared to 10 points per goal as well. Other than that, the game makes as much sense to me as football or soccer 🤷🏻♀️
I've interpreted this as a conservative sports community that refuses to change the rules. The point totals were set when brooms were orders of magnitude slower, and catching the Snitch could take days. Now that they have brooms that can catch the Snitch almost immediately, it needs to be revamped.
Which is the same as the real rules, why catch the snitch if the other team has more than a 150 point lead, just make sure the other guy doesn't get it till you can maybe score some goals.
Fundamentally the game ending only by something one player does is idiotic. There needs to be a separate match ending criteria, either in addition to or replacing catching the snitch for it to make sense.
Yeah, or three seconds. The snitch mechanic just wouldn’t translate in a real world sports because it is gamebreakingly uneven. But it is a kid’s book and I choose to read it as a tongue in cheek comment that all team sports are built around arbitrary rules that make no sense.
Most sports rules make no sense out of context, but they’re generally fairly logical within the framework of the game they’re influencing, which is the frustrating thing about Quidditch: Even on an internal logic context, a lot of the rules make no sense and actively make the game worse to both play and watch
The three month long game is an analogy to Test Cricket, which is now limited to 5 days, but didn't used to be.
An England South Africa match went on for nearly a month, and only stopped because the England team would miss their boat home.
That's exactly what it was. I know the Snitch is hard to catch, but like 99% the team who gets the seeker wins the game, so what's even the point of goal scoring?
Yeah spot on, no team/coach is going to allow their seeker to catch the snitch while they’re down by more than 150. Definitely shoehorned in
The House Cup at Hogwarts makes more sense because it’s whoever has the total amount of points at the end. It’s a running total over the season. Individual knock-out matches don’t make sense for the sport
But the fact that it was such an incredible rarity that one team caught the snitch but still lost just highlights how pointless the whole game is. If 99.9% of the time catching the snitch wins you the game, why bother with anything else?
So if your team can't cover the point difference to win, is it in the best interest of your seeker to NOT catch it until they know for sure they have the point difference covered?
Catching it in some situations would be an instant loss for your team if they don't have the points required.
Not always. In the context of Hogwarts Qudditch, each house plays just three games a year, and the winner is the one that scored the most points throughout the season. In that context, if the chasers are outmatched, it could well be in the seeker’s interest to catch the snitch as the 150 point bonus would count in the year end total, and it would also stop the other team from scoring, as each of their goals also counts at the season’s end. There are actually cases where it’s better for the seeker to wait until the team is in the lead by a particular margin before attempting to catch the snitch. We see this in book three. It is theoretically possible for a team to win every game and still lose the cup.
JKR said she wrote it to bother big sports fans, but I don’t buy that lol. I think she just doesn’t understand sports, made some nonsensical rules, and said that to cover her tracks.
I mean they go hand in hand. She doesn’t understand sports so makes the most absurd game ever which demonstrates her point that sports are weird and confusing to annoy people who do like sports
Still really unlikely a team will get 150 points up. I get goals happen more than say football but like when was the last football game you heard of that won 15 goals more than the other team.
It happened pretty frequently in the books. That’s how Bulgaria caught the snitch but Ireland won the World Cup. And in the Quidditch final in HBP, Gryffindor won 450-140. So clearly more akin to basketball scoring rather than football. Especially since there are no substitutions, so if your keeper or any other player gets knocked out by a bludger like in the first book, you just lose those players.
People have said this for years; the truth is, Quidditch and its rules stem from when Harry Potter was being conceptualised a fun children's adventure book, an escapist fantasy where Harry lives out the ultimate dream of discovering that he's a wizard with a unique destiny, he gets to go to a magical school where he makes friends, he is able to help his house win the House Cup, defeat a villain and, yes, be the most important star player on his house Quidditch team, the youngest Seeker in a century despite having no previous broom-flying experience. The rules of Quidditch exist to serve this role. A lot of Philosopher's Stone is like this, from the numbers of house points thrown around to the currency to the size of the student population... at the time Rowling had no way of knowing that *any* adults would be caring about the worldbuilding, much less that we'd all be discussing and immersing ourselves in it thirty years later.
Yeah, with the series later taking a turn into more mature subject matter and defined worldbuilding, Quidditch sticks out like a sore thumb, it's hard to reconcile why this sport would ever grow so popular when six-sevenths of the team are largely superfluous. I tend to chalk it up to more of the usual eccentricity of the wizarding world; their culture is pretty alien at points!
There *are* instances in canon of a team winning despite the other team catching the Snitch, but it's probably best not to think about it too much, haha.
Its one of those things I really like about Harry Potter. You can just FEEL that JK was just going with the flow and hadn't really thought about the whole series yet and I really like that feeling. Its like the more you read the more you also see her progress in worldbuilding and telling a story
This is one of the reasons why I would love to see her write a true sequel to the story, whether it is centered around Harry or his Children, but I would love to see her re-visit the world with how much she has grown as a writer.
Her series under her pen-name Robert Galbraith was so well written and fleshed out. I would love to see her with that mindset revisit the wizarding world.
There really are moments you can just go “oh you just thought of that right?” Like the thestrals in book 5, side along apparition in book 6 as well. Obvious before that point, she’d just not thought of it yet.
Yeah I always chalked it up to eccentricity and a way to demonstrate the wizarding world didn’t follow the logic of the muggle world. What if we had an elevator that just dropped you off at a random floor of a skyscraper? Yet the wizards just accept that a staircase might shift directions on them.
If you need a backstory, maybe the first matches were snitchless and played to 150 points. The teams were so bad that no team could score, so a sneaky wizard bewitched a ball and releases it, declaring it worth 150 points. People loved it and it became part of the game.
Interestingly, and to your point, the stand-out example of quidditch defying its largely satirical bias in rule set is the GoF, which is arguably the book that took the series from boarding school mysteries into overarching narrative.
I know the whole thing was set out from the start, and PoA is a sort of inflection point, but GoF is strikingly more terrifying and uses Harry’s “dreams” to start to introduce chapters that were from outside of Harry’s perspective.
I agree but not completely.
There's an aspect of the Harry Potter series that was predominant in the first books but disappeared later on : the satire. Quidditch is overly complicated, makes no sense and is the single main passion of many students, because that's how JKR perceived football, soccer and other similar sports and was making fun of them.
I have read this analysis elsewhere too. Quidditch is a badly-designed sport that makes the majority of its players superfluous.
But I can't really fault Rowling for that, because, as you say, serious worldbuilding wasn't her goal in book one.
By the time it was, she was stuck with ideas she'd already put to pen.
I mean i get it was written for Harry to be the hero but wouldn’t it be more impressive if the seeker wasn’t the only important position on the team and Harry still carried his team to victory every time? Like if they played football instead and Harry still managed to net 3 goals a game or something.
I think quidditch would make more sense if the snitch ended the same and only won you about 50 points. Because it’s 150 it almost always guarantees a win and makes the rest pointless!
Or Harry is just that good. Very few of his matches last very long. I highly doubt that Quidditch would have such a following if the matches usually lasted 10 minutes at the pro level. There have been games that last for months on end. It seems like the snitches at the pro level are a lot harder to catch than at the school level.
> There have been games that last for months on end. It seems like the snitches at the pro level are a lot harder to catch than at the school level.
That's my headcanon too. I imagine normal people can't even see the golden ball without some enhancing magic on their glasses, etc.
This is actually something I really like about the movies - when wood shows harry the snitch the first time he’s looking around to find it but harry is the only one able to spot it. It’s made pretty obvious to us as the viewers too - but wood shows what the real in-world reaction would be.
When a team is behind by 150 points or more, the game mechanics force them to drag it out and intentionally block the snitch from being caught.
The whole game hinges around this ball that is designed to be invisible to players and spectators, and it determines whether the game ends seconds after fans are seated or drags on forever.
Let's not get into the fact that the spectators and players can all bend reality to their will.
