QuizList

A one-off quiz is happening this Sunday in York Way, N1.  Go to the one-off quizzes section for details.

People sometimes ask me ‘How do you stop a particular team from winning all the time at a quiz?’  There is, obviously, no one answer to this, but it’s interesting to note that some of the strategies people suggest actually make things worse.  The first line of defence is usually:  ‘Set harder questions’.  Well, no, because if a particular team regularly win the logical inference is that they are better at harder questions than other teams…  The next suggestion might be to make winning dependent on some random process, like a silly tiebreaker question or some arrangement whereby you gamble your points.  Mind you, the latter of these is just so far-fetched that I doubt anyone would have the nerve to try it (ahem).  The downside here is that you reduce the enjoyment of your quiz and increase feelings of frustration if people think they’ve rightfully won it, only to lose it on a seeming whim.

I have three suggestions.   The first one is counter-intuitive, but I have seen it work.  The second is not acceptable in some places, as I have found to my cost, and the third is stating the bleedin’ obvious.

1.  Make the questions easier.  This tends to level the playing field and to make the ‘big’ teams more vulnerable if they miss even one.

2.  Broaden your topics and don’t be snobby about what you can include.  Throw in some questions about the music charts, popular culture, X-factor, I’m a Celebrity – Get me out of here!, or the more unusual interests which might not attract ‘standard quiz questions’: mythology, baseball, rugby sevens… I could go on. Doing this potentially makes the quiz of wider appeal and interest and more open to a shock result.  Mind you, once Fletch and I set the quiz in a context which considers itself the ‘hardest quiz in London’, and had a multiple question on names which appear in Number One singles.  This was a reasonable question and the quiz produced, I thought, a fair result, but afterwards one of the team who ‘usually win’ (and did not do so on that occasion)  came up to us, maroon faced, and shouted that ‘you can’t set a quiz like that here’.  Was it snobbery or sour grapes?  A bit of both, no doubt.

3.  Do what you can to stop cheating.  We are sometimes a bit bemused that a particular team tend to win a particular jackpot in a particular pub with loads of nooks and crannies, and they roost in the nookiest and cranniest place of all.  Are they on i-phones? Who knows, but if I was the QM I would keep an eye on them…

So that’s me nearly done for this week, except for  the latest question in the placename challenge:

6.  Walk up a prominent street there, and you might find yourself in Pennsylvania.