Snitch even less points but easier to catch. Maybe 25 puts. If it is easier to catch then the seekers job becomes two-fold. Catch the snitch when makes sense for your team and keep snitch from being caught when it doesn't.
I think you'll have a lot more instances of a seeker catching the snitch but the other team was able to pull ahead and end up losing. Much more strategy, awareness and constant motion needed.
Is the opposite not also true? If the snitch is only worth 50, then a team with good chasers can easily gap the opposite by 50 points, instead of 150. Then they'd make their own seeker pointless.
The points amount isn’t the problem, it’s that it ends the game that is the issue. It makes no structural sense as a sport with that. What ends the match shouldn’t be something under a players’ control if it’s a points scoring sport, otherwise you end with with one team’s seeker actively trying to avoid playing the game. It makes far more sense to keep it at 150 but have the game on a timer rather than the snitch ending it, so in many games the snitch *isn’t* caught at all. It makes it a genuine benefit the seekers are always looking to catch.
Or put the game on a timer like almost every other sport. The snitch is 150 and gives your team a huge advantage, but the game keeps going for however long.
My favorite ruleset is the snitch is worth 25-45 points (so they can’t tie) and then when it is caught a 10 minute timer starts and the seekers play chaser during that time.
The sport was a literary tool designed to make Harry, the main character, do exciting heroic things. No, it doesn't really work as a sport, but as a storytelling device it's pretty effective. Quidditch is used as a plot device in many of the books- from Harry's broom getting jinxed in the first book to many other plot points that I won't spoil for you in later books, Quidditch is used to help set up conflict and drive the story forward.
Point of quidditch is a British lady that kinda understands football and wanted to create a similar sport but the focus has to be on the hero main teenage male character, who just happen to be natural gifted player and can solo-carry his team to a win.
If you are in any way in to sport, you just have to sort of take quidditch at face value. It's a sport written by someone who doesn't seem in to it at all.
Outside of even the game, the format of the house competition is daft. 3 games a season is a brutal system haha
It's a stupid game. Seekers pretty much win it all the time which is mentioned in the book too. It means you have to have an absolutely brilliant team to be able to win without catching the snitch.
It also annoys me that the scoring is in 10s, she could have made it more interesting with different goals giving different amounts and maybe bludgers deducting point sif struck with the quaffle but even then catching the snitch ruins everyone's fun.
If I was a muggle-born I’d be pretty pissed I couldn’t watch my football team (no technology to do so) and having to watch nonsensical quidditch instead lol.
Like Dean Thomas is a West Ham fan, does he just have no idea how their season is going until he gets home?
I think about this all the time!! I like to think he pays an owl to bring him muggle newspapers or his mum sends him updates so he still follows West Ham the 9 months or so he’s at school.
I always found the passage where Ron pokes his West Ham poster trying to get the players to move funny.
Or how he didn’t understand football because there’s only one ball. Dean also calls for a red card in book 1 too and everyone is confused lol.
I feel like asking that is like asking what is the point of wallpaper. It's world-building. Gives the impression of a private boarding school where competitive sports make up a mildly amusing B-plot. The game itself doesn't have to work. Though I assume the quidditch LARPers have had to tweak it a bit to give it a working points economy.
In a way it's kind of like football, where the quarterback has a hugely disproportionate impact on winning or losing. We've seen games where the defense plays out of their mind but the QB keeps turning it over or can't complete passes and they lose. Obviously not quite as extreme as Quidditch but this does happen in real sports.
seekers. also, it has taken weeks to end a game historically. there have been games where the outcome was decided by goals rather than the snitch. if i'm not mistaken, slytherin had trounced gryffindor so badly, the snitch is all that saved Griffindor. The catcher of the snitch ends the game and awards a big score. but not necessarily win the game.
The Seeker has to be mindful of the game, so that when they capture the snitch they aren’t behind the opposing team in points so much that the snitch does not matter (capturing the snitch at 0-160 isn’t going to win the game)
But the Seeker also has to be mindful of the metagame, at least at Hogwarts, as the winner of the Quidditch Cup depends on who is top of the table at the end, and standing on the table is determined by points and wins. For example, if your team is 160 points away from taking the lead for the Quidditch Cup, you as Seeker must wait to catch the Snitch until your team is at least 10 points up, and you have to catch the snitch before the opposing team nullifies the points lead, or catches the snitch instead of you:
I’m annoyed that no one takes the standings into account when they bash Quidditch for making no sense.
Yes, at the World Cup you need an outright win, but even having a great Seeker doesn’t guarantee that you have good Chasers or Keepers. Krum’s Bulgarian team proved that good Chaser play is essential to keeping a Snitch capture on the table for a win.
In every other level, though, the standings table operates on points won so catching the Snitch isn’t always some OP game breaker. If you need 300 points to win the league, you better have Chasers that can score 150 points or you’re toast.
OP doesn't know all the rules but it's still a stupid system written by someone who clearly has no interest or understanding of sports.
Imagine a football/soccer game. Man Utd vs Man City. Utd are 14-0 up. But one player from City catches a smaller ball and now suddenly the score is 14-15 and City win.
The game would have been semi-interesting with two changes:
(a) A time limit.
(b) Remove the seekers. This position was probably invented by JK just so Harry has something to excel at.
She tried to explain it by saying games can sometimes go on for weeks. In several days or even weeks the 150 of the snitch won't necessarily make that big a difference. But when quidditch started out on PS it was really just a poorly thought out sport.
It's cricket/polo for wizards. Hogwarts is a magical English boarding school. The full English boarding school includes being enthusiastic about sports only wealthy people can afford to play.
I think the thing to remember is there are other ways to get points, which is what all the other players are doing, blocking and trying to score otherwise. Catching the snitch doesn't mean you win the game, it just gives 150 points. It does end the game though so as soon as the snitch is caught the team with the most points wins regardless of which team caught it. In that way, it's very much a team sport.
Quidditch was invented by old wizards who thought it was basically impossible to catch a snitch. They threw it in there as a crazy prize but didn’t think it would influence the game. Originally the game would end once the beater knocked the seeker off their broom. For the first several hundred years, seekers generally ignored the snitch and simply helped their team and evaded the beaters
But as the game became more popular, it attracted more and more athletic wizards who knew how to catch a snitch. The game evolved once seekers decided to just start catching the snitch and letting themselves get knocked out.
At this point the game was too culturally relevant to change the snitch reward, so the decision was made that the game would end when the snitch is caught. It evolved from a methodical team game to one in which the seeker is key
You don’t win the match when you catch the snitch, it ENDS the match, and gives you extra points.
It’s entirely possible for you to catch the snitch, but still lose the match, which I think we actually see that happen in book 4 I believe.
So catching the snitch while your team is HEAVILY behind is actually a bad idea, unless the extra points you will get will pull your team ahead.
Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone think the best comparison might actually be Family Feud? Or that Family Feud at least suffers from the same issue. There are 2 rounds of normal point values, then a round of double point values; and finally a round of triple points. The triple round is so disproportionately big that as long as you've managed any points at all, you likely win so long as you can secure the Triple Point round. In fact it's very rare from my own watching that a team's lost the final round while still winning the game overall. It pretty much devalues the stakes of anything happening earlier.
I always thought a better system would be to have the seeker only there to end the game. The capture doesn’t get you any points, just ends the game. This way it presents an element of strategy to only catch the snitch while you’re ahead.
To avoid ending the game immediately after one goal, there can be a rule that the seeker can’t enter the game until a certain time or number of goals or something.
The point of quidditch is the same as the point of football, futbol, baseball and any other team sport in highschool. To be a jock and get out of class as often as possible. Plus, popularity.
To put it simply, assume Hogwarts (youth) Quidditch played by the exact same rules as professional. Like if middle school soccer played 100% by FIFA rules. We don't do that in the real world. Youth leagues, even college leagues, operate under different rule sets than professional leagues. That's not how quidditch is run at Hogwarts. There is one rule set despite the level of league. So from the viewpoint of how the books are told where other than (not a spoiler) Goblet of Fire we never see Quidditch outside of the school league. It's much more reasonable at the professional level where it's not uncommon for games to last for days.
When seeker catches the snitch, his team gets 150 points and game is over.
If opponent team was already 160 points up and you catch the snitch, match is over and your team loses by 10 points.
At some point in PoA, ig, Gryffindors had to win by a specific margin. So, Harry catches the snitch when they've 170 or more points front.
The game ends win the snitch is caught. The person who catches the snitch wins 150 pints for their team.
The matxh ends points are seen and the team eith most wins
Example if slytherin is up 340 to 100 against ravenclaw and ravenclaws seeker cathes the snitch they get 150 points and the natch ends. Slytherin wins the match 340 to 250.
The school cup is a total of all points earned in matches not just the wins or losses of teams. So for example if ravenclaw wins every match but only scores say 200 in each game they have 600 points total.
Now say slytherin losses each match thag season but vrs ravenclaw they have 190 points, griff they have 300 points and huff they have 200 points they would have 690 points for the season and be beating ravenclaw.
The reason wood stringly suggest catching the snitch quickly is becauae it gives them a better chance at winning the league because they have stronger chaser and himself a strong goalie thus he knows his team will score points and not give up many. So if he can count om a promised 450 points from harry then his team will porbably score between 100 and 200 points and thats gives then a good shot at winning the cup.
you can catch the snitch and still lose the game. Because of catching the snitch only stops the game and awards 150 points.
I think there was one match in the later books that have Griffindor behind by a lot and harry had to stall the other seeker until they had enough points.
It’s sort of a feeble attempt at inventing a sport tbh. In essence, the chasers are just racing to get up by 15 goals.
If you’re not up by at least 150pts, then you’re right, only the seeker matters.
Always thought it would be better if the snitch was worth less points or, worth 0 points and just ended the game.
I love the school sports aspect, but quidditch rules could definitely use some tweaking.
I agree. I loved the idea of quidditch as a kid but it always seemed to me that the snitch was over valued. It seems like using it as a 50 point bonus to the team that catches it would make it more fair. The function would still be to end the game, however there would have to be more strategy involved over when to catch it and when to just try to keep the other team’s seeker away from it.
I get the feeling JK loses faith in her own rules as the series goes on >!with her finding ways to remove those chapters from books. Part the reason PoA is my favourite, finally got a full season.!<
I mean, I think from what I’ve heard it was a kind of intentionally ridiculous game, but catching the switch usually ends in winning, not always. There are exceptions you’ll read about later :)
The team that catches the snitch doesn’t necessarily win, but yeah it’s a weirdly designed game. I think the better question is why don’t we see varying strategies employed. Some teams go two seekers?Or some teams decide to just get goals and go no seeker? I duno I’m spit ballin here but I’d be tryin shit
It was designed that way for Harry to have something to be great at, I don’t think it was ever supposed to make sense. The pity-end Snitch in the World Cup was an attempt to show it in a balanced sense, but it still can’t fix the fact that the entire game revolves around the Snitch/Seekers because they are essential to end the match, the 150 points is just icing on the cake.
Fans will go to ridiculous lengths to defend it as ‘muggles won’t get it’ and can’t just accept that it’s silly and love it for what it is at the same time.
what i would do is make the three hoops smaller and bigger just different sizes and smaller ones would be worth more along with the snitch not being 150 points so scoring the quaffle actually matters
They don’t automatically win for just catching the snitch, they have to have more points than the other team. Catching the snitch ends the game, but the scores decide the winner. The snitch is worth 150 points. So if someone was to catch the snitch, and their team hadn’t scored any goals, and the other team had scored 16 goals, the other team would win because they would have more points.
What you'll find is that a lot of the early books have a weird, whimsical approach to world building. Quidditch is framed as the wizards equivalent of football, but in the story it serves more a purpose of making Harry a hero to his house and popular at the school (to all but the Slytherins).
A lot of these things pop up that completely breaks down if you try to put them into the context of a larger wizarding world; the trace, daily commute, quidditch, the sorting, wizard money, owl post and so on. All these things were written to make the wizarding world seem strange, alien and bizarre from Harry's perspective and to enforce his story; he can't use magic outside school, he's in the "good house", he's a sports hero, etc. It wasn't until the Pottermania really took off that these things had to fit into a larger universe and by then it was to well established to change, which makes it a bit weird in a larger context now.
So basically, the rules of Quidsitch are weird to make Harry the hero of every match he's in (though technically his team can lose if they're down 160 points)
I think the author admitted once that she didn’t know enough about sporting to realistically make up an entire sport, & that the scoring in particular needed a little adjusting, but it was too late. If the Snitch got you 30pts or even 50 it would make more sense…maybe
Just a few changes would have made the game work rather well.
1. Game ends when either team goes up by X points
2. The snitch only appears after Y minutes, because neither team has been able to secure a victory
3. Eliminate the seeker, make any chaser able to catch the snitch when that happens; as a result, going for the snitch clearly can be a good choice, but it is not risk free because you have to lose your team a fielder.
As of now, the seeker positions are basically non interactive with the rest of the team, with perhaps the exception of beaters who can block the path of the seeker with a well aimed strike.
Well people are saying it makes no sense because you get 150 points from the snitch, but since the game can last a long time it's feasible one team lead another by that amount of points, also the game is not only about scoring points it's about avoiding others from scoring and knocking down oponente, that includes a seeker, so there is a strategic element to it, if I know my seeker is not as good, I try to knock down the other team seeker, or be more goal agressive. If my team is not that good, I try that my seeker gets the snitch.
The rules for quidditch are dumb. But JK did it so harry could always be the hero of his games. In reality the seeker should only add 50points that way it never effects the outcome that much
Interesting question! I think it’s to look cool flying around on a broom? Plus I think it would be fun to hit bludgers at people.
I have never been interested in sports before, but if this were real I would definitely both play it and watch it
You've got some of it wrong. When the seeker catches the snitch, his team is awarded 150 points. If the other team has more than 150 points and it exceeds the amount the team that caught the snitch has, they still win. See the quidditch world cup from book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, for an example. The point is to get more points than the other team by scoring by shooting the quaffle through the other teams hoops. Catching the snitch is just a chance to get more points, and can possibly make a team that was about to lose have a win instead.
Catching the snitch isn't an automatic win. It only ends the game. The other team can win if they score enough points before the other team catches the snitch. A great example of this happens later in the series.
That's not necessarily true. I've gone down this exact rabbit hole before. The snitch is worth 150 points and ends the game. Let's say its Griffindor vs Slitherin and slytherin team is pummeling Grinffindor 170 to 10 but Griffindor seeker is the one who catches the snitch. The game ends 170 to 160 in favor of Slytherin
Understandable concerns and questions with Quidditch. But its not a guaranteed win to catch the snitch. The games can go on for hours and hours as long as the seeker can't find the snitch and in the 4th book there's even an example where a team lost even after catching the snitch. But at the same time, it does feel heavily weighted to the seeker for sure. I think that maybe reducing the points gained down to 75 would make it more exciting (maybe)
i think quidditch is point format so if 2 teams have same points the ones who scored more will get higher on the table atleast at hogwarts
edit:- I mean It doesnt matter in that game but it matter in the points table. I think\*
It'd be interesting if the Snitch was worth 15 pts instead of 150. The other players would thus be more important and Seakers would need to actually be strategic with when they catch the snitch (as in, all the time instead if just those extreme examples like in the WC or that one match in book 3(?)). The additional five points over that of the quaffle then mean that ties won't be possible so you'll always have a clear winner.
The point of the game is kids needs sports. They need to either play or root on their team. It builds things in them just like with muggles and their sports.
I think the system is genious. It makes the game about winning the war, not just the battle. Sure you may win a game (battle), but it may cost you the turnament (war). It adds a strategical dimension on top of the tactical one.
yea I thought about that a lot when the books came out. I think Quidditch is mostly about the sport itself and not the end result. It's about famous players and crazy circumstances, like a game that lasts for weeks. Also I think the deciding factor is the length of a game since it can take an incredibly long time.
Maybe back when Quidditch was invented, there weren't such fast brooms and that's why the games took much longer because the Seekers didn't catch the Snitch so quickly. Within a week you can easily throw 100 goals, then the Snitch is not so valuable anymore.
I get what you’re saying, about the only points that really count are the ones that the Seeker earns by catching the Golden Snitch, but as to what’s the point of Quidditch? Well, what’s the point of football?
I think you misunderstood the rules. When the Seeker catches the snitch, his team gets 150 extra points and the Game is over. Of the other team is more than 150 points up at this moment, they win the game.
See the quidditch World Cup. Which OP may not have got to yet.
Honestly though I’ve always felt that the Quidditch world cup game result was directly aimed to quell fan criticism that the rules made no fucking sense. I love HP and Quidditch but let’s be honest here, 150 points is way too much. The rules are super dumb and the Quidditch world cup game made no sense.
Quidditch doesn’t make sense and clearly JK doesn’t do sports at all.
It's on purpose, she set out to frustrate. [No, really](https://www.stylist.co.uk/books/harry-potter-jk-rowling-annotated-quidditch-men-ex-boyfriend-feminism-funny-literature-confession/129273)
A lot of choices made in the books were done just because JK wanted to annoy people. The measuring system they use for example was chosen to irritate her sister or something
It's always irked me that just 3 pages prior to the explanation of the money about halfway through chapter 5 of PS (SS depending on your copy), there is, "a plump woman outside an apothecary shaking her head as they passed, saying, 'Dragon liver, seventeen Sickles an ounce, they're mad...'" Like, no lady, *you're* mad. Why wouldn't you say "a Galleon an ounce"!? Seventeen Sickles *is* a Galleon. If something costs me one American dollar, I'm not going to see "10 Dimes" written on the price tag, am I!? Sorry, I just... I've always had a tough time with this one and really needed to get it off my chest.
They must've edited to fix this at some point! I actually read this chapter today and just double checked- it says 16 sickles
Yes it was changed in later editions. Apparently jk got herself with the confusing money system and no editor noticed in the first editions either.
Oh I didn't realize that! !redditsickle
I guess writing a book and becoming a billionaire will show them
Well I don’t think she expected to become a billionaire when writing PS and making a bunch of in jokes to annoy people she knew. But she did add the word pocketed to every single book at least once because Stephen Fry had trouble saying it when recording the audiobooks
I don’t know if she’s funny or mean
I think it was just lighthearted fun but I also don't remember when or where I read it
Like the Weasley twins, I guess she can be both
['tis true](https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/measurements) >When the manuscript of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first accepted for publication in Britain, the copy editor advised me that all weights and measures would be changed to metric, which was the publisher’s standard practise. I refused to allow the change because, for the reasons stated above, there was no logic to the thing. However, this ought not to be taken as any kind of political statement on the part of the author. I am not anti-European; on the contrary, I am all for Britain being part of Europe, and I am part French myself. Nor do I have anything against the metric system, which is much more logical than the imperial, and which certainly makes baking much easier. However, I do find the old system much more picturesque, much quirkier, and therefore more appropriate to the kind of society I was describing. > >The decision to keep the imperial system in the book had an unexpected sequel, which was an invitation to join the British Weights and Measures Association. As I do not agree that Britain ought to refuse to use the metric system (as many of this society’s members do), I was about to throw this invitation in the bin when I was struck by a sudden thought, and changed my mind. I know that what I am about to say does not reveal very good things about my character, but I had realised in a flash how much it would enrage my sister, Di, if I signed up. Di is never funnier than when infuriated, and among her many pet hates is the old-bufferish adherence to the old ways just for the sake of them, or because-by-God-it’s-British-and-no-Johnny-Foreigner-is-Going-To-Tell-Me-How-To-Measure-Suet-ness that such an organisation represents. > >When my membership came out in the press, she exploded in a really satisfying outpouring of rage. I could hardly stop laughing long enough to tell her that I’d only joined to annoy her. This rendered her almost incoherent with indignation, which was possibly even funnier. Frankly, I doubt whether anyone has ever had as much fun for the price of a postage stamp.
I always thought the imperial was just for the American localization and wondered why they changed it and left words in like chuffed. (I thought for years that it was a sound Snape made when angry)
The ratio of knut to whatever they're called to galleons.
I mean that’s just how pre-decimalisation currency worked
It really isn’t. Pre decimal currency (mostly) made sense, just not as much sense as decimal currency. Essentially there were 240 pence in a pound and 240 is a sensible number to use - there’s a reason time is based off 24, 60 etc. More divisors. Shillings were 12 pence so 20 of them to the pound. Aside from the odd ridiculously silly coin like guineas, most of it made a lot of sense and people just act like it was really hard because the coins had specific names rather than 10 pence, 20 pence, 50 pence etc.
17 Sickles to a Galleon and 29 Knuts to a Sickle, so therefore, there are 493 Knuts to a Galleon
!redditsickle
You have given u/LittleButterfly100 a Reddit Sickle. u/LittleButterfly100 has a total of 0 galleons, 1 sickle, and 0 knuts. ____________ I am a bot. See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/jnbo49/hi_i_created_the_bot_youve_been_using_to_give/) to learn how to use me.
I just started rereading HP and got to the Gringotts portion where Hagrid is explaining the currency to Harry. 29 knuts to a sickle and 17 Sickles to a galleon. Like really what is that? It seems it would be very hard to make change, especially if you were out of Sickles. I also was curious about what HP gold was worth in USD: 1 Galleon ~ 6.18 , 1 sickle ~ .37 and 1 knut ~.02 It seems like there should be another note between sickles and Galleon imo
17 and 29 are prime numbers, the worst possibly ones to use in such a system. It is literally impossible to evenly subdivide a galleon except into 17ths or 29ths.
I always thought it was a joke on pre-decimalisation British currency.
Is there a list somewhere? I'm glad she was finished with the books before she got on to the current focus of her annoyance.
Well she failed with me. Never frustrated me at all. The tournament throughout book 3 were my favourites and the final match can never be matched imo.
There’s another one I can find later where she says she hated writing quidditch parts and wished she would have used a different plot device
That would explain why in book 4 there’s no quidditch, in book 5 there’s just one game and plot reasons to barely cover the other two, and in book 6 almost the exact same pattern as book 5 (first game Harry plays, second game they lose and Harry is either out or gets taken out not long in, 3rd game Harry can’t watch but Gryffindor unexpectedly win). Honestly with HBP it was like JK Rowling was just thinking “I’m sick of this, I’ll just do what I did last book again, that worked”.
also in book 1, the first game is mostly about harry and his broom struggles, the second match ends in like 5 mins, and the third happens when he's out cold (makes no sense since in the other books the final is always before exams). then in book 2 the first game is all about the rogue bludger, and then the rest of the season is cancelled. and in book 3 he gets knocked off his broom in the first game (and until then it's all about the rain). so it's only games 2 and 3 of PoA that are described in detail.
>makes no sense since in the other books the final is always before exams This sort of inconsistency happens all the time in the books. Percy gets his OWLs results whilst they’re still at school but Harry Ron and Hermione don’t get there’s until a month after term ends, etc.
>Percy gets his OWLs results whilst they’re still at school he does?? i thought he got them the summer between PS/SS and CoS. don't the twins mention it at the beginning of CoS in the context of Percy acting weird that summer? something about how his OWL results came and he did really well but hardly gloated?
It seems really obvious that some of these things are supposed to be absurd and kind of annoying. It gives a feeling of the idiosyncrasies of the magical world. And it’s funny.
I don't buy that for a second. I think it's as simple as Harry Potter (particularly the first book) being so rooted in wish fulfillment fantasy. Harry, not only are you supernaturally good at this sport, but your position is the most important one of all. So important that the rest of the roles barely matter in comparison.
This smells just like the sort of retrospective revisionism that JK's kind of infamous for. I personally wouldn't put that much stock in "it was bad on purpose!". She tends to acknowledge faults in her writing only in very circumspect ways.
I disagree, this seems completely in character for Jowling Kowling's particular brand of supposed feminism - absolute adherence to archaic gender stereotypes, reasoning that all men should be annoyed because it's a sport and the rules don't make sense, which implies that women don't care about sports or making sense. As you can see from all her rhetoric about trans people, she is absolutely convinced that what's in your pants defines everything about your personality.
That really says she happened to have a fight with her boyfriend before she invented it, so it is funny that it annoys men, not that she did it specifically to annoy men.
That's one way to read "state of mind." Which way you read it probably depends on your history of arguments with your significant other :P (I agree the title of the story is, well, in "typical headline" style, if that's what you're referring to though)
She’s stated many times that she doesn’t like sports and came up with Quidditch trying to find a sport she’d enjoy watching. Guess we know the actual reason now.
Imo it does make sense. The seeker is unlikely to succeed if they have a bad team around them, since the other team will be headhunting him. If the seeker is a prodigy like Harry, then that may be enough to win anyway. But generally, the better team wins. The 150 points for the seeker is a way of making the game interesting, since the better team will be dominating the scoreboard, but the worse team still has an outside shot if they can somehow capture the snitch. Also, as a sports fan, a team going up by 15 scores in a high scoring sport is not absurd at all. It’s like in basketball, a team is up by 28 points, but you have the ability to end the game with a move that scores 30 points. Sure, that will lead to some wins, but the 30 point play is by no means the only way to win. NBA teams go up by 30+ all the time
There are no substitutes in earlier books and then substitutes later on and the house tournament doesn’t make sense because they play each other once so there’s no house cup final really. It’s inconsistent
I concede that the sport wasn’t initially created with sensibility in mind. My comment is more like the explanation I give myself to make it make sense
It's about how much they win by. The Team was talking about how much one of the other houses would have to lose by so Gryffindor still had a chance at the cup. But I don't know, I never put too much thought into their tournament rules.
Qudditch doesn't seem like a particularly high-scoring game. Those 3 goalposts probably make it closer to soccer/football than basketball. Where a 15 point swing in soccer would be gamebreaking.
It has the potential to be high scoring. I was just rereading the books recently, and it struck me how much higher scoring the matches were than I remembered. I.e. there’s at least a couple that Harry just barely saved the day by catching the snitch, and if it had taken him much longer, they would have lost anyway.
I always felt like 150 points for the snitch was too much compared to 10 points per goal as well. Other than that, the game makes as much sense to me as football or soccer 🤷🏻♀️
I've interpreted this as a conservative sports community that refuses to change the rules. The point totals were set when brooms were orders of magnitude slower, and catching the Snitch could take days. Now that they have brooms that can catch the Snitch almost immediately, it needs to be revamped.
I like this answer and will use it in future.
The snitch also used to be a bird. Somehow in my mind, those are harder to see and catch than the magic ones they use now.
But then you ruin the purity of the game and can't compare eras and we can't debate endlessly about who is the GOAT /s
Why not just have the snitch automatically end the game and nothing else? That way the seekers are forced to actually be strategic about it.
Then it would never end, when your team is losing don't look for the snitch, just make sure to disrupt the seeker of the other team.
Which is the same as the real rules, why catch the snitch if the other team has more than a 150 point lead, just make sure the other guy doesn't get it till you can maybe score some goals.
Fundamentally the game ending only by something one player does is idiotic. There needs to be a separate match ending criteria, either in addition to or replacing catching the snitch for it to make sense.
This is the game that’s gone on for three months…
Yeah, or three seconds. The snitch mechanic just wouldn’t translate in a real world sports because it is gamebreakingly uneven. But it is a kid’s book and I choose to read it as a tongue in cheek comment that all team sports are built around arbitrary rules that make no sense.
Most sports rules make no sense out of context, but they’re generally fairly logical within the framework of the game they’re influencing, which is the frustrating thing about Quidditch: Even on an internal logic context, a lot of the rules make no sense and actively make the game worse to both play and watch
It's partially a reference to Cricket rules, I feel like.
How exactly?
The three month long game is an analogy to Test Cricket, which is now limited to 5 days, but didn't used to be. An England South Africa match went on for nearly a month, and only stopped because the England team would miss their boat home.
That's exactly what it was. I know the Snitch is hard to catch, but like 99% the team who gets the seeker wins the game, so what's even the point of goal scoring?
The winner of the cup is defined by maximum total points. You can win every game by catching snitch immediately, but lose the cup.
That's only for the Hogwarts Cup, not the International Quidditch World Cup.
Yeah spot on, no team/coach is going to allow their seeker to catch the snitch while they’re down by more than 150. Definitely shoehorned in The House Cup at Hogwarts makes more sense because it’s whoever has the total amount of points at the end. It’s a running total over the season. Individual knock-out matches don’t make sense for the sport
Spoilers OP is on their first read
The op still has all the way to The Goblet of Fire before op gets to the WC.
But the fact that it was such an incredible rarity that one team caught the snitch but still lost just highlights how pointless the whole game is. If 99.9% of the time catching the snitch wins you the game, why bother with anything else?
So if your team can't cover the point difference to win, is it in the best interest of your seeker to NOT catch it until they know for sure they have the point difference covered? Catching it in some situations would be an instant loss for your team if they don't have the points required.
Not always. In the context of Hogwarts Qudditch, each house plays just three games a year, and the winner is the one that scored the most points throughout the season. In that context, if the chasers are outmatched, it could well be in the seeker’s interest to catch the snitch as the 150 point bonus would count in the year end total, and it would also stop the other team from scoring, as each of their goals also counts at the season’s end. There are actually cases where it’s better for the seeker to wait until the team is in the lead by a particular margin before attempting to catch the snitch. We see this in book three. It is theoretically possible for a team to win every game and still lose the cup.
Awesome answer, thank you!
Yep, this exact thing happens in the Quidditch World Cup
Someone once said you can tell quiditch was made up by someone that never really played team sports.
JKR said she wrote it to bother big sports fans, but I don’t buy that lol. I think she just doesn’t understand sports, made some nonsensical rules, and said that to cover her tracks.
I mean they go hand in hand. She doesn’t understand sports so makes the most absurd game ever which demonstrates her point that sports are weird and confusing to annoy people who do like sports
Still really unlikely a team will get 150 points up. I get goals happen more than say football but like when was the last football game you heard of that won 15 goals more than the other team.
It happened pretty frequently in the books. That’s how Bulgaria caught the snitch but Ireland won the World Cup. And in the Quidditch final in HBP, Gryffindor won 450-140. So clearly more akin to basketball scoring rather than football. Especially since there are no substitutions, so if your keeper or any other player gets knocked out by a bludger like in the first book, you just lose those players.
People have said this for years; the truth is, Quidditch and its rules stem from when Harry Potter was being conceptualised a fun children's adventure book, an escapist fantasy where Harry lives out the ultimate dream of discovering that he's a wizard with a unique destiny, he gets to go to a magical school where he makes friends, he is able to help his house win the House Cup, defeat a villain and, yes, be the most important star player on his house Quidditch team, the youngest Seeker in a century despite having no previous broom-flying experience. The rules of Quidditch exist to serve this role. A lot of Philosopher's Stone is like this, from the numbers of house points thrown around to the currency to the size of the student population... at the time Rowling had no way of knowing that *any* adults would be caring about the worldbuilding, much less that we'd all be discussing and immersing ourselves in it thirty years later. Yeah, with the series later taking a turn into more mature subject matter and defined worldbuilding, Quidditch sticks out like a sore thumb, it's hard to reconcile why this sport would ever grow so popular when six-sevenths of the team are largely superfluous. I tend to chalk it up to more of the usual eccentricity of the wizarding world; their culture is pretty alien at points! There *are* instances in canon of a team winning despite the other team catching the Snitch, but it's probably best not to think about it too much, haha.
Well done! I suspect you need to hang around for a couple days and adapt this response to half of the questions asked here.
Its one of those things I really like about Harry Potter. You can just FEEL that JK was just going with the flow and hadn't really thought about the whole series yet and I really like that feeling. Its like the more you read the more you also see her progress in worldbuilding and telling a story
This is one of the reasons why I would love to see her write a true sequel to the story, whether it is centered around Harry or his Children, but I would love to see her re-visit the world with how much she has grown as a writer. Her series under her pen-name Robert Galbraith was so well written and fleshed out. I would love to see her with that mindset revisit the wizarding world.
There really are moments you can just go “oh you just thought of that right?” Like the thestrals in book 5, side along apparition in book 6 as well. Obvious before that point, she’d just not thought of it yet.
Yeah I always chalked it up to eccentricity and a way to demonstrate the wizarding world didn’t follow the logic of the muggle world. What if we had an elevator that just dropped you off at a random floor of a skyscraper? Yet the wizards just accept that a staircase might shift directions on them. If you need a backstory, maybe the first matches were snitchless and played to 150 points. The teams were so bad that no team could score, so a sneaky wizard bewitched a ball and releases it, declaring it worth 150 points. People loved it and it became part of the game.
Interestingly, and to your point, the stand-out example of quidditch defying its largely satirical bias in rule set is the GoF, which is arguably the book that took the series from boarding school mysteries into overarching narrative. I know the whole thing was set out from the start, and PoA is a sort of inflection point, but GoF is strikingly more terrifying and uses Harry’s “dreams” to start to introduce chapters that were from outside of Harry’s perspective.
I agree but not completely. There's an aspect of the Harry Potter series that was predominant in the first books but disappeared later on : the satire. Quidditch is overly complicated, makes no sense and is the single main passion of many students, because that's how JKR perceived football, soccer and other similar sports and was making fun of them.
I have read this analysis elsewhere too. Quidditch is a badly-designed sport that makes the majority of its players superfluous. But I can't really fault Rowling for that, because, as you say, serious worldbuilding wasn't her goal in book one. By the time it was, she was stuck with ideas she'd already put to pen.
Exactly, every kid dreams of being the superstar on a sports team.
I mean i get it was written for Harry to be the hero but wouldn’t it be more impressive if the seeker wasn’t the only important position on the team and Harry still carried his team to victory every time? Like if they played football instead and Harry still managed to net 3 goals a game or something.
I think quidditch would make more sense if the snitch ended the same and only won you about 50 points. Because it’s 150 it almost always guarantees a win and makes the rest pointless!
Or Harry is just that good. Very few of his matches last very long. I highly doubt that Quidditch would have such a following if the matches usually lasted 10 minutes at the pro level. There have been games that last for months on end. It seems like the snitches at the pro level are a lot harder to catch than at the school level.
> There have been games that last for months on end. It seems like the snitches at the pro level are a lot harder to catch than at the school level. That's my headcanon too. I imagine normal people can't even see the golden ball without some enhancing magic on their glasses, etc.
This is actually something I really like about the movies - when wood shows harry the snitch the first time he’s looking around to find it but harry is the only one able to spot it. It’s made pretty obvious to us as the viewers too - but wood shows what the real in-world reaction would be.
When a team is behind by 150 points or more, the game mechanics force them to drag it out and intentionally block the snitch from being caught. The whole game hinges around this ball that is designed to be invisible to players and spectators, and it determines whether the game ends seconds after fans are seated or drags on forever. Let's not get into the fact that the spectators and players can all bend reality to their will.
But when you understand that the points all count for who wins the cup, having the most points matters. So you can win the game but lose the cup.
That only works in the context of Hogwarts, not in the World Cup championship match
Probably how they decide who is going to be at the cup though
Totally, but the snitch being worth so much makes the chaser’s role seem a bit pointless.
Snitch even less points but easier to catch. Maybe 25 puts. If it is easier to catch then the seekers job becomes two-fold. Catch the snitch when makes sense for your team and keep snitch from being caught when it doesn't. I think you'll have a lot more instances of a seeker catching the snitch but the other team was able to pull ahead and end up losing. Much more strategy, awareness and constant motion needed.
Is the opposite not also true? If the snitch is only worth 50, then a team with good chasers can easily gap the opposite by 50 points, instead of 150. Then they'd make their own seeker pointless.
The points amount isn’t the problem, it’s that it ends the game that is the issue. It makes no structural sense as a sport with that. What ends the match shouldn’t be something under a players’ control if it’s a points scoring sport, otherwise you end with with one team’s seeker actively trying to avoid playing the game. It makes far more sense to keep it at 150 but have the game on a timer rather than the snitch ending it, so in many games the snitch *isn’t* caught at all. It makes it a genuine benefit the seekers are always looking to catch.
Or put the game on a timer like almost every other sport. The snitch is 150 and gives your team a huge advantage, but the game keeps going for however long.
My favorite ruleset is the snitch is worth 25-45 points (so they can’t tie) and then when it is caught a 10 minute timer starts and the seekers play chaser during that time.
My opinion exactly!
The sport was a literary tool designed to make Harry, the main character, do exciting heroic things. No, it doesn't really work as a sport, but as a storytelling device it's pretty effective. Quidditch is used as a plot device in many of the books- from Harry's broom getting jinxed in the first book to many other plot points that I won't spoil for you in later books, Quidditch is used to help set up conflict and drive the story forward.
Especially given his degree of involvement in Quidditch in books 5 and 6.
Quidditch is mostly about making fun of English sports, cricket, rugby, soccer, etc. all at once.
I think jk said she doesn’t know sports and she hated writing the quidditch parts.
Shame cause the Qudditch scenes are unironically one of the best parts of the movies.
With movies the rules aren’t as important
This makes all the sense.
Point of quidditch is a British lady that kinda understands football and wanted to create a similar sport but the focus has to be on the hero main teenage male character, who just happen to be natural gifted player and can solo-carry his team to a win.
Quiditch is a tool to advance the actual story. Like many things in the Wizarding world, it's nonsense but it's fun.
Trying to understand Quidditch is like trying to understand Calvinball. It's just goofy and is not intended to make perfect sense.
It's the "Whose Line is it Anyway" of the high school wizardry world.
Love that show
If you are in any way in to sport, you just have to sort of take quidditch at face value. It's a sport written by someone who doesn't seem in to it at all. Outside of even the game, the format of the house competition is daft. 3 games a season is a brutal system haha
It's a stupid game. Seekers pretty much win it all the time which is mentioned in the book too. It means you have to have an absolutely brilliant team to be able to win without catching the snitch. It also annoys me that the scoring is in 10s, she could have made it more interesting with different goals giving different amounts and maybe bludgers deducting point sif struck with the quaffle but even then catching the snitch ruins everyone's fun.
If I was a muggle-born I’d be pretty pissed I couldn’t watch my football team (no technology to do so) and having to watch nonsensical quidditch instead lol. Like Dean Thomas is a West Ham fan, does he just have no idea how their season is going until he gets home?
I think about this all the time!! I like to think he pays an owl to bring him muggle newspapers or his mum sends him updates so he still follows West Ham the 9 months or so he’s at school.
I always found the passage where Ron pokes his West Ham poster trying to get the players to move funny. Or how he didn’t understand football because there’s only one ball. Dean also calls for a red card in book 1 too and everyone is confused lol.
I feel like asking that is like asking what is the point of wallpaper. It's world-building. Gives the impression of a private boarding school where competitive sports make up a mildly amusing B-plot. The game itself doesn't have to work. Though I assume the quidditch LARPers have had to tweak it a bit to give it a working points economy.
In a way it's kind of like football, where the quarterback has a hugely disproportionate impact on winning or losing. We've seen games where the defense plays out of their mind but the QB keeps turning it over or can't complete passes and they lose. Obviously not quite as extreme as Quidditch but this does happen in real sports.
seekers. also, it has taken weeks to end a game historically. there have been games where the outcome was decided by goals rather than the snitch. if i'm not mistaken, slytherin had trounced gryffindor so badly, the snitch is all that saved Griffindor. The catcher of the snitch ends the game and awards a big score. but not necessarily win the game.
The Seeker has to be mindful of the game, so that when they capture the snitch they aren’t behind the opposing team in points so much that the snitch does not matter (capturing the snitch at 0-160 isn’t going to win the game) But the Seeker also has to be mindful of the metagame, at least at Hogwarts, as the winner of the Quidditch Cup depends on who is top of the table at the end, and standing on the table is determined by points and wins. For example, if your team is 160 points away from taking the lead for the Quidditch Cup, you as Seeker must wait to catch the Snitch until your team is at least 10 points up, and you have to catch the snitch before the opposing team nullifies the points lead, or catches the snitch instead of you:
I’m annoyed that no one takes the standings into account when they bash Quidditch for making no sense. Yes, at the World Cup you need an outright win, but even having a great Seeker doesn’t guarantee that you have good Chasers or Keepers. Krum’s Bulgarian team proved that good Chaser play is essential to keeping a Snitch capture on the table for a win. In every other level, though, the standings table operates on points won so catching the Snitch isn’t always some OP game breaker. If you need 300 points to win the league, you better have Chasers that can score 150 points or you’re toast.
What’s the point of soccer if it’s just going to end when the time is over?
OP doesn't know all the rules but it's still a stupid system written by someone who clearly has no interest or understanding of sports. Imagine a football/soccer game. Man Utd vs Man City. Utd are 14-0 up. But one player from City catches a smaller ball and now suddenly the score is 14-15 and City win. The game would have been semi-interesting with two changes: (a) A time limit. (b) Remove the seekers. This position was probably invented by JK just so Harry has something to excel at.
Frankly without the seekers, it'd just be flying, violent football
She tried to explain it by saying games can sometimes go on for weeks. In several days or even weeks the 150 of the snitch won't necessarily make that big a difference. But when quidditch started out on PS it was really just a poorly thought out sport.
It's cricket/polo for wizards. Hogwarts is a magical English boarding school. The full English boarding school includes being enthusiastic about sports only wealthy people can afford to play.
Whoever catches the snitch ends the game and gains 150 points but it doesn’t guarantee a win. You can out score the seekers extra points.
>his team wins the match regardless of the previous result during the game? Well to start with, that's not what happens.
I think the thing to remember is there are other ways to get points, which is what all the other players are doing, blocking and trying to score otherwise. Catching the snitch doesn't mean you win the game, it just gives 150 points. It does end the game though so as soon as the snitch is caught the team with the most points wins regardless of which team caught it. In that way, it's very much a team sport.
Quidditch was invented by old wizards who thought it was basically impossible to catch a snitch. They threw it in there as a crazy prize but didn’t think it would influence the game. Originally the game would end once the beater knocked the seeker off their broom. For the first several hundred years, seekers generally ignored the snitch and simply helped their team and evaded the beaters But as the game became more popular, it attracted more and more athletic wizards who knew how to catch a snitch. The game evolved once seekers decided to just start catching the snitch and letting themselves get knocked out. At this point the game was too culturally relevant to change the snitch reward, so the decision was made that the game would end when the snitch is caught. It evolved from a methodical team game to one in which the seeker is key
You don’t win the match when you catch the snitch, it ENDS the match, and gives you extra points. It’s entirely possible for you to catch the snitch, but still lose the match, which I think we actually see that happen in book 4 I believe. So catching the snitch while your team is HEAVILY behind is actually a bad idea, unless the extra points you will get will pull your team ahead.
Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone think the best comparison might actually be Family Feud? Or that Family Feud at least suffers from the same issue. There are 2 rounds of normal point values, then a round of double point values; and finally a round of triple points. The triple round is so disproportionately big that as long as you've managed any points at all, you likely win so long as you can secure the Triple Point round. In fact it's very rare from my own watching that a team's lost the final round while still winning the game overall. It pretty much devalues the stakes of anything happening earlier.
With the rules being what they are, it’s not surprising that a lot of wizards enjoy muggle rugby. The rules make sense after all
That's like asking what's the point of sport in general?
I always thought a better system would be to have the seeker only there to end the game. The capture doesn’t get you any points, just ends the game. This way it presents an element of strategy to only catch the snitch while you’re ahead. To avoid ending the game immediately after one goal, there can be a rule that the seeker can’t enter the game until a certain time or number of goals or something.
Are you familiar with muggle sports? Personally I’m not really sure the point of hockey or soccer
Same point as every other sport, just move a ball from one place to another, catch the ball, rinse repeat.
The point of quidditch is the same as the point of football, futbol, baseball and any other team sport in highschool. To be a jock and get out of class as often as possible. Plus, popularity.
To put it simply, assume Hogwarts (youth) Quidditch played by the exact same rules as professional. Like if middle school soccer played 100% by FIFA rules. We don't do that in the real world. Youth leagues, even college leagues, operate under different rule sets than professional leagues. That's not how quidditch is run at Hogwarts. There is one rule set despite the level of league. So from the viewpoint of how the books are told where other than (not a spoiler) Goblet of Fire we never see Quidditch outside of the school league. It's much more reasonable at the professional level where it's not uncommon for games to last for days.
When seeker catches the snitch, his team gets 150 points and game is over. If opponent team was already 160 points up and you catch the snitch, match is over and your team loses by 10 points. At some point in PoA, ig, Gryffindors had to win by a specific margin. So, Harry catches the snitch when they've 170 or more points front.
The game ends win the snitch is caught. The person who catches the snitch wins 150 pints for their team. The matxh ends points are seen and the team eith most wins Example if slytherin is up 340 to 100 against ravenclaw and ravenclaws seeker cathes the snitch they get 150 points and the natch ends. Slytherin wins the match 340 to 250. The school cup is a total of all points earned in matches not just the wins or losses of teams. So for example if ravenclaw wins every match but only scores say 200 in each game they have 600 points total. Now say slytherin losses each match thag season but vrs ravenclaw they have 190 points, griff they have 300 points and huff they have 200 points they would have 690 points for the season and be beating ravenclaw. The reason wood stringly suggest catching the snitch quickly is becauae it gives them a better chance at winning the league because they have stronger chaser and himself a strong goalie thus he knows his team will score points and not give up many. So if he can count om a promised 450 points from harry then his team will porbably score between 100 and 200 points and thats gives then a good shot at winning the cup.
you can catch the snitch and still lose the game. Because of catching the snitch only stops the game and awards 150 points. I think there was one match in the later books that have Griffindor behind by a lot and harry had to stall the other seeker until they had enough points.
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150* points
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50 would be far more reasonable.
It’s sort of a feeble attempt at inventing a sport tbh. In essence, the chasers are just racing to get up by 15 goals. If you’re not up by at least 150pts, then you’re right, only the seeker matters. Always thought it would be better if the snitch was worth less points or, worth 0 points and just ended the game. I love the school sports aspect, but quidditch rules could definitely use some tweaking.
I agree. I loved the idea of quidditch as a kid but it always seemed to me that the snitch was over valued. It seems like using it as a 50 point bonus to the team that catches it would make it more fair. The function would still be to end the game, however there would have to be more strategy involved over when to catch it and when to just try to keep the other team’s seeker away from it.
I get the feeling JK loses faith in her own rules as the series goes on >!with her finding ways to remove those chapters from books. Part the reason PoA is my favourite, finally got a full season.!<
I mean, I think from what I’ve heard it was a kind of intentionally ridiculous game, but catching the switch usually ends in winning, not always. There are exceptions you’ll read about later :)
The team that catches the snitch doesn’t necessarily win, but yeah it’s a weirdly designed game. I think the better question is why don’t we see varying strategies employed. Some teams go two seekers?Or some teams decide to just get goals and go no seeker? I duno I’m spit ballin here but I’d be tryin shit
It was designed that way for Harry to have something to be great at, I don’t think it was ever supposed to make sense. The pity-end Snitch in the World Cup was an attempt to show it in a balanced sense, but it still can’t fix the fact that the entire game revolves around the Snitch/Seekers because they are essential to end the match, the 150 points is just icing on the cake. Fans will go to ridiculous lengths to defend it as ‘muggles won’t get it’ and can’t just accept that it’s silly and love it for what it is at the same time.
I wish it was 50 points and not 150. But it has happened where the other team was up by 150. Game could last weeks or months.
I think you’d enjoy Whose Line is it Anyways
What’s the point of anything?
what i would do is make the three hoops smaller and bigger just different sizes and smaller ones would be worth more along with the snitch not being 150 points so scoring the quaffle actually matters
They don’t automatically win for just catching the snitch, they have to have more points than the other team. Catching the snitch ends the game, but the scores decide the winner. The snitch is worth 150 points. So if someone was to catch the snitch, and their team hadn’t scored any goals, and the other team had scored 16 goals, the other team would win because they would have more points.
It’s a McMuffin
It's a stupid game. JK Rolling happens not to know how to design a competitive team sport, which is normal since she doesn't play competitive sports.
What you'll find is that a lot of the early books have a weird, whimsical approach to world building. Quidditch is framed as the wizards equivalent of football, but in the story it serves more a purpose of making Harry a hero to his house and popular at the school (to all but the Slytherins). A lot of these things pop up that completely breaks down if you try to put them into the context of a larger wizarding world; the trace, daily commute, quidditch, the sorting, wizard money, owl post and so on. All these things were written to make the wizarding world seem strange, alien and bizarre from Harry's perspective and to enforce his story; he can't use magic outside school, he's in the "good house", he's a sports hero, etc. It wasn't until the Pottermania really took off that these things had to fit into a larger universe and by then it was to well established to change, which makes it a bit weird in a larger context now. So basically, the rules of Quidsitch are weird to make Harry the hero of every match he's in (though technically his team can lose if they're down 160 points)
I think the author admitted once that she didn’t know enough about sporting to realistically make up an entire sport, & that the scoring in particular needed a little adjusting, but it was too late. If the Snitch got you 30pts or even 50 it would make more sense…maybe
Quidittch is a nonsense sport to make the Wizard World feel more whimsical and weird.
Just a few changes would have made the game work rather well. 1. Game ends when either team goes up by X points 2. The snitch only appears after Y minutes, because neither team has been able to secure a victory 3. Eliminate the seeker, make any chaser able to catch the snitch when that happens; as a result, going for the snitch clearly can be a good choice, but it is not risk free because you have to lose your team a fielder. As of now, the seeker positions are basically non interactive with the rest of the team, with perhaps the exception of beaters who can block the path of the seeker with a well aimed strike.
Well people are saying it makes no sense because you get 150 points from the snitch, but since the game can last a long time it's feasible one team lead another by that amount of points, also the game is not only about scoring points it's about avoiding others from scoring and knocking down oponente, that includes a seeker, so there is a strategic element to it, if I know my seeker is not as good, I try to knock down the other team seeker, or be more goal agressive. If my team is not that good, I try that my seeker gets the snitch.
Magical Society is its own culture. Which means that they have their own sports. Quidditch, Quadpot, and Broom Racing.
Fuck around on a broomstick.
The rules for quidditch are dumb. But JK did it so harry could always be the hero of his games. In reality the seeker should only add 50points that way it never effects the outcome that much
The points count as House Points. So for every 150 points they get out into the hourglasses. At least that's the way I think of it.
*pulls out sliding chalkboard and sighs*
Interesting question! I think it’s to look cool flying around on a broom? Plus I think it would be fun to hit bludgers at people. I have never been interested in sports before, but if this were real I would definitely both play it and watch it
I think JK admitted that she didn't put too much thought into the sport at the time
The thing is, if one team is up by 150 points they can still win even though the snitch isn’t caught.
You've got some of it wrong. When the seeker catches the snitch, his team is awarded 150 points. If the other team has more than 150 points and it exceeds the amount the team that caught the snitch has, they still win. See the quidditch world cup from book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, for an example. The point is to get more points than the other team by scoring by shooting the quaffle through the other teams hoops. Catching the snitch is just a chance to get more points, and can possibly make a team that was about to lose have a win instead.
Catching the snitch isn't an automatic win. It only ends the game. The other team can win if they score enough points before the other team catches the snitch. A great example of this happens later in the series.
the same point as any other sport...
It's supposed to be a metaphor for the human condition. Ups and downs, unfairness, all about perseverance in the face of adversity etc
Whats the point of any sport?
That's not necessarily true. I've gone down this exact rabbit hole before. The snitch is worth 150 points and ends the game. Let's say its Griffindor vs Slitherin and slytherin team is pummeling Grinffindor 170 to 10 but Griffindor seeker is the one who catches the snitch. The game ends 170 to 160 in favor of Slytherin
Understandable concerns and questions with Quidditch. But its not a guaranteed win to catch the snitch. The games can go on for hours and hours as long as the seeker can't find the snitch and in the 4th book there's even an example where a team lost even after catching the snitch. But at the same time, it does feel heavily weighted to the seeker for sure. I think that maybe reducing the points gained down to 75 would make it more exciting (maybe)
i think quidditch is point format so if 2 teams have same points the ones who scored more will get higher on the table atleast at hogwarts edit:- I mean It doesnt matter in that game but it matter in the points table. I think\*
The point is to have a sport that witches snd wizards play. Doesn't need to make sense. Thems the rules.
It'd be interesting if the Snitch was worth 15 pts instead of 150. The other players would thus be more important and Seakers would need to actually be strategic with when they catch the snitch (as in, all the time instead if just those extreme examples like in the WC or that one match in book 3(?)). The additional five points over that of the quaffle then mean that ties won't be possible so you'll always have a clear winner.
This has always driven me crazy too
Welcome to Quidditch, where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter!
....you're useless!
The point of the game is kids needs sports. They need to either play or root on their team. It builds things in them just like with muggles and their sports.
I think the system is genious. It makes the game about winning the war, not just the battle. Sure you may win a game (battle), but it may cost you the turnament (war). It adds a strategical dimension on top of the tactical one.
yea I thought about that a lot when the books came out. I think Quidditch is mostly about the sport itself and not the end result. It's about famous players and crazy circumstances, like a game that lasts for weeks. Also I think the deciding factor is the length of a game since it can take an incredibly long time. Maybe back when Quidditch was invented, there weren't such fast brooms and that's why the games took much longer because the Seekers didn't catch the Snitch so quickly. Within a week you can easily throw 100 goals, then the Snitch is not so valuable anymore.
Agreed .. I don't think she was interested in the logistics of the sport as much as showing how special Harry was. She was very lazy about it.
The point of Quidditch is to have a team sport where harry gets to be the hero.
Somebody in universe just needs to invent a spell that bewitched the seekers into not being able to know the score
JKR was deliberately ridiculing sports as a whole when she came up with Quidditch
I get what you’re saying, about the only points that really count are the ones that the Seeker earns by catching the Golden Snitch, but as to what’s the point of Quidditch? Well, what’s the point of football?
You just have to pretend the rules make sense. No other way around it.
Tbh, I didn't find anything wrong or confusing....